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It looks like Fani Willis’ deranged passion for destroying President Trump bit off more than she expected, like her own fanny. Her corruption has been exposed and has jeopardized her case against Trump.
NEW REPORT: Fani Willis Conspired with Liz Cheney’s Faux J6 Committee – J6 Committee Shared Video Recordings with Fani Willis But Then Deleted the Video to Prevent Republican Lawmakers from Gaining Access To It
By Jim Hoft – March 12, 2024
Chairman Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) released his January 6 Initial Findings Report on Monday, March 11. Rep. Loudermilk is the Committee on House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight Chairman. “For nearly two years former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s January 6th Select Committee promoted hearsay and cherry-picked information to promote its political goal – to legislatively prosecute former President Donald Trump,” said Chairman Loudermilk on Monday.
“It was no surprise that the Select Committee’s final report focused primarily on former President Trump and his supporters, not the security failures and reforms needed to ensure the United States Capitol is safer today than in 2021.” READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
North Carolinians who didn’t present a photo ID when voting during the presidential primary last week were still permitted to cast a ballot, thanks to exceptions that Soros-backed groups supported including in the state’s voter ID law.
On March 5, more than 1.7 million North Carolina voters were asked to show a photo ID to vote in the presidential primary, in the first major election since the law went into effect. Most of those voters appeared to successfully present an ID and cast a ballot. Still, according to preliminary counts, more than 1,000 voters cast what is known as a “provisional ballot” due to “ID not provided,” according to the state’s election board (NCSBE). Of those more than 1,000 voters, 546 later returned to show their IDs. But another 607 voters never showed a photo ID, instead simply signing a form claiming that a “reasonable impediment” prevented them from presenting an ID.
The Law Doesn’t Actually Compel Voters to Show Photo ID
The North Carolina general assembly initially passed a series of election-related laws in 2013. After facing legal challenges to the voter ID requirement, the state legislature presented a revised voter ID law in 2015 that included the “reasonable impediment” exception, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit nevertheless struck down the voter ID requirement in 2016. Republicans spent the next several years fighting in the courts to pass some type of voter ID laws while North Carolinians voted in 2018 to approve a state constitutional amendment establishing a photo ID requirement.
Most recently, the North Carolina Supreme Court — which had flipped from a Democrat-majority to a Republican-majority — overturned a past decision by the same court and thus permitted the photo ID requirement to go into effect.
The current version says that a voter who does not present a photo ID due to a “reasonable impediment” may still cast a provisional ballot so long as he provides “a current utility bill, bank statement, government check, paycheck, or other government document,” his voter registration card, or the last four digits of his Social Security number and birth date.
If a voter still fails to present any of those documents, the law says he can simply complete a declaration stating that he is who he says he is — aka the “honor system.” He must also designate on the form that a “reasonable impediment” — such as disability or illness, lack of transportation, lack of birth certificate or other documents needed to obtain a photo ID, work schedule, or family responsibilities — has prevented him from providing an ID. Other acceptable reasons include a voter having lost his ID or simply “not know[ing] photo ID was required for voting.”
The ID exception form is also accepted for mail-in voters who cannot include a copy of their photo ID with their ballots, according to voting instructions posted by the Mecklenburg County government.
‘Nobody Will Be Turned Away’
Thirty-six other states currently mandate some form of voter ID, but Republicans who have worked on election integrity efforts say North Carolina’s law is the “weakest” of them all.
“You can literally put any kind of excuse you want on the ‘Reasonable Impediment’ form and be given a ballot. It’s not hard at all to vote,” Chairman of the Lee County Republican Party James Womack told The Federalist.
“This ‘Reasonable Impediment’ thing is really a weakness in the law, it’s the weakest voter ID law in the country when you consider almost anyone can walk in and say ‘Oh, I lost my ID’ and cast a provisional ballot,” Womack continued. “They really didn’t make an attempt this year, in Senate Bill 747, to update anything that was in the case of ‘Reasonable Impediment.’”
Executive Director of Voter Integrity Project of North Carolina Jay DeLancy wrote in 2015 after an earlier, similar version of the law was passed that it was a “stunning betrayal” to all state residents who wanted to see “real voter ID” laws. DeLancy said at the time that, while he did not believe Republicans in the legislature purposely gutted the photo ID provisions, “their inexperience in election fraud analysis leads them to believe the new loophole ‘won’t be a big deal’ in our state.”
Provisional ballots can theoretically be rejected, but those cast based on a “reasonable impediment” to providing voter ID can only be rejected if a county elections board unanimously finds that the information a voter gives in the ID exception form is false. It’s unclear, however, how a county board would be able to discern whether a person’s claimed impediment to obtaining an ID is genuine. Besides, Womack noted these voters likely wouldn’t be rejected due to a fear that lawsuits would be lodged alleging voter suppression.
“What they did, this law, neuters the ability of the board to reject those ballots no matter how ridiculous the excuse is that the voter uses,” DeLancy told The Federalist. “It defies common sense.”
DeLancy told The Federalist he believes Republicans in the legislature thought they would be “clever” and include the “reasonable impediment” provision as a way to avoid having the voter ID law tossed.
Womack speculated that then-House Rules Chairman Rep. David Lewis included the last-minute “compromise language” to help the legislation pass. He noted Republicans had to work in bipartisan fashion since, at the time, they did not hold a supermajority in either state legislature and the Reasonable Impediment provision would alleviate concerns from the left that there would be an “undue burden on people who didn’t have photo ID.”
Womack said the provision likely didn’t get much attention since the legislation got stuck in the courts for years but argued that now that it has gone into effect “people are starting to expose its weaknesses.”
“There’s all kinds of excuses you can put on the form and you’ll still be granted the right to vote, nobody will be turned away,” he added.
DeLancy said the provision should be fixed ahead of November’s election “or else” it leaves the door open for potential abuse.
Soros-Linked Group Cheered ‘Reasonable Impediment’ Exception
When North Carolina’s 2013 law was challenged in court shortly after it was signed, the leftist groups behind the legal fight included the NAACP and the Advancement Project. The Advancement Project had received nearly $4 million between 1999 and 2012 from the Soros-funded Open Society Project. The Foundation to Promote Open Society contributed more than half a million to the Advancement Project between 2009 and 2012, according to Influence Watch. Later suits targeting the law were brought by other election-interference groups like the ACLU.
When Republicans proposed a revision adding the “reasonable impediment” exception to the law in 2015, the Soros-backed group Democracy North Carolina spent weeks “encouraging hundreds of citizens to attend and speak out” at hearings regarding the legislation and celebrated the inclusion of the “reasonable impediment” provision.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
None of Democrats’ witnesses in a congressional hearing Tuesday could say resolutely that they believe only citizens should be able to vote in a federal election.
During a Senate Judiciary Hearing on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee asked the witnesses to provide a basic “yes” or “no” answer to a series of questions about non-citizens voting.
“Do you believe that only citizens of the United States should be able to vote in federal elections?” Lee asked each of the witnesses.
“We don’t have a position about non-citizens voting in federal elections, we believe that’s what the current laws are, and so we’re certainly fighting for everyone who is eligible under current law to vote,” Executive Director of The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law Damon T. Hewitt said.
“That’s a decision of the state law but I want to emphasize –” President of Southwest Voter Registration Education Project Lydia Camarillo said.
“It’s a decision of state law as to who should vote in federal elections?” Lee interjected.
“States decide who gets to vote in various elections, and in federal elections I believe that we should be encouraging people to naturalize and then vote,” Camarillo said.
“Okay but you’re saying that the federal government should have no say in who votes in a federal election?” Lee pressed.
“I don’t have a position on that,” Camarillo responded.
Director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project Sophia Lin Lakin told Lee, “Federal law prohibits non-citizens from voting in federal elections and our focus is on enabling all eligible voters to be able to vote and cast their ballot.”
Only two witnesses, counsel at Public Interest Legal Foundation Maureen Riordan and Manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at the Heritage Foundation Hans von Spakovsky said they do not believe non-citizens should be able to vote. Both were Republican witnesses.
Lee then asked all the witnesses whether “people registering to vote should provide documentary proof of their citizenship in order to register to vote.” Hewitt replied the real question is how asking people to provide proof of citizenship affects them.
“I think your first question kind of answers the second. Based upon the applicable rules, federal or state elections, what have you, we know we have to follow those rules. The question is what is the impact of those rules?” He said in response.
Camarillo called the question “redundant” and said, “It’s already being asked.”
Current federal law stipulates voters must simply check on a form that they are a U.S. citizen, but they do not have to provide any proof.
Lakin flat-out argued asking people to prove they are U.S. citizens to vote amounts to discrimination: “Documentary proof of citizenship or requirements are often discriminatory,” she said.
Riordan and Spakovsky agreed voters should be required to prove they are citizens. Lee said he was troubled that not every witness could simply answer “yes” to both of his questions.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Act seeks to federalize all elections by stripping states and local jurisdictions from making changes to their elections without approval from federal bureaucrats. If the legislation is passed, the U.S. Justice Department could essentially take over an election if its left-wing allies claim minority voters are being harmed by something as simple as requiring an ID or proving citizenship to vote.
A federal judge recently ruled Arizona’s law requiring individuals to prove U.S. citizenship in order to vote in a statewide election is not discriminatory and could proceed after leftists lodged a series of suits.
“Arizona’s interests in preventing non-citizens from voting and promoting public confidence in Arizona’s elections outweighs the limited burden voters might encounter when required to provide” proof of citizenship, U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton ruled.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
One of the big takeaways from the newly released transcript of Joe Biden’s two-day interview with Robert Hur is that the special counsel was being exceedingly generous when describing the president as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Much of the conversation with Hur is littered with barely incoherent answers and spiraling word salads. Though, the reader is occasionally entertained by Biden’s blowhard-y non-sequiturs. We learn about Biden’s Corvette — twice. We learn that the president is a frustrated architect but an excellent archer. Biden jokes that there might be risqué pictures of Dr. First Lady Jill Biden.
Then again, the fact that the entire two-day interview isn’t a giant nonsensical rant is not as impressive as his defenders might believe. The president is, indeed, completely coherent at times. And those are the times he’s probably lying.
When Hur released his report last month, for example, it noted that Biden couldn’t recall the year his son died. This is not the kind of event that typically slips a healthy person’s mind — not even one who is constantly trying to emotionally manipulate the public with misleading claims about the cause of his son’s death.
Recall that Biden feigned great anger about this interaction. “There’s even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died,” he barked at reporters when the report was released. “How in the hell dare he raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself: It wasn’t any of their damn business.”
The transcript shows that it was Biden who brought up his late son Beau, not Hur. The president claimed he believed Beau had died in 2017 or 2018 when he had tragically died of brain cancer in 2015.
Who knows? Maybe Biden forgot what he said? Reading the full context of his answer, and considering the president’s lifelong fabulism, it is not entirely out of the question that the president purposely floated the wrong date to try and justify his pilfering of classified documents. Either way, it’s bad.
Here is the key interaction:
MR. HUR: So, during this time when you were living at Chain Bridge Road and there were documents relating to the Penn Biden Center, or the Biden Institute, or the Cancer Moonshot, or your book, where did you keep papers that related to those things that you were actively working on?
PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well, um .. . I , I, I, I, I don’ t know. This is, what, 2017, 2018, that area?
MR. HUR: Yes, sir.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: Remember, in this timeframe, my son is either been deployed or is dying, and, and so it was and by the way, there were still a lot of people at the time when I got out of the Senate that were encouraging me to run in this period, except the President. I’m not — and not a mean thing to say. He just thought that she had a better shot of winning the presidency than I did. And so I hadn’t, I hadn’t, at this point — even though I’m at Penn, I hadn’t walked away from the idea that I may run for office again. But if I ran again, I’d be running for President. And, and so what was happening, though – what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30th –
MS. COTTON: 2015.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: 2015.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: Was it 2015 he had died?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: It was May of 2015.
PRESIDENT BIDEN: It was 2015.
By the way, just as Beau did not die in Iraq, Joe was never “at Penn,” not in any real way. The outgoing vice president was bequeathed an honorary professor position at the school, which the Philadelphia Inquirer noted in 2019 was “a vaguely defined role that involved no regular classes and around a dozen public appearances on campus, mostly in big, ticketed events.”
More importantly, Biden also contradicted himself when speaking about the documents themselves.
When Hur asked the president about the classified papers in his possession, the president contended that he “had no purpose for them, and I think it would be inappropriate for me to keep clearly classified documents.” But Hur, in his prepared testimony for Congress, says: “We also identified other recorded conversations during which Mr. Biden read classified information aloud to his ghostwriter.”
So, the documents did have a very specific purpose. Those files were used, according to Amtrak Joe, to help earn $8 million writing a book after leaving the Obama administration. Yet, when the Hur report was released, the left wing did what they always do when confronted with bad news: they feigned a meltdown. They smeared the messenger. They concoct conspiracy theories. They denied reality. They’re doing the same right now.
The media continues to frame Hur’s findings as an exoneration of Biden to head off the (correct) perception that there is a stark, selective prosecution when it comes to the hoarding of classified documents. Donald Trump, yes. Biden and Hillary Clinton, no.
In The New York Times, Charlie Savage begins the paper’s story on the leaked transcripts by misleading readers with the contention that Hur had found “insufficient evidence to charge Mr. Biden.” This is not true. Hur’s report concluded that Biden came off as too feeble-minded to be convicted by a jury for his decades-long mishandling of classified information. According to the special counsel, the president had “willfully retained classified information.” And he had done it for years before winning the presidency.
During today’s hearing Democrats falsely used the word “exoneration” a number of times. Hur noted that the word “does not appear anywhere in my report, and that is not my conclusion.”
So, the fact remains that there are two ways to look at the Hur report. Either the president lacks the mental acuity to be charged for breaking the law, or he should be charged for breaking the law. Pick one.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., grilled former Special Counsel Robert Hur during a House hearing on Tuesday over not charging President Biden’s ghostwriter for destroying evidence pertaining to Hur’s investigation of Biden’s handling of classified documents.
“What does somebody have to do to get charged with obstruction of justice by you?” Gaetz said to Hur, suggesting that the special counsel let Mark Zwonitzer – the ghostwriter on Biden’s memoir “Promise Me, Dad” – off the hook for deleting evidence.
According to Hur’s much-publicized report on the classified documents probe, Zwonitzer erased audio files in his possession that contained “significant evidentiary value” related to the documents held by Biden.
Hur’s report states, “Zwonitzer’s later actions – including the production to the special counsel of transcripts that mention classified information – suggest that his decision to delete the recordings was not aimed at concealing those materials from investigators. Significantly, Zwonitzer voluntarily consented to two interviews and could have, but did not, invoke the Fifth Amendment to decline to produce the transcripts, his laptop, and the external hard drive. And when FBI agents contacted Zwonitzer, they were unaware that audio recordings existed or where Zwonitzer’s electronic devices were located.”
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., grills former Special Counsel Robert Hur during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday. (Screenshot/CSPAN feed)
However, Hur’s report noted that Zwonitzer admitted to the FBI that he “was aware that there was an investigation” when he deleted the evidence, though he denied that he deleted them to prevent investigators from finding them. He also said in the report of the ongoing probe, “I’m not going to say how much of the percentage it was of my motivation.”
Gaetz was nonplussed.
“So, the ghostwriter purposefully deletes this evidence that seems to … show culpability of Biden’s crimes, and you don’t charge him?” Gaetz asked.
Hur said Zwonitzer told investigators he was “aware that I had been appointed special counsel and was conducting an investigation.”
Special Counsel Robert Hur and President Biden (Getty Images)
Gaetz took it from there, saying, “Just so everybody knows, the ghostwriter didn’t delete the recordings just as a matter of happenstance. Ghostwriter has recordings of Biden making admissions of crime. He then learns that you’ve been appointed. He then deletes the information that is the evidence, and you don’t charge him?”
He then asked what someone would have to do to get charged.
“If, like, deleting evidence of crimes doesn’t count, what would meet the standard?” he added.
Hur explained the decision by saying that as he noted in his report, Zwonitzer did not delete “transcripts of the recordings that he had created, that included inculpatory evidence relating to Mr. Biden.”
Gaetz did not appear to buy the justification for how Hur handled the ghostwriter.
“Oh, so, if you destroy some evidence but not other evidence that somehow absolves you of the evidence you destroy,” he said. “Like, here’s what I see. Zwonitzer should have been charged, wasn’t. Biden and Trump should have been treated equally. They weren’t. And that is the double standard that I think a lot of Americans are concerned about.”
Former Special Counsel Robert Hur corrected House Democrats, who persisted in their assertions during a public hearing that he had “exonerated” President Joe Biden in the classified documents case.
Hur submitted a 345-page report in early February, outlining his decision against charging Biden for mishandling classified docs, but the word “exonerate” does not appear anywhere in his ruling, a fact he brought up multiple times during his hours-long testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
Committee ranking member Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., used his opening preamble to say Hur’s report “represents the complete and total exoneration of President Biden.”
“That is not what the report says,” Hur said later in the hearing. “The report is not an exoneration. That word does not appear in my report.”
Committee member Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., also asserted that Hur’s report was a “complete exoneration” of Biden.
“I need to go back and make sure that I take note of a word that you used, exoneration. That is not a word that appears in the report. That’s not part of my task as a prosecutor,” Hur said.
Regardless, Hur’s decision not to charge Biden, exoneration or not, fueled the ire of Republican committee member Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., who railed against Hur’s decision as a “glaring double standard” of justice, given former President Donald Trump is facing a federal trial for mishandling classified docs in Florida.
“The fact the only person being prosecuted for this offense happens to be the president’s political opponent makes it an unprecedented assault on our democracy. This is the worst we could expect from a banana republic,” McClintock told Hur, who is not the special counsel bringing Trump to trial. Jack Smith is.
In fact, Hur left the Justice Department last week.
Hur would not comment further on the difference between the cases, but in his report, he acknowledged Biden’s cooperation vs. Trump’s refusal to hand over classified material. That and the fact Biden is a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
“That’s one of the points you make, President Biden is likely to be an elderly sympathetic person with a poor memory. How does that bear on any individual’s guilt or innocence?” McClintock said. “Isn’t that a question for a judge … after guilt or innocence is determined? Here’s the problem. Donald Trump is being prosecuted for the same act that you’ve documented Joe Biden committed.”
McClintock went on, “All I have to do when I am caught taking home classified materials, ‘I’m sorry, I’m getting old, my memory isn’t so great?’ This is the doctrine that you’ve established in our laws now and it is frightening.”
Hur responded, “Congressman, my intent is certainly not to establish any sort of doctrine. I had a particular task. I had a particular set of evidence to consider and make a judgment to one particular set of evidence and that’s what I did.”
McClintock had the last word.
“The foundation of our justice system is equal justice under law. That’s what gave the law its respect and its legitimacy. … It doesn’t matter who comes before her, all are treated equally. You’ve destroyed this foundation. And the rule of law becomes a sick mockery. It becomes a weapon to wield against political rivals and a tool. And I’m desperately afraid this decision of the Department of Justice has now crossed a very bright line,” he concluded.
Special counsel Robert K. Hur prepares to testify Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee in Washington. Hur investigated President Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents and published a report with contentious conclusions about Biden’s manner and memory. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
President Joe Biden provided information deemed “not credible” to federal prosecutors during an investigation that determined he knowingly retained and shared classified documents, special counsel Robert Hur told the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Hur released his report in February, concluding that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” after his vice presidency ended in early 2009. However, the special counsel opted not to bring charges, writing that a jury would be unlikely to convict because of Biden’s “diminished faculties in advancing age.”
During the hearing, which went into recess at 1:52 p.m., the committee’s Democrats repeatedly brought up former President Donald Trump’s own classified documents case. Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., ranking member of the committee, noted that Trump was charged with trying to obstruct the investigation into classified documents stored at his Florida estate.
“At any point in your investigation, do you have any reason to believe that President Biden lied to you?” Nadler asked, then seemed to be surprised by the answer he got from Hur.
The special counsel named by Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden appointee, referred to the Feb. 8 report from his office.
“I do address in my report one response the president gave to a question we posed to him that we deemed to be not credible,” Hur said.
Nadler moved on to talking more about Trump.
But other committee members talked significantly about Biden’s sharing information with the ghostwriter of his 2017 book “Promise Me, Dad,” which the report said Biden was getting up to $8 million to produce for the publisher.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said there were “8 million reasons” why Biden might have knowingly violated the law on classified information.
“It wasn’t just the money, it wasn’t just $8 million,” Jordan said. “It was also his ego. Pride and money is why he knowingly violated the rules.”
Jordan read aloud from Hur’s report: “President Biden had strong motivations to ignore the proper procedures for safeguarding the classified information in his new book.”
“That’s a key word. We’re getting a motive now,” Jordan said, later adding: “Why did he have strong motivations? Because he decided months before leaving office to write a book.”
Later in the hearing, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., asked more about the matter, reading aloud from the transcript in which a federal prosecutor questions Biden.
“Mr. President, why did you share classified information with your ghostwriter?” the lawyer on the special counsel’s team asks.
The president answers: “I did not share classified information. … I guarantee I did not.”
“That’s not true, is it, Mr. Hur?” Gaetz asked.
“That is inconsistent with the evidence of the findings in my report,” Hur responded.
Gaetz followed by asking: “It’s a lie is what regular people would say, right?”
Hur smiled, but didn’t answer directly.
Gaetz read again from the transcript, quoting Biden as saying: “All the stuff that was in my home was in filing cabinets that were locked or able to be locked.”
“That wasn’t true either, was it?” Gaetz said.
Hur replied: “That was inconsistent with the findings of our investigation.”
One of the long-standing unanswered questions from the January 6th riot has been why the Capitol was so poorly prepared and defended on that day. A newly released transcript has caused a firestorm in Washington over allegations that the J6 Committee downplayed or even suppressed evidence that former President Donald Trump personally suggested the deployment of 10,000 national guard troops to prevent violence.
The transcript also includes contradictions of major allegations that ran wild in the media. That includes the claim that Trump tried to physically grab the steering wheel of the presidential limo, “The Beast,” when Secret Service refused to take him to the Capitol. Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson was the source of the claim, which appeared in most of the media and was highlighted in her testimony. However, it appears that the J6 Committee had testimony of secret service agents directly contradicting that account, including the driver.
However, it is the National Guard question that is more weighty for historical purposes.
Trump has long claimed that he proposed the deployment of the National Guard troops (as was done previously at the White House during violent protests). The January 6th Committee said that was a lie. The release of the transcript by Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R., Ga.) triggered attacks on the J6 Committee. The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway wrote a column titled “Former Rep. Liz Cheney’s January 6 Committee suppressed evidence.” That triggered an angry response from former co-chair Liz Cheney which led to an even angrier reply from commentator Mark Levin.
The anger is nothing new in a J6 investigation that seemed to produce more heat than light. Cheney’s spokesperson called the Federalist report “flatly false” and added “no transcripts were destroyed” while acknowledging that some material was not published “to allow the Secret Service to protect sensitive security information for interviews of its agents before preserving that testimony in the archives.”
The issue of the suppression or destruction of the evidence has drawn a lot of attention, but the more troubling question is the fact that such an offer was made and declined.
The Committee found “no evidence” that the Trump administration called for 10,000 National Guard members to Washington, D.C., to protect the Capitol. That now stands contradicted, and the question is whether Cheney or other members knew the public was being misled on the question. For example, the Washington Post “debunked” Trump’s comments with an award of “Four Pinocchios.”
The Post’s Glenn Kessler admitted that Trump raised the issue but noted that he might have been suggesting the troops “not because he wanted to protect the Capitol,” but to suggest that he and his supporters were being threatened. He added that “Trump brought up the issue on at least three occasions but in such vague and obtuse ways that no senior official regarded his words as an order.”
However, the issue is not whether Trump issued “an order” but made an offer that was declined. For those of us who were covering the event on that day, the question has always been prominent in our minds. I was critical of Trump’s speech while he was still giving it. However, before the Capitol was breached, I also noted that I had never seen the Capitol so thinly protected in a major protest. We had just seen violent protests outside of the White House with a large number of police officers injured and extensive property damage, including arson. President Trump and his family had to be moved to a secure location out of concern of an imminent breach of the White House. National Guard were deployed and fencing installed.
Even without an offer, it remains unclear why the violence around the White House did not prompt Congress to install the same barriers and deploy the same troops. (They ultimately took both steps but only after the rioters gained entry into the Capitol). Moreover, if an offer was clearly made, it undermines the allegations that Trump was actively seeking an insurrection. While he has never been charged with an insurrection or even incitement, that allegation was used more recently to support his disqualification from the ballots in Colorado, Maine, and Illinois.
The transcript contains the testimony of former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato’s interview on January 2022 with Cheney present. Ornato states that he clearly recalled the offer of 10,000 troops being made by Trump in a conversation with D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser:
“I was there, and he was on the phone with her and wanted to make sure she had everything that she needed. Because I think it was the concern of anti and pro groups clashing is what I recall…I remember the number 10,000 coming up of, you know, the President wants to make sure that you have enough. You know, he is willing to ask for 10,000. I remember that number.”
Ornato said that Browser said that they would not need the troops. (She ultimately asked for only 300 troops). There are also reports that then Speaker Nancy Pelosi was worried about the “optics” of military reinforcements at the Capitol.
Ornato also said that he recalled that, after Bowser refused additional National Guard members, the White House requested the Defense Department have a “quick reaction force” ready on that day. He gave details on meetings with the Defense Department and follow up from Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Hemingway noted in her report that Ornato’s testimony was supported by former Trump administration aide Kash Patel. Cheney has attacked Patel as unreliable.
Ornato also testified that Meadows and others were frustrated by the delay in getting those troops to the Hill. The delay was blamed on the logistics, not some conspiracy to enable or facilitate an insurrection.
The Federalist article makes additional allegations, including that Cheney was behind an op-ed by her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, opposing any use of national guard troops on January 6th. However, even proving such duplicity would hardly be news for Washington. Likewise, it does not negate criticism over Trump’s comments on that day or his delay in publicly calling for supporters to withdraw.
Yet, again, what is more important historically is whether the J6 Committee had direct evidence that Trump made the offer of thousands of troops and that the White House pushed for rapid deployment troops on that day.
I have previously criticized the one-sided J6 Report and the biased framing of the hearings held by the members. The Committee could have been so much more than the echo chamber that it became. However, this latest transcript adds questions over the perplexing failure of Congress to take obvious steps to prevent a riot.
Had Congress simply installed the same fencing previously used at the White House and deployed such troops, the J6 riot would likely have never occurred. Given the cost and trauma to our nation, we should want to know the full story of what occurred on January 6th.
With the border out of control, inflation through the roof, and the economy and the world in disaster, due mainly to Bidens and Democrat policies, Crooked Joe has decided to take aim at shrinkflation. Something he himself caused.
Snickers Bar Maker Denies Biden’s State of the Union “Shrinkflation” Charge
By Kristinn Taylor March 11, 2024
The maker of the Snickers candy bar released a statement refuting Joe Biden’s “shrinkflation” charge made in Thursday’s State of the Union address that the candy maker has reduced the size of Snickers bars but kept the same price.
Scott Jennings, a conservative commenter on CNN, queried Mars, Inc., the maker of Snickers for comment. The reply confirmed his suspicions about Biden’s claim “As I suspected. The president is literally slandering a candy bar. Official statement given to me by the Mars/Snickers people. Will literally slander anything and anyone. Total hack.” READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) replaced its chairwoman Ronna McDaniel on Friday with the now-former North Carolina Republican Party (NCGOP) chair Michael Whatley, who was the Trump-backed frontrunner. Ever since Whatley’s name was floated, the corporate media predictably deployed the “election denier” smear they assign to any Republican who has ever shown an interest in protecting the integrity of elections.
Whatley has a track record of emphasizing election integrity — and that’s enough, in the eyes of the corporate press, to paint him as a radical election-denying extremist. But with the high stakes of the 2024 election cycle, some of Whatley’s critics say he needs to amp up his election integrity efforts to another level in his anticipated post at the RNC.
Attacks From the Corporate Media
Whatley, who had served as NCGOP chair since narrowly defeating his opponents Jim Womack and John Lewis in 2019, has been the target of hand-wringing pieces from corporate media ever since he was tapped as former President Trump’s choice to lead the RNC. In an MSNBC column, North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton clutched her pearls about the “danger” Whatley poses.
“It’s clear that Trump is looking for an RNC leader who won’t hesitate to disenfranchise voters, rig elections or dismantle our democracy,” Clayton melodramatically wrote. “[Whatley] has helped lead efforts to defy the will of the people and infringe on North Carolinians’ rights.”
CNN ran a piece entitled “Likely frontrunner for RNC chair parroted Trump’s 2020 election lies.”
Multipleoutlets affiliated with States Newsroom — a network launched by a Democrat dark-money group — shuddered at the thought that Whatley teamed up with organizations like Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network that trains poll watchers, under the headline: “Trump’s pick for RNC chief worked with top election denier’s group.”
Russia hoax lawyer Marc Elias’ Democracy Docket joined in the attacks, saying Trump’s “endorsement of Whatley signals that the party is continuing down its path of pushing false election fraud narratives ahead of the November general election.”
What did Whatley do to be smeared as an election conspiracy theorist? In November 2020, he alleged that there was “massive fraud” in “places like Milwaukee and Detroit and Philadelphia.” Of course, even the Associated Press has admitted the existence of voter fraud in the 2020 election, just simply not enough for their liking to denote it as “widespread.”
As Whatley told CNN, “changes to the 2020 election process … weakened safeguards on absentee and mail-in votes in some states,” which “led to distrust by many across the country.”
Whatley’s Work on Election Integrity
Whatley’s supporters tout major wins for the state’s courts and election integrity efforts under his leadership.
“I think [election integrity] is probably [Whatley’s] greatest strength,” Nash County Republican Party Chair Mark Edwards said. “Coming out of the 2020 election there was a lot of angst and energy among Republicans about election integrity and rather than stoke some of the more outlandish and extreme and outrageous reactions to what happened in 2020, Whatley stood above it and saw that this is where the concerns of the party were.”
“He took it upon himself to grab the election integrity issue by the horns and direct that energy into productive use by setting up the Election Integrity Review Committee within the party,” Edwards added, crediting Whatley with “hiring legal staff to help head up the election integrity efforts of the party, and work very closely with Republican legislators to craft legislation that was drafted, introduced and passed and is now being implemented.”
The NCGOP established the Election Integrity Committee in 2021 to recruit, train and send out attorneys and poll watchers to observe “absentee-by-mail approval meetings, early voting polls, election day polls, county canvasses, recount meetings, and protest hearings.”
In 2022, “Whatley doubled down on his efforts to recruit and train poll observers and lawyers,” said former NCGOP legal counsel Philip Thomas. The NCGOP was unable to provide numbers for how many poll watchers were appointed over the course of Whatley’s tenure. Whatley critic Jay DeLancy, however, said it might be difficult for the NCGOP to obtain that data since individual counties appoint observers and the process is decentralized.
Senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute Cleta Mitchell said Whatley “understands that there is more to winning elections than just turning out votes and voters.”
“He has a sense of the need to focus on the election system itself,” Mitchell added. “While sometimes he has too narrow a focus, such as thinking that volunteer lawyers on Election Day will somehow overcome the billions of dollars that the left has invested in changing the entire voting system in our country, Michael is at least aware that there is more to winning than the historic or traditional ‘If we have a good candidate and good issues and a good campaign, our side will win.’ Those days are long gone and at some level, Michael understands that.”
Whatley also created the Judicial Victory Fund, which states its goal is “raising the resources needed to support … statewide conservative judicial candidates.” NCGOP Communications Director Matt Mercer said the fund is “something that really can’t be overstated enough.”
“Whatley campaigned on ‘Reset in Raleigh’ and overturning a 6-1 Republican deficit on the Supreme Court,” Mercer said. “Whatley has been undefeated [in judicial races] in 2020 and 2022 with the Judicial Victory Fund and the partners at the county and district levels.”
Mercer also credits Whatley with helping get voter ID “past the finish line” by flipping the balance of the court, adding while the NCGOP will miss him, “it’s going to be a benefit for the RNC to have someone of his caliber there.”
The fund was particularly handy during the 2020 election for the North Carolina Supreme Court’s chief justice between Democrat incumbent Cheri Beasley and Republican Associate Justice Paul Newby. Beasley refused to concede after she lost by about 400 votes and attempted to restore thousands of ballots. Of the 2,800 of those ballots analyzed by The News & Observer at the time, 70 percent belonged to Democrats and just nine ballots belonged to Republicans.
Some of the ballots Beasley tried to force election officials to accept were ballots that had already been counted, WRAL News reported. But the NCGOP says her attempts ultimately failed after they used resources from the Judicial Victory Fund to fight back.
Republicans also managed to flip the balance of the state’s Supreme Court in 2022 after Republicans Trey Allen and Richard Dietz won their races, giving Republicans a 5-2 majority.
“If you’re a state party chairman and you don’t have critics, you probably aren’t doing your job,” former chairman of the NCGOP Tom Fetzer told The Federalist. “It’s something that anybody who has ever been a state party chairman accepts and deals with.”
GOP Critics Say Whatley Could Do More
Womack and John Kane, who tried to unseat Whatley in 2022, say he is being given too much credit and should be doing more for election integrity.
“He’s taking credit for [the Judicial Victory Fund] as a great accomplishment, but the credit needs to be shared with … the attorneys that were working on the judicial campaigns, there were different districts that were raising money,” Womack said.
And when it comes to fighting to secure elections, Womack said the real effort comes from the RNC. In October, the NCGOP and RNC intervened in a lawsuit wherein Democrats attacked a state senate bill that “prevents non-citizens from voting, protects bipartisan poll watchers, and eliminates dark money in elections.”
“The RNC is taking the lead on their lawyers so the NCGOP is just saying, ‘Me too,’” Womack told The Federalist. “We do have a general counsel who is pretty good but the RNC is the one floating all these costs for the lawsuits nationwide.” Aside from the RNC’s election integrity efforts, he added, grassroots Republicans have also worked behind the scenes to ensure the state has a fair process.
This criticism was echoed by Executive Director of Voter Integrity Project of North Carolina, Jay DeLancy, who claimed the NCGOP only addressed allegations of dead people voting in the Beasley-Newby race after his organization took the lead and began investigating.
“It wasn’t [the NCGOP] idea, it was ours,” DeLancy said, adding however that he was pleased the NCGOP helped ramp up efforts. DeLancy also argued that while he has “no complaints about [the NCGOP] lawsuits” and said he gives “credit” to the “effective” legal action that was taken, securing elections starts from the bottom up.
“Election integrity takes creativity, you have to think about how the bad guys are doing things and get into the process,” he said. “What we’re more concerned with is day-to-day ground game and where people are cheating, where the rubber meets the road at the polls.”
“When things go south at the polls, we train our poll workers to pull out the law and show the clerk where they’re wrong. [NCGOP] doesn’t, they just say, ‘call us’…and log it unless they feel they can take legal action,” DeLancy added. “I would love to have seen someone who took election integrity seriously as RNC chairman but at the end of the day, all they really care about is get out the vote efforts and they’re not serious about election integrity.”
Mitchell expressed similar thoughts, saying while recruiting volunteer lawyers and poll observers is “absolutely vital,” she hopes Whatley “will be open to hearing about and understanding” that Republicans need to “fight the left on every single issue and every inflection point regarding the election system.”
“We cannot hope to counter their massive funding and organizational advantage that has nothing to do with the DNC or the normal political campaigns,” Mitchell said. “We are in a different world now and hopefully, Michael and the new RNC leadership will want to learn and do something about it. Banking early votes or ballot harvesting as a singular strategy has the left rolling in the aisles laughing at us.”
Womack and Kane also expressed concerns about whether Whatley could actually fundraise for the party.
“The state party would be broke if it weren’t for RNC subsidies,” Womack said. Kane also attributed the state party’s funds to the RNC.
Womack acknowledged, however, that Whatley likely wouldn’t need to worry about doing all the heavy lifting when it comes to fundraising because Trump would be able to drum up most of the support himself.
“Trump’s train has left the station,” Womack said. “I think he’s gonna do well regardless of who the RNC chair is so I’m guessing it really doesn’t matter who leads the RNC.”
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and House GOP leadership members say President Joe Biden’s proposed 2025 fiscal year budget “is a roadmap to accelerate America’s decline.”
Biden on Monday unveiled a $7.3 trillion spending wish list that is as much an election-year pitch to voters — one that slams Republicans and former President Donald Trump by name — as it is a policy proposal.
“The price tag of President Biden’s proposed budget is yet another glaring reminder of this Administration’s insatiable appetite for reckless spending and the Democrats’ disregard for fiscal responsibility,” Johnson, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., and Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., said in a joint statement.
“Biden’s budget doesn’t just miss the mark — it is a roadmap to accelerate America’s decline.”
It has been widely reported Biden wants to raise $5.5 trillion in tax on corporations and high earners during the next decade, the 2025 budget showed. That would help cut the federal deficit and pay for new programs to assist those who make less cope with high housing and child care costs, according to The Associated Press.
“While hardworking Americans struggle with crushing inflation and mounting national debt, the President would increase their pain to spend trillions of additional taxpayer dollars to advance his left-wing agenda,” the GOP leaders said in their statement.
They added that the House Republican Conference has “taken action to steer our nation back to a path of fiscal sanity.”
“Our efforts to rein in the runaway spending spree from last year’s budget have already yielded results, lowering projected deficits by $2.6 trillion over the next decade,” they said in the statement.
“The House’s budget plan for the next fiscal year, preceding the President’s proposal, reflects the values of hardworking Americans who know that in tough economic times, fiscal discipline is non-negotiable. House Republicans understand the American people expect and deserve nothing less from their government.”
Although Biden released his proposed 2025 budget, Congress has yet to pass full funding for federal agencies for the current fiscal year. House Republicans on Thursday issued a plan that aims to balance the federal budget within a decade by cutting $14 trillion in federal spending, including green energy subsides and student loan forgiveness, while reducing taxes. The White House, though, called that plan unworkable.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which provides independent analyses of budgetary and economic issues to support the Congressional budget process, released a Feb. 7 report that offered a budget and economic outlook for 2024 to 2034. In CBO’s projections, federal budget deficits total $20 trillion over the 2025–2034 period and federal debt held by the public reaches 116 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP).
By Brian Freeman | Monday, 11 March 2024 12:49 PM EDT
The illegal immigration problem can’t be solved without defining it, making it frustrating that President Joe Biden retracted the “illegal” label of the man who was charged in the murder of nursing student Laken Riley, Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, told Newsmax on Monday.
“Its ridiculous that President Biden is not willing to define this problem, and by not defining it, he is not going to come up with solutions,” Judd said on “Wake Up America,” adding that is “what really frustrates every single one of us.”
Judd reiterated that Biden “is not going to come up with a solution to the problem by watering down what this problem actually is.”
Instead, by walking back his comments, Biden is “inviting so many people to cross our borders illegally,” Judd said.
Judd, who has endorsed former President Donald Trump in this year’s presidential election, said that when Biden came into office, he reversed 97 of Trump’s policies on the border, explaining that is why the nation has had a surge in illegal crossings.
Still, Judd said his organization backed a recent bipartisan Senate immigration bill that Trump and Republicans sabotaged.
Judd said that the compromise proposal would have been “absolutely better than what we currently have” by, for example, removing the backed-up judiciary from the process and raising the credible fear standard, which would have severely reduced the number of migrants able to use that argument to stay in the country.
He stressed that his organization wanted to see it to go to the floor for debate and amendment in order to get rid of the bad items that were in the proposal.
Judd, however, blamed Biden for “weaponizing” his group’s backing for the bill by failing to give the “proper context for our support at the time.”
He stressed that this is one of the reasons that the public should have “zero confidence” in the Biden administration.
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
The Justice Department, run by Attorney General Merrick Garland, is keeping secret its strategic plan to implement President Joe Biden’s executive order on getting out the vote. Pictured: Biden, appearing via teleconference, looks on as Garland attends a meeting Aug. 3, 2022, in the White House complex. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
The Biden Justice Department continues to claim presidential privilege to block release of its strategic plan to turn out the vote, although at least two other federal agencies have made their plans public. In defending a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act, the Justice Department is keeping under wraps its plans to implement President Joe Biden’s 2021 executive order, under which most federal agencies are required to develop a strategic plan for increasing voter participation in elections.
The plaintiff in that case, the Foundation for Government Accountability, contends that privilege claim is undermined by two federal agencies releasing their plans to implement Biden’s Executive Order 14019, which he signed in March 2021. Notably, the U.S. Trade Representative, an agency that is part of the Executive Office of the President, made its plan public through a public records request, as The Daily Signal reported last week. The Railroad Retirement Board also released its strategic plan for boosting voting, The Daily Signal reported.
“Now that at least two agencies have handed out their strategic plans, the Justice Department’s claim [that the plan] is protected by presidential privilege in our case is questionable,” Stewart Whitson, legal director for the Foundation for Government Accountability, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.
The Foundation for Government Accountability first sued the Justice Department under the Freedom of Information Act in April 2022 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida.
“The DOJ is supposed to be the arbiter of following the law, and they are doing the opposite,” Whitson said in the interview.
My book “The Myth of Voter Suppression” details how executives at the liberal think tank Demos—one of the private groups working with federal agencies on voter turnout—drafted an executive order in December 2020, the month before Biden took office, suggesting how he should turn government bureaucracies into voter registration agencies.
Possibly more ambiguous is the Defense Department, which said it updated an existing strategic plan to fit Biden’s executive order on voting. The Pentagon’s strategic plan isn’t dated, but appears to have been drafted in 2021 after Biden signed the order that March. The Defense Department, unlike most other federal agencies, consistently has dealt with voting issues for military personnel.
The Justice Department didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s inquiries for this report. Federal agencies frequently decline to comment on ongoing litigation. Publicly, however, the Justice Department said in an October 2022 court filing that releasing documents about its strategic plan to implement Biden’s order could cause “public confusion.”
“To qualify for protection under this privilege, material must be inter- or intra-agency, and both pre-decisional and deliberative,” the Justice Department’s motion in the lawsuit says.
In a March 3 speech, Attorney General Merrick Garland said voter ID and other election reforms were “discriminatory, burdensome and unnecessary,” and that the Justice Department would “fight back” against such measures.
Numerous House and Senate Republicans have sought information about the documents related to Biden’s order telling government agencies to register voters. Critics have said the order could cause federal employees to engage in illegal activity by participating in elective politics. They point to potential violation of the Hatch Act, a law prohibiting partisan political activity using government time or resources, and the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits executive branch agencies from spending money for purposes not designated by Congress.
The Department of Education released a “toolkit” to expand voting among college students and to provide information about voting for students in grades K-12.
Also under Biden’s initiative, the Department of Homeland Security registers new voters during naturalization ceremonies. It’s not clear what else the DHS–which also is charged with stopping illegal immigration–has done to implement Biden’s executive order.
As The Daily Signal previously reported, the Biden administration carved out paid administrative leave to encourage federal bureaucrats—seen as a loyal Democrat constituency—to volunteer as poll workers during elections. The Daily Signal also reported that federal agencies are working to carry out Biden’s order on voting with Demos and other liberal advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union.
In 2021, the White House announced that the Justice Department would focus on the Bureau of Prisons to “provide information about voting to individuals in federal custody, facilitate voting by those who remain eligible to do so while in federal custody, and educate individuals before reentry about voting rules and voting rights in their states.”
The Biden administration has made little other information available, however.
Below is my column in the Hill on the real possibility of a federal trial of former president Donald Trump just before or even through the 2024 election. The claim that this schedule is the result of treating Trump like other criminal defendants is increasingly dubious given statements of courts and the Special Counsel.
Here is the column:
“This trial will not yield to the election cycle.” Those words of U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan last year made clear that she will not consider that Donald Trump will likely be the 2024 Republican presidential nominee in setting the schedule for his federal trial in Washington, D.C.
Most recently, in the federal prosecution in Florida, Special Counsel Jack Smith declared that he will not consider himself bound by the Justice Department’s longstanding policy of not bringing charges or holding trials of candidates close to an election.
With the Supreme Court reviewing the immunity question (and a decision not expected until June), a nightmare scenario is unfolding in which Trump could be tried not just before the general election, but actually through November’s election.
Chutkan has insisted that her refusal to consider Trump’s candidacy is simply denying special treatment to the former president. But there is nothing typical about how she and others have handled the case. The fact that Chutkan was pushing for a March trial date shows just how extraordinary her handling has been.
In the D.C. courts, with thousands of stacked up cases, that would be a rocket docket for a complex case of this kind. There are roughly 770,000 pending cases in roughly 100 district courts around the country. The backlog of pending criminal cases in the federal court system increased by more than a quarter in the last five years. Even when defendants plead guilty, criminal cases average 10 months. If a trial is needed, it runs on average to two years, absent serious complications over classified or privileged material. Smith indicted Trump less than a year ago.
At every juncture, Smith has tried to expedite and spur the case along. This has included an attempt to cut off standard appellate options for Trump. It seems as if the entire point is to try Trump before the election. Smith has offered no reason, other than that he wants voters to consider the outcome of the trial. It is a rare acknowledgement of a desire for a trial to become a factor in an election.
Judge Chutkan has shown the same determination. The judge was criticized for comments she made before any charges were brought that strongly suggested she thought Trump should be criminally charged. Chutkan told one defendant that he showed “blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.” In another case, Chutkan told the defendant that it was unfair that he might go to prison but “the architects of that horrific event will likely never be charged.”
When asked to recuse herself, Chutkan denied the clear implication of her own words. She insisted that she has not expressly stated that “’President Trump should be prosecuted’ and imprisoned… And the defense does not cite any instance of the court ever uttering those words or anything similar.”
Of course, neither the court nor the prosecutors seem willing to apply a similarly deferential view of the meaning of Trump’s words within the context of the case. There, the implications are sufficient for that “one person” described earlier by the court.
Chutkan is now reportedly telling parties in other cases that she will be out of the country in August, and that defendants will have to delay any proceedings in light of her plans…unless she can try Trump. She told lawyers that she will stick with her schedule unless “I’m in trial in another matter that has not yet returned to my calendar.”
Given the apparent motivation of the trial court to try Trump before the election, the only other source of restraint would be the Justice Department itself. Smith, however, has insisted that he will show no such restraint, even if he tries Trump through the election.
In his filings in Florida, Smith insisted that the oft-cited Justice Department policy to avoid such proceedings within 60 days of an election would not be applied in Trump’s case. He insisted that, since everyone knows about the allegations, there would be no harm or foul in holding him for trial for the weeks before the election as his opponent, President Biden, is free to traverse the country campaigning.
Smith’s position was applauded by commentators who had previously invoked the rule to oppose charges that might have helped Trump before prior elections. Take Andrew Weissmann, who served as the controversial top aide to Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Now an MSNBC legal analyst, Weissmann assured viewers that there was no problem trying Trump just before the election because this is just “an internal rule. It is not a law.”
He then added “Second, the rule does not apply! For anyone who has been at the Justice Department, this is such a red herring.” He insisted this is only meant to avoid some “covert cases” being tried “because you don’t want to influence the election when that person — the candidate — doesn’t have an opportunity to get to trial.”
However, when the issue was the possibility of Special Counsel John Durham charging figures in the Russia investigation before the 2020 election, Weissmann and Professor Ryan Goodman wrote a column not only invoking the rule but encouraging prosecutors to refuse to assist Durham.
I have previously written about the ambiguity of this rule and the selectivity of its applications. However, Weissmann and Goodman were adamant that such prosecutions would be dangerous. Even though no actual election candidate would have been charged, they invoked this Justice Department “norm” and declared, “The Justice Department should not take action that could distort an election and influence the electorate. If someone is charged immediately before an election, for instance, that person has no time to offer a defense to counter the charges. The closer the election, the greater the risk that the department is impermissibly acting based on political considerations, which is always prohibited.”
It is certainly true that these charges have been known for a while, but Trump may not have an ability to present a complete defense before the election. It is also clear that he will have to choose between campaigning for office and defending his liberty.
Moreover, this is the leading candidate for the presidency, and the opponent to the current incumbent. A 2023 poll found that a 47 percent plurality of Americans already believe the charges are politically motivated. That appearance will only worsen as the election approaches, a recognition that should force a modicum of restraint upon both the court and the prosecution. Finally, Smith is referencing the election as the reason to expedite the trial precisely because it may have an influence on voters.
The Trump trials are troubling precisely because they are being handled differently because of who the defendant is. No one can seriously suggest that Judge Chutkan would be moving other cases or canceling trips in order to shoehorn them into the calendar this year, if it were not for the election and the name of the defendant. Such cases are, after all, notorious for taking years to work out complicated pre-trial matters.
Most citizens already see that reality. State prosecutors in New York and Georgia waited for years to charge Trump, then pushed for expedited schedules in order to try him before the election.
That brings us back to Judge Chutkan’s pledge to “not yield to the election cycle.” Yet the expedited effort of the court seems clearly motivated by the election cycle. She and Smith are depending on the election cycle as they struggle to pull Trump into court at the height of a presidential campaign. It is a schedule conceived for the “one person” described by Chutkan in the earlier cases. As the calendar continues to shrink, claims of blind justice increasingly look like the blind pursuit of a specific person.
Jonathan Turley is the J.B. & Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at the George Washington University Law School.
Special Counsel David Weiss has filed a blistering opposition to the motion to dismiss by Hunter Biden in California that cites his own book and conflicting statements as creating “nothing more than a house of cards.” The filing (below) shows how Hunter’s claims (repeated by many in the media) collapse under even cursory review in court.
Weiss’s filing bulldozes through arguments of selective prosecution and political influence in the case. He specifically notes that Biden repeatedly makes statements without any proof or support in his filings.
The filing begins by outright accusing Hunter Biden and his counsel of lying to the court about what occurred after the earlier plea agreement fell apart in court after the judge in Delaware asked about a sweeping immunity clause in paragraph 14. Notably, Weiss said that it was Hunter Biden’s legal team that inexplicably shut down negotiations by playing hardball in seeking to preserve the original agreement:
“The government proposed changes to the agreements that addressed only the issues identified during the hearing. Exh. 3. The defendant rejected these counterproposals on August 7, 2023. Id. Instead, the defendant began insisting that the proposed Diversion Agreement had bound both parties, even though it had not been approved by the Chief U.S. Probation Officer, a condition precedent to formation that would have brought it into effect. Moreover, by taking this position, he chose to shut down any further negotiations that could address the issues raised at the hearing.”
It then accuses Biden and his counsel as outright lying to the court:
“In his motion, in multiple places, the defendant falsely states that DOJ ‘inexplicably demanded Mr. Biden plead guilty to felonies with jail time.’ He cites nothing in support of his false claims, which is a consistent theme across his motions. The government attaches as Exhibit 3 a redacted letter from the defendant’s counsel which confirms the defendant understood that the government had proposed changes to only those paragraphs that were at issue during the hearing, not paragraphs regarding the charges the defendant must plead to or any “jail time” the defendant must serve. As shown in Exhibit 3, the government proposed changes to Paragraphs 14, 15 and 17 of the Diversion Agreement, and Paragraph 5(b) of the Plea Agreement. The government proposed no changes to Paragraph 1 of the Plea Agreement, which required the defendant to plead guilty to two misdemeanors. Nor did the government propose any changes to Paragraph 6 of the Plea Agreement, in which the United States had agreed to recommend a sentence of probation. The defendant rejected these counterproposals and refused further negotiations…His newly invented claim in his motion that the government “inexplicably demanded Mr. Biden plead guilty to felonies with jail time” is patently false, unsupported by evidence, and belied by his own letter and representations in his filings in the Delaware case.”
The rest of the filing is equally devastating.
Weiss notes that Biden repeatedly misrepresents facts or claims authority that does not exist. He notes that Biden does not cite any cases of similarly situated individuals who were not prosecuted. For example, it notes:
“The only attempt the defendant makes to link animus directly to prosecutors is his claim that “reports indicate Mr. Weiss himself admitted [the charges] would not have been brought against the average American.” Motion at 13. However, his citation does not include a reference to reports (plural), rather it includes a single New York Times citation, which includes a denial immediately after the quoted excerpt: “A senior law enforcement official forcefully denied the account.” An anonymous account that is “forcefully denied” is not evidence that can satisfy the defendant’s burden of producing “clear evidence” of discriminatory intent and animus by prosecutors.”
In rejecting the two cases that he references, Weiss takes a swipe at Hunter’s book. When he published the book, some of us noted that he was making statements against his own interest in possible prosecutions. Weiss just made that a reality:
“The defendant compares himself to only two individuals: Robert Shaughnessy and Roger Stone, both of whom resolved their tax cases civilly for failing to pay taxes. Shaughnessy failed to file and pay his taxes, but he was not alleged to have committed tax evasion. By contrast, the defendant chose to file false returns years later, failed to pay when those returns were filed, and lied to his accountants repeatedly, claiming personal expenses as business expenses. Stone failed to pay his taxes but did timely file his returns, unlike the defendant. Neither Shaughnessy nor Stone illegally purchased a firearm and lied on background check paperwork. And neither of them wrote a memoir in which they made countless statements proving their crimes and drawing further attention to their criminal conduct. These two individuals are not suitable comparators, and since the defendant fails to identify anyone else, his claim fails.”
The brief even takes a shot at the use of public statements by former Attorney General Eric Holder to prove selective prosecution, noting that Holder seems hopelessly conflicted in his own claim of selective prosecution:
“The defendant cites media commentary by former Attorney General Eric Holder, who acknowledged that the defendant is not similarly situated to other individuals: ‘This isn’t some kind of ordinary run-of-the-mill tax case, [] this was an abuse of the tax system . . .’”
The filing annihilates the public claims of Hunter and his allies. It is the difference between making a case in the court of public opinion and making a case in an actual court of law.
One of Minnesota’s fastest-growing high school sports is in danger of becoming too expensive for its athletes if a bill circulating in the state House and Senate comes to pass.
Shooting league calls DFL bill an ‘attack on a school-approved activity they don’t like
Sen. Jen McEwen, DFL-Duluth, says SF3792 is focused on keeping youth shooting athletes and the environment safe from lead-based ammunition. One of Minnesota’s fastest growing high school sports is in danger of becoming too expensive for its athletes if a bill circulating in the state House and Senate comes to pass. That’s according to organizers for the USA Clay Target League who say a proposal sponsored by a handful of DFL legislators that would ban lead-based ammunition would “more than double” the costs of ammunition for trap shooting athletes and result in many no longer being able to afford the sport. READ MORE
It is now abundantly clear that the Democrats and Biden are using lawfare to remove their political opposition, mainly Trump and his supporters. All the indictments are from hardcore leftists within the justice system.
LAWFARE: Trump Posts $91.6 Million Bond to Appeal E. Jean Carroll Defamation Judgment
By Cristina Laila – March , 2024
President Trump on Friday posted a $91.6 million bond as he appeals the E. Jean Carroll judgment. The money will be returned to Trump if he wins his appeal. Judge Lewis Kaplan, a Clinton appointee on Thursday denied Trump’s second request to delay paying Carroll.
In January, a 9-person jury ordered Trump to pay a total of $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll for statements he made defending himself against false rape accusations. The Trump team argued that the evidence Carroll deleted proves that she was receiving threats before President Trump ever commented on her allegations. Judge Kaplan defended Carroll and said Trump offered no evidence that he ever attempted to recover the deleted messages. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Top Stories • Joe Biden Promoted Abortions Up to Birth, But lgnored How Abortion Hurts Women • Thousands Demand University Take Down Satanic Abortion Statue • Hey Joe Biden. I’m Disabled But I Shouldn’t Have Been Killed in an Abortion • Abortion Businesses Masquerade as Health Centers in K-12 Schools to Prey on Kids
More Pro-Life News • Premature Baby Born at 22 Weeks is a “Little Fighter” Who Beat the Odds • The Abortion Drug is Killing and Injuring Women, Where are the Feminists? • Abortion Pills in Our Water Are Polluting Our Nation Worse Than Gas Stoves • Virginia Democrats Kill Women’s Health Care Because They Care More About Abortion • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2024 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
Former Rep. Liz Cheney’s January 6 Committee suppressed evidence that President Donald Trump pushed for 10,000 National Guard troops to protect the nation’s capital, a previously hidden transcript obtained by The Federalist shows.
Cheney and her committee falsely claimed they had “no evidence” to support Trump officials’ claims the White House had communicated its desire for 10,000 National Guard troops. In fact, an early transcribed interview conducted by the committee included precisely that evidence from a key source. The interview, which Cheney attended and personally participated in, was suppressed from public release until now.
Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato’s first transcribed interview with the committee was conducted on January 28, 2022. In it, he told Cheney and her investigators that he overheard White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows push Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to request as many National Guard troops as she needed to protect the city.
He also testified President Trump had suggested 10,000 would be needed to keep the peace at the public rallies and protests scheduled for January 6, 2021. Ornato also described White House frustration with Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller’s slow deployment of assistance on the afternoon of January 6, 2021.
Not only did the committee not accurately characterize the interview, they suppressed the transcript from public review. On top of that, committee allies began publishing critical stories and even conspiracy theories about Ornato ahead of follow-up interviews with him. Ornato was a career Secret Service official who had been detailed to the security position in the White House.
Cheney frequently points skeptics of her investigation to the Government Publishing Office website that posted, she said, “transcripts, documents, exhibits & our meticulously sourced 800+ page final report.” That website provides “supporting documents” to the claims made by Cheney and fellow anti-Trump enthusiasts.
However, transcripts of fewer than half of the 1,000 interviews the committee claims it conducted are posted on that site. It is unclear how many of the hidden transcripts include exonerating information suppressed by the committee.
Those documents support the committee’s narrative rather than the truth of the events leading up to January 6, 2021, said Rep. Barry Loudermilk, chairman of the House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight.
“The former J6 Select Committee apparently withheld Mr. Ornato’s critical witness testimony from the American people because it contradicted their pre-determined narrative. Mr. Ornato’s testimony proves what Mr. Meadows has said all along: President Trump did in fact offer 10,000 National Guard troops to secure the U.S. Capitol, which was turned down,” said the Georgia Republican.
His subcommittee is reviewing the work of the January 6 committee, which has been accused of other unethical behavior at the expense of accuracy, as well as collusion with other Democrat efforts to prosecute political opponents.
“This is just one example of important information the former Select Committee hid from the public because it contradicted what they wanted the American people to believe,” Loudermilk said. “And this is exactly why my investigation is committed to uncovering all the facts, no matter the outcome.”
Early Corroboration For Contested Claim
A January 6 committee staffer asked Ornato, “When it comes to the National Guard statement about having 10,000 troops or any other number of troops, do you recall any discussion prior to the 6th about whether and how many National Guard troops to deploy on January 6th?” Ornato surprised the committee by noting he did recall a conversation between Meadows and Bowser: “He was on the phone with her and wanted to make sure she had everything that she needed,” Ornato told investigators.
Ornato said White House concerns about January 6 were related to fears that left-wing groups would clash with Trump protesters and that no one in the White House anticipated a riot at the Capitol. Antifa and other left-wing groups were planning protests for the same day. Left-wing groups had been involved in violent assaults on Trump supporters following public protests.
Meadows “wanted to know if she need any more guardsmen,” Ornato testified. “And I remember the number 10,000 coming up of, you know, ‘The president wants to make sure that you have enough.’ You know, ‘He is willing to ask for 10,000.’ I remember that number. Now that you said it, it reminded me of it. And that she was all set. She had, I think it was like 350 or so for intersection control, and those types of things not in the law enforcement capacity at the time.”
“No DCNG personnel shall be armed during this mission, and at no time, will DCNG personnel or assets be engaged in domestic surveillance, searches, or seizures of US persons,” Bowser wrote in her letter requesting the D.C. National Guard. Bowser had been a strenuous critic of Republican efforts to limit rioting from leftwing political activists in U.S. cities during 2020’s summer of violence.
Bowser’s decision to decline help from the White House did not end the Trump team’s efforts to secure troops ahead of the protest. When the D.C. mayor declined Trump’s offer of 10,000 troops, Ornato said the White House requested a “quick reaction force” out of the Defense Department in case it was needed.
“The only thing I remember with DOD and the National Guard was even though the mayor didn’t want any more National Guard in D.C., that a request was made to have kind of a, lack of better term, a quick reaction force out at Joint Base Andrews being that it was a military installation,” Ornato told investigators in the previously concealed interview. “I remember Chief Meadows talking to DOD about that, I believe. I remember Chief Meadows letting me know that, ‘Hey, there was going to be National Guard that’s going to be at Joint Base Andrews in case they’re going to need some more, we’re going to — the Mayor would need any, we’re going to make sure they’re out there.’”
Meadows was concerned that D.C. would be unprepared for the size of the crowd coming to protest the controversial 2020 election in which hundreds of laws and processes were changed to enable tens of millions of unsupervised mail-in ballots to flood the country. The January 6 Committee prevented an investigation into Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s preparation — or lack thereof — for Capitol security ahead of the event, so it is unclear if she was as concerned about keeping the peace as Meadows and the Trump White House were.
“And, again, the crowd sizes were, you know, the organizers were saying, you know, there may be 50,000 here. So that’s where it started, I think, to scare the chief a little bit of how many people were coming in for this event, and wanted to make sure that they would be able to bring in National Guard if needed for this size of this many people inside D.C.,” Ornato said.
Once the Capitol was breached, the Trump White House pushed for immediate help from Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller and grew frustrated at the slow deployment of that help, according to the testimony.
“So, then I remember the chief saying, ‘Hey, I’m calling secretary of defense to get that [quick reaction force] in here,” Ornato said. Later he said, “And then I remember the chief telling Miller, ‘Get them in here, get them in here to secure the Capitol now.’”
Still later, he said, “[T]he constant was, you know, where is the National Guard? Why isn’t — you know, we’ve got to get control of this.” And again, “But, you know, [Meadows] understood the urgency, that’s for sure. And he kept, you know, getting Miller on the phone, wanting to know where they were, why aren’t they there yet.”
Days prior, Cheney had “secretly orchestrated” a pressure campaign to prevent the Defense Department from deploying resources on January 6, 2021. She organized an op-ed for the Washington Post from her father and other former secretaries of defense specifically to discourage Miller from taking action.
Ornato described Meadows’ strenuous efforts to quicken the Defense Department’s deployment of the National Guard: “Every time [Meadows] would ask, ‘What’s taking so long?’ It would be, like, you know, ‘This isn’t just start the car and we’re there. We have to muster them up, we have to’ — so it was constant excuses coming of — not excuses, but what they were actually doing to get them there. So, you know, ‘We only have so many here right now. They’re given an hour to get ready.’ So, there’s, like, all these timelines that was being explained to the chief. And he relayed that, like, you know — he’s like, ‘I don’t care, just get them here,’ you know, and ‘Get them to the Capitol, not to the White House.’”
Cheney hid this testimony and instead asserted in her report that President Trump “never gave any order to deploy the National Guard on January 6th or on any other day. Nor did he instruct any Federal law enforcement agency to assist.”
Her report noted that the secretary of defense “ultimately did deploy the Guard. Although evidence identifies a likely miscommunication between members of the civilian leadership in the Department of Defense impacting the timing of deployment, the Committee has found no evidence that the Department of Defense intentionally delayed deployment of the National Guard. The Select Committee recognizes that some at the Department had genuine concerns, counseling caution, that President Trump might give an illegal order to use the military in support of his efforts to overturn the election.”
Cheney has never addressed the effects of her secretly orchestrated campaign to prevent Miller from acting ahead of the January 6, 2021 protest. A new book confirms prior reporting that Cheney secretly conspired with District Attorney Fani Willis in Fulton County’s prosecution of Republicans and that she viewed it as a “platform for her to resuscitate her political career” and would “provide a springboard for a Cheney presidential run.”
Ornato’s description of events also matched testimony offered by Kash Patel, the former chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, in the Colorado Supreme Court hearing about Democrat efforts to limit the ability of Americans to vote for the candidate of their choice. The Colorado court, whose efforts to remove Trump from the ballot were so extreme they were overturned this week by a unanimous Supreme Court, claimed Patel’s “testimony regarding Trump authorizing” at least 10,000 National Guardsmen was “illogical” and “completely devoid of any evidence in the record.” Because Ornato’s corroborating information had been suppressed from the public record by the January 6 committee, the Colorado Supreme Court improperly dismissed evidence.
‘I Never Heard Anything Like That’
Cheney and her committee did devote 2,000 words in their final report to an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that President Trump had physically overcome a Secret Service agent in his zeal to join protesters at the Capitol. That story had been told by Cassidy Hutchinson, Cheney’s friend and star witness, along with other stories that eyewitnesses disputed. (Disclosure: Hutchinson falsely claimed this reporter received classified information from a Secret Service handler in a clandestine Georgetown meeting. She has thus far refused formal requests to correct her theatrical claim.) While the story of Trump overcoming a Secret Service agent would not be told for months, Ornato pre-rebutted it in his testimony.
Asked if he ever heard anything about Trump deciding to go to the Capitol that day, Ornato said he hadn’t. Ornato said Trump had driven by a previous rally, had flown over another, and that handlers had previously decided against him joining the day’s events.
“No. I did not know that. I mean, I don’t think — that couldn’t have happened. Nobody had — nobody would be prepared for that. There would be no security to do that. There would be no — I mean, that was like I said, talked about a couple of days, whenever it was prior, and it was scoffed at and moved on, and I never heard about it again,” Ornato said, adding that he never heard anything about Trump wanting to go to the Capitol that day. “Usually somebody would, you know, report it up or report over, like, ‘Hey, this is what I overheard’ or something, but I never heard anything like that.”
Later, Hutchinson would claim Ornato had been the source of her dramatic tale that Trump had commandeered the presidential vehicle and demanded to be taken to the Capitol. Other Secret Service sources also strongly repudiated the outlandish claim.
Should individuals who immigrate here in pursuit of economic prosperity gain the right to vote? Eventually, but only after they go through the lengthy process to become legally naturalized citizens and do so without jumping the line. (Photo: Shironosov/iStock/Getty Images)
The New York City Legislature, following in the footsteps of Washington, D.C., passed a groundbreaking bill into law in 2022. The law would have allowed any lawful permanent resident or green card holder to vote in a New York City election. That law was met with legal challenges as quickly as it was passed, which was to be expected, given that it flagrantly infringed upon the state’s constitution.
The Constitution of New York states unequivocally, “every citizen shall be entitled to vote … .” This provision’s meaning is so obvious that it has been painful to see the far-left liberal New York City Council pass a law that violates it. It is evident that the New York City Legislature misplaced its reading glasses, as it would not have enacted a law that contradicts the New York Constitution in such a bizarre way.
The majority opinion, authored by appellate Judge Paul Wooten, stated, “The plain language of this provision provides that the right to vote in ‘every election for all officers elected by the people’ is available exclusively to citizens.”
Unsurprisingly, pro-immigrant organizations denounced the decision, calling it “shameful” and saying it “disenfranchise[s] residents.” Disenfranchises? Really? This remark is as illogical as it is absurd. The only people disenfranchised by this law are United States citizens.
Voter disenfranchisement entails impeding an individual’s ability to exercise his or her right to vote or diminishing the value of his or her vote. The reason the Electoral College is reviled by the Left is because, according to its worldview, it confers greater value on specific votes than others, especially in smaller states.
The right to vote is sacred. However, the Left has forgotten that it must be earned, not given. Not earned in the conventional sense of passing a test to acquire, like the racist literacy tests of the past; rather, acquired through enduring the complexities and challenges associated with being a citizen. Becoming a citizen is not a simple task. Individuals must either be so lucky as to be born in the United States or endure a laborious and sometimes yearslong application process. There are discernible indicators in both processes that demonstrate an individual is prepared and deserving of the right to vote.
A person born in the United States has lived and grown in that country. He or she has gone through the government-mandated educational system and complied with the laws of this country for his or her entire lives. They have fulfilled their responsibilities through compliance and, in the case of some, hardship brought upon by our laws.
Individuals who obtain citizenship have demonstrated their readiness to undertake substantial obligations and sacrifices to integrate into a foreign nation. They have sworn allegiance to a new nation after navigating a complex legal system, and many have become proficient in a foreign language.
Nothing of the sort applies to noncitizens. There are undoubtedly many noncitizens loyal to this country, but they, like everyone else, must undergo the same process to demonstrate that they have earned the right to vote. It is inequitable to accord equal weight to the votes of transient individuals who enter the country for economic purposes, return their funds to their country of origin, or who are mere public charges, in comparison to those who have sworn allegiance to the United States and who have gone through the process to become a citizen.
Through the news, we tragically witness the disloyal individuals who come here and commit heinous acts daily. Migrants assaulting police officers, MS-13 gangs wreaking havoc on the population, migrants stabbing innocent people in Georgia. These tragedies have become routine occurrences. Should these individuals, whose sole intention is to cause harm or act selfishly, be permitted to vote? Undoubtedly not.
Should individuals who immigrate in pursuit of economic prosperity gain the right to vote? Eventually, but only after enduring the same trials and tribulations that each and every American has also endured.
The foundation of the United States is immigration. Each of us is an immigrant in some capacity. Our right to vote has been acquired through either our unwavering allegiance to the United States or our successful completion of the trials and systems established by the country. If an individual claims your vote lacks significance, you should explain the arduous journey you undertook to earn that privilege and the actions you undertook as a citizen. It just might persuade someone to reconsider their position.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., has a right to be a tad confused. The senator noted the matter-of-fact coverage by The New York Times of Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan to send troops to New York City to crack down on crime. Cotton posted a “hmmm” note that simply read: “Sending in the troops to help restore law and order…” His point was that, roughly four years ago, the newspaper publicly denounced him after running his opinion piece calling for the use of national guard troops to quell violent riots in Washington.
The Cotton column led to editors being forced out after public confessions and recriminations. Now, after Democratic politicians actually ordered such a deployment, the Times has offered little more than a journalistic shrug.
Hochul announced she will be deploying 750 members of the National Guard to New York City’s subway system to assist the New York Police Department (NYPD) in the crackdown on crime, including bag searches at the entrances of busy train stations.
Mara Gay of the New York Times then ran a story titled “The National Guard May Make Riders Feel Safer.” This is the same Mara Gay who was part of the campaign against Cotton and posted a tweet saying “Running this puts black people in danger. And other Americans standing up for our humanity and democracy.”
I have previously written on the hypocrisy of the Times in how it has handled the Cotton affair. The column itself was historically accurate. Indeed, critics never explained what was historically false (or outside the range of permissible interpretation) in the column. Moreover, writers Taylor Lorenz, Caity Weaver, Sheera Frankel, Jacey Fortin, and others said that such columns put black reporters in danger and condemned publishing Cotton’s viewpoint.
In a breathtaking surrender, the newspaper apologized and not only promised an investigation in how such an opposing view could find itself on its pages but promised to reduce the number of editorials in the future:
“We’ve examined the piece and the process leading up to its publication. This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards. As a result, we’re planning to examine both short term and long term changes, to include expanding our fact-checking operation and reduction the number of op-eds we publish.”
The sacking of Bennet had its intended effect. Writers and columnists with opposing or critical views were soon forced off newspapers around the country, including at the New York Times.
Editor Adam Rubenstein was also forced out at the paper and recently wrote a scathing account of the bizarre environment within the paper. The writers have condemned the “both sideism” of allowing conservative viewpoints in the newspaper and insisted that Cotton and others must be banned as favoring potential violent actions against protesters. Yet, the newspaper has published people with anti-free speech and violent viewpoints in the last year. While the New York Times stands by its declaration that Cotton should never have been published, it had no problem in publishing “Beijing’s enforcer” in Hong Kong as Regina Ip mocked freedom protesters who were being beaten and arrested by the government.
Indeed, just before the anniversary of the Cotton controversy, the New York Times published a column by University of Rhode Island professor Erik Loomis, who brushed off the murder of a conservative protester and said that he saw “nothing wrong” with such acts of violence. Loomis’ article on “Why The Amazon Workers Never Stood A Chance” did not include his earlier violent rationalization. It was in my view a worthy and interesting column for publication. So was Cotton’s column.
While many today still claim that the protests around the White House were “entirely peaceful” and there was no “attack on the White House,” that claim is demonstrably false. As I discussed in my testimony to Congress, there was in fact an exceptionally high number of officers injured over the course of days of protests around the White House. In addition to a reported 150 officers injured (including at least 49 Park Police officers around the White House), protesters caused extensive property damage including the torching of a historic structure and the attempted arson of St. John’s. The threat was so great that Trump had to be moved into the bunker because the Secret Service feared a breach of security around the White House.
Notably, later during the January 6th riot, there were no recriminations for the use of the same fencing and national guard troops to protect the Capitol, albeit too late to have prevented the initial riot.
So now it is a Democratic leader who is not just calling for the use of troops but actually deploying them in New York City. It is part of an effort by many Democrats to change course on crime and immigration before the 2024 election after years of criminal law reforms and sanctuary city policies.
What is clear from the Times coverage is that there is still no sense of compulsion at the newsroom to be consistent or even self-aware. Outrage remains entirely selective and political. There is no hashtag campaign by writers or repeating the same line that “running this put Black @nytimes staff in danger.”
The selective outrage directed at Sen. Cotton and the termination of editors at the newspaper were troubling enough. However, what is even more troubling is the unwillingness of the paper to apologize to Sen. Cotton for this hypocritical and unfair treatment.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is expected to visit former President Donald Trump at his Florida home of Mar-a-Lago on Friday but is not scheduled to meet with President Biden or visit the White House during his trip courting potential foreign policy in the U.S. The visit was first reported last week by The New York Times.
Orbán’s trip to the U.S. comes without an invitation from the White House, according to The Guardian. The Hungarian prime minister is expected to speak at a panel with the leader of the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation on Thursday before heading to Trump’s West Palm Beach estate. Orbán, who has been in office since 2010, has promoted what he calls “illiberal democracy” and has been criticized by international observers, including the U.S. State Department, for leading an increasingly autocratic system in Hungary, including allegations that he has rolled back minority rights, seized control of the judiciary and media and manipulated the country’s election system to remain in power, according to The Associated Press.
A Trump campaign spokesman responded to criticism about Orbán’s visit in a statement to Fox News Digital on Thursday.
“There’s only one candidate in the race who has been endorsed by Vladimir Putin– Crooked Joe Biden. That’s because he knows a Biden presidency will make America weak and jeopardize our standing on the world stage,” the spokesman said.
President Donald Trump, left, shakes hands with Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, at the West Wing of the White House in Washington, D.C., on May 13, 2019. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez questioned in a 2023 op-ed, “Why is the Biden administration funding agitation against Hungary, a NATO ally with a pro-American population?” As he put it, “Hungary may sit strategically at the crossroads of Europe, but what irritates the liberals in the White House is that its government stands up for Western values.”
Some American conservative commentators have championed Orbán for standing against the European Union on mass migration and vowing border security. In what some on the right celebrate as protecting family values, Orbán exempted women with four children from paying income tax for life in 2019, the BBC reported.
Orbán and Trump have long been allies, and Trump regularly praises the right-wing populist politician in his campaign speeches. The two met in August 2022 at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club when Orbán traveled to the U.S. to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Texas.
President Donald Trump, right, speaks to the media during a meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on May 13, 2019. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
In April 2023, when charges were filed in the first of Trump’s four criminal cases, Orbán posted a message of support for Trump urging him to “keep on fighting.” Trump said in early 2022 that he was giving his “complete support and endorsement” to Orbán’s re-election campaign that year.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, right, attends the annual Economic Season opening event in Budapest, Hungary on Monday. (Arpad Kurucz/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Amid some concern that Orbán is lobbying the U.S. on behalf of Russia, Katalin Cseh, a member of the European Parliament representing Hungary’s opposition Momentum party, told The Guardian, “If Trump really was the China hawk he claims to be, he would be grilling Orbán about cozying up to Beijing.”
“But it seems Trump is more interested in cozying up to authoritarians himself,” she said, according to the outlet, adding that “they could even be swapping notes on how to undermine NATO to suit Putin’s interests.”
The trip comes as Sweden on Thursday formally joined NATO, ending decades of post-World War II neutrality following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine despite objections from NATO members Turkey and Hungary. Orbán earlier this year said in a speech that he would welcome a Trump return to the White House to “make peace here in the eastern half of Europe.”
The U.S. ambassador in Budapest, David Pressman, however, surmised in an interview with The Guardian earlier this year that the Hungarian government was pursuing a “fantasy” foreign policy.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Danielle Wallace is a reporter for Fox News Digital covering politics, crime, police and more. Story tips can be sent to danielle.wallace@fox.com and on Twitter: @danimwallace.
Biden’s State of the Union address, filled with lies and gaslighting, was no surprise to people paying attention. How many people will ignore the truth right in front of them and buy into his political rhetoric? In truth, Biden and the Democrats are the real threat to our Constitutional Republic that oversees our democracy.
President Trump RIPS Old Joe at SOTU: He Looks So Angry when He’s Talking, Which Is a Trait of People Who Know They Are “Losing It”
By Jim Hoft March 7, 2024
play-by-playcomment tonight during Joe Biden’s SOTU Address. TGP’s Jordan Conradson is posting Trump’s comments tonight here. Trump called out the angry old man speaking tonight.
President Trump: He looks so angry when he’s talking, which is a trait of people who know they are “losing it.” The anger and shouting is not helpful to bringing our Country back together! Read More
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
With so many homeless veterans, Biden and the Democrats are focusing millions in tax dollars on the healthcare, feeding, and housing of the illegal immigrants coming across Bidens open borders.
Report: Biden Administration Considering Pulling Health Care from Veterans to Treat Illegal Aliens
By Richard Moorhead
Did you, or a family member, serve your country with the expectation of receiving the health care benefits you were promised? Sorry, illegal aliens apparently come first in President Joe Biden’s America. The Biden administration reportedly is considering diverting doctors from the Department of Veterans Affairs to treat the massive inflow of illegal aliens expected at the southern border this spring and summer. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Top Stories • Donald Trump Will Take on Pro-Abortion Radical Joe Biden • Nikki Haley Suspends Her Campaign After Super Tuesday Losses • Joe Biden Will Lie About Abortion in His State of the Union • Planned Parenthood Sold Aborted Baby Parts in Exchange for Intellectual Property
More Pro-Life News • Hundreds of Pro-Life People Protest University’s Satanic Abortion Statue • Who Knows How Many Women Will be Injured or Killed Now That Walgreens and CVS Sell Abortion Drugs • Other Nations May Follow France, Make Killing Babies in Abortions a Constitutional Right • Killing Unborn Human Beings is Wrong, Whether It’s Abortion or IVF • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2024 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
The truth about transgenderism is coming out. On Monday, Michael Shellenberger released a multitude of internal files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) that “prove that the practice of transgender medicine is neither scientific nor medical.” WPATH has been accepted by the political, cultural, and medical establishments as the authority on transgenderism, but what its members say in private is not the narrative they sell to the public.
Instead of the rigorous, careful, evidence-based medicine that champions of “gender-affirming care” claim to practice, the WPATH files show doctors who are making it up as they go along, smashing through guardrails even though they know that the children they are chemically and surgically altering cannot really give informed consent. And people are noticing.
No wonder the transgender ideologues are worried. The public has proven more resistant than they expected, especially regarding radical policies such as putting men in women’s prisons and girls’ locker rooms, let alone sexually mutilating and sterilizing children. And transgender activists and their allies have no response except to repeat their same failed arguments, just louder.
Consider a recent opinion piece in the New England Journal of Medicine by Michael R. Ulrich, a Boston University professor of law and public health who is also affiliated with Ibram X. Kendi’s scandal-plagued Center for Antiracist Research. Ulrich argues that restrictions on transitioning children are part of a broader right-wing culture war restricting and regulating medicine. There is a lot wrong with this assertion, but the fundamental problem is that so-called gender-affirming care is not medicine.
From puberty blockers to hormones to surgeries, transition is never medically necessary. Transitioning does not cure any disease or correct any physical ailment or injury. Rather, the point of medicalized transition is to disrupt and destroy the normal functioning of healthy bodies.
Ulrich tries to assuage concerns over these procedures by comparing them to “Pediatric chemotherapy and radiation,” which also “have lasting effects on growth development and reproductive capabilities.” Well, yes, but cancer kills people, which is why we are willing to accept serious side effects to treat it — and even then, doctors and patients have to balance the risks of the disease against the risks of treatment. In contrast, there is no physical risk from not receiving “gender-affirming care,” whereas, as the WPATH files show, there is significant, potentially lethal, risks from puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transition surgeries.
This is why the argument for transition always comes down to encouraging people, especially children, to take themselves hostage by threatening suicide. The only harm that can come from not transitioning is self-harm. And so, Ulrich deploys the suicide threats early and often, writing that “it is not hyperbole to say that lives are at risk in states pursuing these bans on needed care.” Ulrich offers no real evidence to back this claim up. He simply presumes that the “high rates of suicide, suicide attempts, and suicidal ideation among transgender young people” would be reduced with affirmation and medical transition.
Ulrich cites just one study as “evidence showing the effectiveness of gender-affirming care in reducing depression, anxiety, and suicide attempts.” But, despite hype to the contrary, that study showed no such thing. Rather, as Jesse Singal explained after it was published in 2022, “the kids who took puberty blockers or hormones experienced no statistically significant mental health improvement during the study. The claim that they did improve, which was presented to the public in the study itself, in publicity materials, and on social media (repeatedly) by one of the authors, is false” (emphasis in original).
No Evidence Regarding Suicide
There is no good evidence that transition prevents suicide, especially for children. Those who identify as trans do have an elevated risk of suicide (though this tends to be exaggerated by activists), but this is best explained by trans-identified individuals also having a much higher rate of mental health problems and trauma — and it doesn’t help to add to these underlying issues the lie that they were somehow born in the wrong body.
This extraordinary claim — that some children are born into the wrong bodies, and therefore must be chemically and surgically reshaped into a facsimile of the opposite sex — is medically unsupported. It is ideological and sexual fantasy masquerading as medicine. There is no good evidence to support transitioning children because gender ideology is just that, an ideology masquerading as medicine. The reality of human nature does not change, even though much of the medical establishment, such as the NEJM, was shamefully eager to capitulate to a small number of aggressive activists.
Rein in the Industry
Therefore, it is not only reasonable, but imperative, for legislators to rein in the transgender industry, and especially to stop the “transitioning” of children. Ulrich and other activists can fulminate about right-wing conspiracies, but it is right and just to ban the surgical and chemical mutilation of children. Many states have done so, thereby proving that gender ideology will not inevitably triumph and claim our children for its own.
This does not mean the fight is over. Indeed, we should expect gender ideologues to become more aggressive as their losses pile up. They thought time would be on their side, and that new research would vindicate them. But their time is running out, and the continued lack of evidence for “gender-affirming care” is pushing them to increasingly brazen lies and distortions as they attempt to justify their collapsing position. And they are also becoming more authoritarian in the places and institutions they do control, as they attempt to impose transgender dogma on the rest of us.
Thus, those opposed to gender ideology must not get cocky. Trans activists and their allies will keep fighting to the bitter end, especially those who have staked their reputations, livelihoods, and self-respect on radical gender ideology. Nonetheless, the end can now be envisioned, even if much work remains to achieve it.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
President Joe Biden won most of the delegates up for grabs in the Democrat presidential primaries on Super Tuesday, but the sizable number of votes cast against him in favor of an “uncommitted” option confirm how much sway the loudest, most radical wings of the party have.
Anti-Israel Democrats launched a campaign to vote “uncommitted” or “no preference” (casting a vote for no candidate) out of frustration that Biden’s position toward Israel is insufficiently supportive of Hamas-run Gaza. After gaining traction in Michigan last week, the protest vote — which seeks to use “uncommitted” Democrat votes to call for Biden to oppose Israel’s military response following the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attacks — won close to 19 percent of Democrat primary voters in Minnesota and 12.7 percent in North Carolina, according to the Associated Press. The campaign pulled single-digit percentages of voters in states including Alabama, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Tennessee.
“Democrats are really frustrated,” said Jaylani Hussein, co-chair of Uncommitted Vote Minnesota, on ABC News. “Now it’s starting to cost him immensely.”
“The policy of this war is untenable and it will have consequences, not only for down-ballots but hopefully also in the upcoming election,” he added. “We understand the consequences of leaving the party that we voted for, or the president that we voted for.”
Groups like Abandon Biden, formed by Muslim Americans calling Israel’s response against Hamas a “genocide,” and Our Revolution, which sprung up from Bernie Sanders’ failed 2016 presidential campaign, are supporting the effort. Last Tuesday, “uncommitted” won more than 13 percent of Michigan Democrats.
“The ‘Vote Uncommitted’ movement is growing, and voters continue to make themselves heard,” Our Revolution Director Joseph Geevarghese wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, Tuesday. “There is no unconditional support for President Biden, not without an unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza.”
The Democratic Socialists of America endorsed the “uncommitted” effort March 3. The group is planning phone banks in support and posted Tuesday night that they have “big pushes coming up in WA, WI and beyond.”
Vice President Kamala Harris called for a ceasefire Sunday, but this was apparently not enough to win over the anti-Israel groups. Meanwhile Democrat and known antisemite Rep. Ilhan Omar, who represents Minnesota where the movement gained the most, has been attacking Biden’s policy on the conflict.
Biden’s unpopularity Super Tuesday went even beyond the mainland. He lost the primary in American Samoa to self-described entrepreneur Jason Palmer, who won with 56 percent, according to CNN.
“We are not supporting Donald Trump,” Hussein said. “As far as the consequences of having President Trump, that’s a reality that we’re willing to accept.”
Logan Washburn is studying politics and journalism at Hillsdale College. He serves as associate editor for the school paper, The Collegian, served as editorial assistant for Christopher Rufo, and has bylines in publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller.
Rep. Adam Schiff, whom colleagues censured for fomenting the Russia hoax, practically won Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat Tuesday night. Schiff captured the Democrat nomination in the deep-blue state and will face Republican baseball star Steve Garvey in the fall general.
Corporate media coverage of Schiff’s part in the years-long effort to impeach former President Donald Trump over deep-state conspiracies ignored his repeat abuses of power. They also ignored Schiff’s use of his intelligence committee chairmanship to peddle lies about Democrats’ political opponents.
To the New York Times, Schiff is “the chief tormentor of former President Donald J. Trump.” To Politico, Schiff is “a scourge of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.” To Axios, Schiff is simply a “Top Trump foe.”
Schiff is the Democrat conspiracy theorist who falsely claimed he had evidence of treasonous Russia collusion when he did not. Democrat voters in California expected to reward the conspiracy theorist with a Senate seat. https://t.co/95Zob52kw1
Republican North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, on the other hand, may have grounds to sue MSNBC and Slate for defamation over calling him a “Holocaust denier.”
The network’s Joy Reid tossed out the moniker following Robinson’s Tuesday night win in his state’s GOP gubernatorial primary when she introduced North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper for an interview. Slate went with the headline — now apparently altered — “Mark Robinson: North Carolina Republican primary for governor goes to a Holocaust denier.”
Below is all the evidence the Slate article presents to frame the gubernatorial nominee as a denier of the Holocaust:
The Holocaust “There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered. There is also a REASON those same liberals DO NOT FILL the airwaves with programs about the Communist and the 100+ million PEOPLE they murdered throughout the 20th century.”
(He also, in a 2014 post, quoted Hitler without context.)
The quote from Adolf Hitler comes from The New Republic, which linked two Facebookposts to claim Robinson “has minimized the horrors of the Holocaust.” Neither, however, comes anywhere close to Holocaust denial.
“We often speak of the ‘appeasement’ of Hitler,” Robinson wrote in one. “But the biggest ‘appeasement’ of ALL TIME is how we turned a blind eye to the clear and present danger of MARXISM.”
“It is EXTREMELY distressing that many well meaning and intelligent people are so focused on long dead Hitler while the living political dissidents of Stalin are currently fighting to destroy our REPUBLIC,” Robinson wrote in the other.
The press can have their opinions about Robinson’s eccentricity, but to call him a Holocaust denier is exceedingly dishonest.
In high contrast, Rachel Maddow positively described conspiracy theorist Schiff as a “major, major player in Trump impeachments and investigations” when MSNBC called the Senate primary for the California congressman.
BREAKING: NBC News projects Democratic congressman Adam Schiff will advance to the general election in the hotly contested California Senate race pic.twitter.com/T4aD6J1Jdd
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
By a strange process of transformation, Joe Biden has become Jimmy Carter. Everything he touches turns into a crisis. Like Carter, Biden has presided over an inflationary economy, spiking interest rates, shortages of essential goods, and danger and disaster abroad.
Carter offered the world Christian meekness and no “inordinate fear of communism.” The world responded with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the agonizing hostage crisis in Iran.
Biden’s self-inflicted rout from Afghanistan was followed by the release of $6 billion to the religious mafia that rules Iran. In return, the Iranian regime has encouraged its proxies to kill American soldiers and attack American warships.
The most important way in which Biden resembles Carter is this: Voters have made up their minds about him. They think he’s a loser, and they want him gone. That’s true even of Democrats, a majority of whom think he’s too old and dotty to stick around for a second term. Biden is a loser.
If 2024 were a normal presidential election, Donald Trump would beat him like a drum. Nikki Haley would beat him. Spongebob Squarepants would beat him.
Yet these are not normal times, and there’s a high degree of probability that Biden will be re-elected. Unlike Carter, who really was the Democratic front man, Biden is a sock puppet for an institutional conglomerate that exercises enormous influence over our national politics, our government, and our culture.
The elites who inhabit these institutions like to speak of the arrangement as “Our Democracy,” which roughly translates into “given our obvious moral and intellectual superiority, we must be allowed to govern in perpetuity.” They have the tools to make it happen, too — wearing the appropriate masks and disguises, they often impersonate the popular will.
I’m not talking about Trump’s complaint that he was robbed at the polls in 2020, a sterile controversy best passed over in silence. The options available to Our Democracy are, in reality, far more tentacular and oppressive than crude ballot-stuffing. It can, for example, take a lie and make it echo and thunder for years, like the half-million news articles published about Trump’s supposed criminal collusion with Russia. Or it can take the truth and bury it so deep that it has suffocated to death by the time some determined soul unearths it — think Hunter Biden.
Well, here is a partial roster of the institutions Our Democracy controls at the moment: the White House, half of Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the scientific establishment and expert class in general, the old prestige media, the new digital media (minus Twitter/X), the universities, the arts and entertainment world, and famous corporations from Coca-Cola to Nike. When these gigantic entities synchronize their voices, the chorus is so deafening little else can be heard within the information sphere. And when they withdraw their attention — as they have from Americans left behind in Afghanistan or taken hostage by Hamas — it’s as if it never happened.
What does Our Democracy want? Its representatives spout magnificent nonsense about justice, diversity, and inclusion. They comprise the college of cardinals of the church of identity and ecology, and are therefore authorized to smite you, as an infidel, with their righteous condemnations.
But the soul of Our Democracy is will to power. The point of control is control. The measure of success is the number of Americans placed in a position of dependence to the elite class. More immediately, the objective is the permanent dominance of the Democratic Party, political home and bastion of that class.
Thus when Hunter Biden, son of the Democratic presidential candidate, abandoned a laptop crammed with all sorts of scandalous material, Our Democracy conscripted 51 intelligence executives, who surely knew better, to dismiss it all as a Russian “hack.” And behold, there was no laptop.
And when Trump, a Republican president, speculated about COVID-19 having started with a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China, Our Democracy dragooned five scientists, several of whom had speculated along the same lines as Trump, to author a “study” contradicting him and themselves. Suddenly, blaming China betrayed a racist predisposition. Opposition to Our Democracy can never be legitimate. Consequently, Trump, the likely Republican candidate, must always be a moral impossibility — a “dictator,” an “authoritarian,” a Mussolini from the fascist heartland of Queens.
Listen to The New York Times, Atlantic, Politico: Trump isn’t merely a bad candidate — he’s beyond the pale. The harsher the attacks, however, the higher Trump seems to climb: to the horror of the elites, he’s presently trouncing Biden in most opinion polls.
So he must be disposed of somehow. He must be prosecuted in heavily Democratic venues and indicted, not once or twice but 91 times. And just in case, his name must be removed from the ballot: the ideal election under Our Democracy is a choice of one.
Fear and loathing of Trump is a defining feature of elite sensibility, but any politician who threatens Biden’s re-election will get the same treatment. Robert Kennedy, Jr., who is making a third-party bid, has been called “vile” and “racist.” The No Labels group, which is considering fielding a candidate, has been accused of “brain-breaking logic” that promotes “less democracy.”
Nikki Haley has so far been spared because she is thought to weaken Trump. The moment she endangers Biden, we can be sure that The New York Times will reveal her participation in a sex trafficking ring or possibly ritual cannibalism.
Nobody is so insignificant as to avoid the tentacles of the conglomerate.
Only in this sense is Our Democracy truly democratic: all of us, high and low, are given our marching orders, which we defy at our peril. Parents of schoolchildren who dissented from the identity creed have been treated like domestic terrorists. Participants at the pro-Trump Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol building were prosecuted as subversives and punished with long prison sentences. Other critics have been subjected to harassment from federal agencies like the IRS and the FBI. A convoluted censorship apparatus was erected at the start of the pandemic, eventually giving the White House control over what was allowed to be said on all the major digital platforms.
President Biden appears in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 28. Biden took credit for declining crime rates in parts of the U.S. as he seeks to reverse potentially damaging public perceptions that violence and lawlessness are on the rise. (Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The FBI, faithful servant of the system, stood guard over forbidden speech: unorthodox opinions about the virus at first, but soon, inevitably, the ban spread to topics that favored Trump and the Republicans, identity heresy, Ukraine war criticism, mockery of the Biden administration — pretty much everything the First Amendment was enacted to protect.
Censorship bureaucrats devised a bizarre jargon of control: “misinformation” meant error, “disinformation” meant deliberate falsehood, and “malinformation” was truth Our Democracy found unacceptable.
Without warrant or warning, millions of posts by ordinary Americans were taken down. Some of those posters were permanently silenced. Trumpist websites were arbitrarily “deplatformed.” Nothing like it had been seen in our country since John Adams rubbed his hands with glee over the Alien and Sedition Acts.
One might have expected members of the entity formerly known as “the press” to investigate the abuses and raise the alarm. That idea is too retro for words, literally.
Today, the great organs of the news media are happy to serve as attack dogs of the elite class and obedient apologists of institutional power. Our Democracy aims to dominate the information sphere — as things now stand, it can speak loudly to everyone, while its opponents, shoved into an informational ghetto, speak mostly to themselves.
This is the array of forces standing behind the doddering, stupefied figure of Joe Biden, eager to foist him on American voters. Our Democracy is the true candidate and ultimate question to be settled by the 2024 election. It is battling mightily, with every weapon available, to destroy Trump and other obstacles to its continued rule. Sooner or later, I imagine, it will succeed.
The wisdom of Ecclesiastes tells us that the fight does not go to the strong — but a political analyst would be crazy to bet any other way. Is it possible to identify a glimmer of optimism somewhere in this bleak landscape?
I can think of two strategic vulnerabilities that should trouble Our Democracy. One is the massive unpopularity of its policy positions. Large majorities of Americans of all races and political leanings question the sanity of open borders, for example, and believe that merit rather than grievance should determine outcomes.
If the 2024 election is fought on the merits of the case, the Democrats lose big. The second vulnerability is Biden’s obvious and extraordinary unfitness to stay on as president. The report by Special Counsel Robert Hur, which characterized the president as “an elderly man with poor memory,” was official confirmation of what we can plainly see with our own eyes. Old age is terminal: there’s no fixing Biden, and there’s no clear way out of this mess for the Democrats. If he clings to power, he will continue to decline physically and politically, opening the door to a Republican victory in 2024 — in the person, it may be, of the dreaded Trump.
If Biden turns down a second term at this late hour, his vice president, Kamala Harris, would be the natural heir to the party leadership, but she’s even more unpopular than he is. With Harris as candidate, defeat would be virtually certain. If a free-for-all erupts over the top spot, either because Biden has offered to abdicate or because the paladins of Our Democracy wish to shove him aside, the internal trauma to the Democratic Party would probably prove fatal, regardless of who the winner might be.
The Democratic establishment is solid but brittle. Once it crumbles, the agents of chaos will be in command, as they have been for some time in the Republican Party.
To my mind, these are low-probability events, as the elites realize how much they stand to lose and will huddle in a conformist herd for protection. Fortunately, however, history is not a mathematical proposition — and one can always hope.
Progressive groups are renewing calls to expand the number of seats on the U.S. Supreme Court after the court’s ruling to prevent Colorado from removing former President Donald Trump from the ballot. The justices unanimously ruled to overturn the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision that barred Trump from the Republican primary ballot and cited the Constitution’s anti-insurrectionist clause.
The progressive judicial groups Demand Justice and Women’s March posted calls on X to “expand the court” after the ruling. Carrie Severino, president of the conservative group JCN, criticized the calls in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
“Right on cue, left-wing dark money groups are calling for court-packing when they get a decision they don’t like (including one that was unanimous on the judgment),” Severino said.
“It’s telling that, to change this decision, they would have to add ten Justices, and it suggests they do not think that even Justices [Sonia] Sotomayor, [Elana] Kagan, and [Ketanji Brown] Jackson are liberal enough for them. It shows how radical and out of touch these groups are and how reflexively partisan a judge would have to be to meet their standards.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced plans Wednesday to send the National Guard to the New York City subway system to help police search passengers’ bags for weapons, following a series of high-profile crimes on city trains. Hochul, a Democrat, said she will deploy 750 members of the National Guard to the subways to assist the New York Police Department with bag searches at entrances to busy train stations. Her move comes a day after NYC Mayor Eric Adams, also a Democrat, announced plans Tuesday to resume random bag searches among commuters and to deploy more police officers on the city’s trains and station platforms.
“For people who are thinking about bringing a gun or knife on the subway, at least this creates a deterrent effect. They might be thinking, ‘You know what, it just may just not be worth it because I listened to the mayor and I listened to the governor and they have a lot more people who are going to be checking my bags,'” Hochul said at a news conference in New York City.
“They might be thinking??????”
The move came as part of a larger effort from the governor’s office to address crime in the subway, which included a legislative proposal to ban people from trains if they are convicted of assaulting a subway passenger and the installation of cameras in conductor cabins to protect transit workers.
The deployment of the National Guard would bolster an enhanced presence of NYPD officers in the subway system. The governor said she will also send 250 state troopers and police officers for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that oversees the city’s transit system, to help with the bag searches.
Overall, crime has dropped in New York City since a spike during the COVID-19 pandemic, and killings are down on the subway system. But rare fatal shootings and shovings on the subway can put residents on edge. Just last week, a passenger slashed a subway conductor in the neck, delaying trains.
Police in New York have long conducted random bag checks at subway entrances, though passengers are free to refuse and leave the station, raising questions of whether the searches are an effective policing tactic in a subway system that serves over 3 million riders per day.
“We know people feel unsafe,” the mayor said at his Tuesday press conference. “I’m on the subway system and I speak with riders. They say, ‘Eric, nothing makes us feel safer than seeing that officer at the token booth, walking through the system, walking through the trains,’ and that is what we want our officers to do.”
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Critics of “book bans” tend to speak as though no book chosen by a school librarian is ever inappropriate for kids. That’s preposterous on its face. (Photo: Jose Luis Pelaez Inc./Digital Vision/Getty Images)
Our English teachers taught us to use extreme caution before writing a word such as “always” or “never.”
Such totalizing words are rarely accurate, since most principles have exceptions. But you won’t see this advice applied by critics of “book bans,” who tend to speak as though no book chosen by a school librarian is ever inappropriate for kids.
My colleagues at The Heritage Foundation found that about three-fourths of books on lists of “banned books” are actually still in the libraries where the books were challenged. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Many of the rest are indeed inappropriate for children. They contain “images of people engaged in sex acts or graphic descriptions of those acts.” The material is so graphic, in fact, that it’s censored on broadcasts to avoid Federal Communications Commission fines. Moreover, movies and TV shows have ratings. Anyway, none of the books is “banned.” Kids generally can bring their own copies to school or buy them at a bookstore.
Since 1982, the Supreme Court has made it clear that while books may not be removed from school libraries to suppress ideas, there are legitimate reasons to remove books. Those reasons include when a book is obscene in general or is obscene as to minors, and when a book is inappropriate for the age, grade, or developmental level of students. When a book is inappropriate for the curriculum, it also can be removed from classrooms.
That point should be obvious. After all, the Supreme Court also has permitted censorship of school newspapers. The high court also has permitted punishment of students who held a banner reading “bong hits for Jesus.” In that case, the school argued successfully that it could in fact suppress an idea if that idea were about promoting the use of illegal drugs.
And the court has permitted punishment of a student who used pervasively vulgar language at a school assembly.
Adults really do, it turns out, have a role in determining what expression is acceptable for kids at school. And some of the same schools that resist book challenges have speech codes. They unconstitutionally ban “hate speech” and “misgendering,” but if the same language is in a book, they think nobody ought to challenge it.
Next week, I will be making these points at a private school, where “book banning” is the conference topic. I will note that the school’s libraries use the term “age-appropriate” to describe their book curation. Do librarians never make mistakes?
I also will tell the students that a complete opposition to book challenges is unlikely to express their true position.
Do the kids really think they were ready for the sexual, violent, gory, or scary content of any book when they were in the first grade? Do they think their younger siblings should be able to access all of that at school?
Do the kids really think it would be appropriate for the school librarian to advertise to first graders a book making the case against the existence of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy?
More likely, kids still believe that preserving innocence is one of their values. That argument should hold for most adults, too.
Probably no one is arguing that every challenged book is inappropriate for kids. Just as librarians can err in adding a book to the library, schools can err in removing them. The key is to develop a review process that puts the most knowledgeable people in charge—parents and, secondarily, teachers know the kids best—and makes the fewest mistakes.
For those critics of “book bans” who are unwilling to admit that even one book could ever be bad enough to remove from a school library, it’s time to mature and acknowledge that unlike the printed page, life is not black and white. Then we can have the important discussion of how to properly protect kids.
Below is my column in USA Today on the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court to reject the disqualification of former president Donald Trump from the 2024 election. Some Democrats are now seeking to resume the effort through Congress to prevent voters from being able to vote for the leading candidate for the presidency.
Here is the column:
“Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos.” Those words from the Supreme Court in its Trump v. Anderson ruling on Monday put an end to the effort of Democratic secretaries of state to engage in ballot cleansing by removing former President Donald Trump from the 2024 election. The court’s decision was one of the most important and impactful moments in its history.
During the first Trump impeachment in 2019, I cautioned Democrats not to toss aside constitutional standards out of their hatred for the president. I quoted from the play “A Man For All Seasons,” when Sir Thomas More is told by his son-in-law that he would “cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?” More responded, “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?”
As More described England, the United States also is “planted thick with laws, from coast to coast.” The nation’s highest court on Monday decided to leave them standing.
After months of activists and experts calling for the court to allow ballot cleansing by individual states, the justices refused. Figures like Harvard professor Laurence Tribe had insisted that the legal theory allowing Trump’s removal from ballots was “unassailable” and rejected opposing positions as “absurd.” Many news outlets posted the analysis of former federal court Judge J. Michael Luttig, who also called the theory “unassailable” and denounced the arguments against disqualification as “revealing, fatuous, and politically and constitutionally cynical.” He predicted that the court would simply affirm the Colorado Supreme Court.
Democratic members of Congress further pushed the narrative that only judicial activists and MAGA justices would oppose disqualification. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., declared: “This is their opportunity to behave like real Supreme Court justices.”
Well, the court rejected that “unassailable” theory in a unanimous decision. While Tribe’s view was repeated with little contradiction on many networks and newspapers for months, it failed to garner a single vote from either the left or the right of the court.
Things are not going well for those seeking to remake the nation. In 2020, Harvard professor Michael Klarman warned that all of the plans to change the country were ultimately dependent on packing the court. With the 2020 election, he stated that Democrats could change the election system to guarantee Republicans “will never win another election.”
However, Klarman conceded that “the Supreme Court could strike down everything I just described,” so the court itself had to be changed.
Now that the three progressive justices have joined their conservative colleagues in ruling for Trump, they apparently also will have to go. Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann declared that “the Supreme Court has betrayed democracy. Its members including Jackson, Kagan and Sotomayor have proved themselves inept at reading comprehension. And collectively the ‘court’ has shown itself to be corrupt and illegitimate. It must be dissolved.”
The problem for many on the left is that the unanimous decision shattered the narrative repeated for months that Colorado would be reversed because the conservative justices would robotically protect Trump (despite the fact that they have repeatedly ruled against Trump and his policies). Now, by Rep. Raskin’s measure, Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor are no longer acting as “real Supreme Court justices.”
Supreme Court transcended ideological divisions
The fact is that the Supreme Court justices have proved, again, that they are precisely the “real Supreme Court justices” that the Founding Fathers envisioned. The court was created to be able to transcend our divisions and politics. On Monday, a court sharply divided along ideological grounds showed the nation that it could speak with one voice. In doing so, it spoke to the things that bind us to each other, including an article of faith in our Constitution that defines us all.
In the news media and in universities, there is a persistent message that the court and the Constitution are the problem. In a New York Times column, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” law professors Ryan Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for the Constitution to be “radically” altered to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”
Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks previously went on MSNBC to warn citizens not to become “slaves” to the Constitution and that the Constitution itself is now the problem for the country.
Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet and San Francisco State University political scientist Aaron Belkin even called upon President Joe Biden to defy rulings of the Supreme Court that he considers “mistaken” in the name of “popular constitutionalism.”
The lumberjack school of constitutional law is the rage on our campuses. Free from the obstructions of constitutional demands, activists (and a newly constituted court) could set about pursuing the devil as a nation of Ropers.
Supreme Court ruling provides moment of clarity
Despite the push of court packing and extreme interpretations of the law, most Americans continue to cling to America’s core institutions and constitutional values. For those reasons, this opinion could be one of the most significant in the court’s history, not because of what it did but what it would not allow to be done. It is a moment of clarity for a nation mired in rage politics. It was not just the opinion that brought that clarity but what followed the opinion.
A day after the unanimous ruling, millions of citizens will line up at polling places around the country to vote for their preferred candidates. It is their choice and privilege as citizens. They are also speaking with one voice. Not for a particular party or person, but as free people claiming their right to choose their own leaders.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter: @JonathanTurley
Below is my column in the New York Post on the expanding controversy surrounding the disqualification of Fani Willis and Nathan Wade. In today’s legislative hearing in Atlanta, counsel Ashleigh Merchant testified that cellphone records on one occasion show “pings” on Wade’s cellphone from his home to the vicinity of Willis’s home followed by a call to Willis and then hours of silence. The next morning, she claims, the data shows him going back to his home and texting Willis. It is only the latest example of how evidence against the two prosecutors is growing and possible explanations are dwindling in the case. The greatest problem is how these allegations are beginning to mirror those against the defendants being prosecuted by Willis and Wade.
Here is the column:
When Fani Willis ran against her former boss Paul Howard in 2020, she highlighted the experience that she would bring to the position.
Howard was embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal involving his relationship with women in his office.
Willis offered both experience and ethical leadership, including pledging repeatedly that “I will certainly not be choosing to date people that work under me.”
Willis is now accused of the wrong type of relevant experience.
She and her lead prosecutor are not just accused of having an intimate relationship, but they are accused of some of the same underlying conduct that they are prosecuting in the election interference case against former President Donald Trump and other defendants. That includes allegations of filing false statements with courts and even influencing witnesses.
This week, another witness came forward with an explosive new allegation against Willis. In the prior hearings in Atlanta, Nathan Wade was confronted with what appears to be false statements made to the court in his divorce case, false statements that he repeated under oath in disqualification testimony. For example, Wade was asked about his denial of “a sexual relationship during the time of his marriage and separation” up to and including May 30, 2023.
That would obviously include the sexual relationship with Willis in 2022 and possibly earlier. Wade, however, denied any such sexual relationship and said he confined the question to sexual relations meaning an affair “in the course of my marriage.” Of course, his marriage was ongoing even during the divorce and the question asked about any relationship up to May 2023.
Wade and Willis have also been contradicted in their testimony by various witnesses who said they lied about their intimate relationship starting after he was hired in 2022. That includes prior text messages in which Wade’s former partner and lawyer Terrence Bradley repeatedly told opposing counsel that he was “absolutely” sure that the relationship began much earlier.
A former close friend of Willis also said they were lying.
Now another prosecutor has come forward to say that Bradley also told her repeatedly and with complete clarity and certainty that Wade and Willis were involved long before his hiring. Those conversations allegedly occurred as late as January 2024 with Cindi Lee Yeager, a co-chief deputy district attorney for Cobb County.
What is even more alarming is Yeager’s account that she overheard Willis tell Bradley on the telephone that “they are coming after us. You don’t need to talk to them about anything about us.” If true, that call could raise questions of influencing potential witnesses.
Willis can legitimately point out that the calls was allegedly in September 2023, before Bradley was called as a witness and the current proceedings had started. However, it would indicate that Willis was aware that Bradley would be asked questions about past payments and relationships with him and his partner Wade.
If that seems loose, you should take a look at the case Willis brought against these defendants. Many of us have been critical of the overarching racketeering conspiracy alleged by Willis among the 18 defendants.
The false statement charges often dismiss plausible alternative interpretations or the paucity of evidence of intent.
The question is whether Willis or Wade had other communications indirectly or directly with Bradley.
His testimony was widely panned and he showed all of the spontaneity and comfort of a hostage video.
Willis is a powerful political figure in Atlanta and Bradley did everything short of faking his death to avoid assisting in her disqualification.
The odds are that Judge Scott McAfee is not inclined to hold additional hearings. He is ready to rule.
It is hard to imagine these two prosecutors continuing with so many allegations hanging over the case. They have placed their personal interests before their office and their case.
However, the standard for disqualification is murky. For Willis, the case has become a modern political tragedy a la movie classic “All the King’s Men,” about a reformer who became everything that he once denounced in the corruption of powerful figures.
In her combative testimony, Willis attacked the media, opposing counsel and the public for questioning her actions. She declared, “You’re confused. You think I’m on trial. These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020. I’m not on trial, no matter how hard you put me on trial.”
The question is whether the courts, prosecutors or bar officials will show the same vigor in pursuing these allegations against Wade and Willis that they have shown against their own defendants. If so, she could well find herself “on trial” as the allegations mount against her and her lead prosecutor.
Jonathan Turley is an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School.
Who says we can’t fix stupid? Now that Trump has pretty much clinched the GOP primary, many feel it’s time to move on against Biden in the General Election and then on to the White House so Trump can fix the problems caused by Biden and the Democrat’s stupid policies. Maybe we can “fix stupid”.
Trump Super Tuesday Victory Speech: Joe Biden Is the Worst President in the History of Our Country (VIDEO)
By Jim Hoft – March 5 2024
President Trump delivered a victory speech tonight at his Mar-a-Lago home after winning 15 of the Super Tuesday states. Nikki Haley squeaked off a victory in Vermont where they held an open primary in a far left socialist state. President Trump focused on the complete devastation of the Biden regime in his Mar-a-Lago speech. Read More…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Top Stories • Joe Biden’s State of the Union Will Exploit Disabled Babies to Promote Abortions Up to Birth • Indiana Abortions Drop to Near 0 as Abortion Ban Saves Thousands of Babies • Catholic Bishops Call for Prayer After France Makes Killing Babies in Abortions a “Right” • Biden Turned VA Clinics Into Abortion Centers, Now He’s Making the Policy Permanent
More Pro-Life News • New Documents Show Planned Parenthood Breaking Law to Sell Aborted Baby Parts to a University • I Was Told Abortion Drugs Wouldn’t Hurt Me. It Was a Lie • Pharmacists are Supposed to Sell Drugs That Heal Us, Not Abortion Pills That Kill Babies • Virginia Bill Legalizing Assisted Suicide Dies, Democrats Don’t Have Enough Votes • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
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West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner last month eviscerated the Big Brother censorship operation known as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
“When we have our own federal agencies lying to the American people, that’s the most insidious thing that we can do in elections,” the election integrity champion told officials from the FBI and CISA on a panel at the winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) in Washington, D.C., according to Wired’s Eric Geller. While Geller did his best to defend the federal agency — under the suggestive headline, “How a Right-Wing Controversy Could Sabotage US Election Security” — its history of censorship and election interference validate Warner’s concern.
The agency’s work, particularly the extracurricular business CISA has conducted in recent years, has been rightly criticized for its massive overreach. A report released last fall by the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government details just how CISA “Colluded With Big Tech And ‘Disinformation’ Partners To Censor Americans.”
“Although the investigation is ongoing, information obtained to date has revealed that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—an upstart agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—has facilitated the censorship of Americans directly and through third-party intermediaries,” the congressional report states.
The report goes on to assert that the shadowy agency has “metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.”
‘Platforms Have Got to Get More Comfortable With Gov’t’
Launched in 2018, CISA was supposed to be “an ancillary agency designed to protect ‘critical infrastructure’ and guard against cybersecurity threats,” the report notes. By 2020, the agency was “routinely” targeting what CISA officials claimed to be “disinformation” on social media. A year later, the agency had established a formal team devoted to what it decided was “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation,” the latter of which CISA defines as “information based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” In other words, factual information that is problematic to the Biden regime.
CISA’s parent agency DHS launched the much-ridiculed and ultimately disbanded “Disinformation Governance Board” in 2022, to streamline the work of colluding with social media providers to shut down speech the government didn’t like or found inconvenient.
A federal lawsuit filed by then-Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, now a U.S. senator, uncovered troubling conversations between the Biden administration and private companies about the pathways for removing information the government deemed false or misleading. A federal judge in a ruling last year barred the Biden administration from its censorship work, although the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the injunction when it took up the case.
Leaked documents obtained by The Intercept show that Microsoft executive and former DHS official Matt Masterson texted CISA director Jen Easterly in February 2022, saying “Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.”
But it seems Big Tech was getting pretty comfortable with the Biden administration’s puppet enforcer. The Intercept report showed, among other alarming revelations, that Facebook operated a portal where Homeland Security could report allegations of “disinformation.” CISA also has worked in concert with the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project, which is accused of conspiring with state, local, and federal government officials to trample the First Amendment rights of social media users, according to a class-action lawsuit.
“But the EIP did not act alone. In fact, the EIP was created ‘in consultation’ with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, with the idea for the EIP allegedly originating from CISA interns who were Stanford students,” The Federalist’s Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland wrote in May.
‘Only a Matter of Time’
Facing more public outrage over its unconstitutional actions, the CISA audaciously insisted it merely plays an “informational” role.
As the congressional report notes:
CISA is “working with federal partners to mature a whole-of-government approach” to curbing alleged misinformation and disinformation.
CISA considered the creation of an anti-misinformation “rapid response team” capable of physically deploying across the United States.
CISA moved its censorship operation to a CISA-funded non-profit after CISA and the Biden Administration were sued in federal court, implicitly admitting that its censorship activities are unconstitutional.
CISA wanted to use the same CISA-funded non-profit as its mouthpiece to “avoid the appearance of government propaganda.”
The agency’s advisory committee, according to the report, worried that it would be “only a matter of time before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work.” Incidentally, the advisory committee created a “Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Misinformation & Disinformation” subcommittee whose members included Vijaya Gadde — Twitter’s former chief legal officer who was “involved in censoring [the New York] Post’s Hunter Biden laptop” story. Gadde was also “behind the decision to permanently ban former President Trump from Twitter.”
‘Most Insidious Attack on American Democracy’
Geller’s Wired piece took aim at Warner, West Virginia’s outspoken secretary of state who is making a run for governor. At last month’s secretaries of state meeting, Warner “lambasted” CISA and FBI officials for “what he said was their agencies’ scheme to suppress the truth about US president Joe Biden’s son Hunter during the 2020 election and then cover their tracks,” Geller wrote, as if he is not privy to the same public documents and testimony confirming Warner’s assertions. In Geller’s account, the FBI was merely advising Twitter and Facebook to be on the lookout for Russian disinformation.
But how do you square the intelligence community’s “advisory” role after learning Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign prompted a former acting CIA director to “help Biden” by leading 50 colleagues to sign a letter spreading the false claim that damning emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop — published by the New York Post — were Russian disinformation? And all of that just weeks before the election.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the FBI and CISA officials did not respond to Warner’s charges and the meeting quickly went on, Geller reported before he quickly attempted to establish Warner as a dreaded “election denier,” noting that the secretary of state “attended an election-denier rally after Biden’s 2020 victory.”
But Warner is no conspiracy theorist. The West Point graduate served nearly a quarter century in the U.S. Army and then worked with the State Department in Afghanistan, according to his bio. Warner knows about security threats.
CISA’s activities are “the most insidious attack on American democracy that I know of in U.S. history,” Warner told The Federalist in an interview last week. He called the targeting and censoring of state-defined “disinformation” a “psychological operation against the American people” that is “as bad as it gets.”
Warner said he has spoken to CISA officials multiple times but that they have yet to heed his calls for an after-action report on the 2020 election — to truly find out what went right and what went wrong.
A Warning
It appears most state elections officials don’t want to deal with the actual threat of the Biden administration’s disinformation and political silencing campaign.
“They know they will be lambasted by mainstream press,” Warner said. No one wants to be hit with the “election denier” label so effectively applied by the accomplice media. “It’s not easy, not politically expedient for them.”
Warner is one of the few speaking out against CISA and pulling away from involvement with the agency. But Geller worries Warner’s conservative colleagues will join him in breaking ties with CISA, as conservatives in Congress work to cut the budget of the abusive agency.
“It remains unclear how many of Warner’s colleagues agree with him. But when WIRED surveyed the other 23 Republican secretaries who oversee elections in their states, several of them said they would continue working with CISA,” Geller wrote.
“But others who praised CISA’s support also sounded notes of caution,” he added.
They need only look at CISA’s record and its rhetoric in the agency’s brief existence to know that Warner’s warnings aren’t merely the stuff of a “right-wing controversy.”
“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important,” CISA director Jen Easterly said at 2021’s RE:WIRED conference.
Apparently running roughshod over the First Amendment isn’t warning enough.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
Hot on the heels of a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling on Monday that states have “no power” to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot, Democrats and their lackeys in the corporate press denounced the court for supposedly meddling or interfering in the election.
“Not since Bush v. Gore have we seen a court that’s had this many opportunities to interfere in the election,”said former Rep. Donna Edwards on MSNBC. NBC News’ Ken Dilanian mused that the 9-0 ruling would “be seen by many people as the court essentially interfering in some sense in the election.”
Got that? When Democrats interfere in a presidential election and launch what amounts to an insurrection against the U.S. Constitution, and the Supreme Court steps in and unanimously puts a stop to it, it’s the court, not Democrat activists, who are interfering in the election.
The hypocrisy here is breathtaking but not unexpected. Democrats engage in this kind of projection constantly, taking an extreme position and then decrying any dissent or resistance to it as extremist.
In the Colorado case, two well-funded leftist groups with anodyne names — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and Free Speech for People — waged a lawfare campaign with a far-fetched reading of the 14th Amendment’s “insurrection clause,” managing to get Colorado’s Democrat-dominated Supreme Court to rule in December that Trump is ineligible to appear on the ballot. The plan was to do this in numerous states, foreclosing the possibility of Trump’s reelection.
From the outset, it should have been obvious that the legal argument was bogus, a cynical and clumsy ploy to prop up President Biden’s reelection bid by robbing voters of the chance to cast ballots for Trump. It’s hard to imagine anything getting a unanimous ruling on our deeply divided Supreme Court, but these bozos managed to do it — and in the process embarrassed the many corporate media commentators who twisted themselves into pretzels arguing that the Colorado case was strong.
But if we step back a bit and consider all this in the context of nearly every other scheme Democrats have hatched in recent years, it’s possible to see why they thought it was worth a shot. Time and again, Democrats take unprecedented steps and trample every conceivable norm to advance their agenda, and when anyone objects, they label them an extremist or insurrectionist or Christian nationalist (whatever that means). They project onto their opponents, and especially onto Trump, the very things they are actively engaged in doing.
An obvious example of this is when Democrats warn that if Trump is reelected, he’ll use the Department of Justice and the FBI to go after his political rivals. Oh really? This is exactly what the Biden administration has been doing for the past three years to Trump, his lawyers, and his supporters. The criminal cases against Trump are nothing if not the weaponization of the DOJ to crush an unpopular sitting president’s chief political rival. This weaponization began even before Trump won the White House in 2016. In the waning days of the Obama administration, Democrats used the FBI and the intelligence community to go after the Trump campaign — and continued going after Trump after he won the presidency, perpetuating the Russia-collusion hoax for years with the assistance of a complicit corporate press. If anyone is using the levers of government power to go after their enemies, it’s Democrats, not Trump.
Other examples of Democrat projection abound. After months of letting our cities burn in Black Lives Matter riots, excusing them as “mostly peaceful,” Democrats threw the book at anyone who wandered into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, arresting, jailing, and prosecuting more than a thousand Americans to date, often on flimsy charges that otherwise would hardly merit a fine. Just last week, the FBI arrested Blaze Media investigative reporter Steve Baker for his coverage of Jan. 6, marching him out of Blaze’s Dallas office in handcuffs. Democrats feign outrage at the arrest of The Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich in Russia, but they gloat, as NBC News did, when the Biden administration does the same to right-of-center journalists here in America.
Pick almost any controversial issue, and you’ll find the same pattern at work. Democrats flood the internet with disinformation and propaganda about Covid, and then decry dissenting voices (and accompanying data) as agents of disinformation who must be censored and banned by Big Tech. Same thing for what they call “election disinformation,” which merely refers to opinions and data that run counter to their preferred narrative.
Democrats do this with everything.
On abortion, they take the extreme position that it should be allowed up until the moment of birth, then denounce Republican-led states that impose restrictions that are the norm across the Western world.
On transgenderism, they insist children can consent to genital mutilation and sterilization, then condemn modest efforts to ban or limit these practices as child abuse.
On immigration, they throw open the southern border and let 10 million illegal immigrants flood into the country, then attack anyone who suggests we have a crisis at the border and need to secure it.
On crime, they defund the police and decriminalize a host of antisocial, destructive behavior in our cities, precipitating a crime wave of robbery and assault, then denounce as racist any arguments for law and order.
On racism itself, they tar everyone on the right with the label but look the other way when the racists on their side call for the genocide of the Jews and defend (even celebrate) Hamas terrorist attacks on civilians.
On nearly every major issue today, Democrats are the extremists. Their denunciations of Trump and his supporters rise in direct proportion to their own extremist agenda. The projection is a tactic, a crude rhetorical ruse. Don’t fall for it.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
By Brian Freeman | Tuesday, 05 March 2024 10:03 AM EST
An Iranian intelligence officer is wanted in connection with planning to assassinate former and current U.S. officials in revenge for the 2020 killing of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Quds Force Cmdr. Qassem Soleimani, the FBI posted on X.
The FBI field office in Miami shared a wanted notice for Majid Dastjani Farahani in connection with the recruitment of individuals for various operations in the U.S., including for surveillance activities focused on religious sites, businesses, and other facilities in the U.S., according to Newsweek. The announcement by the FBI, which said Farahani is working directly or indirectly for Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, comes amid heightened tensions with Tehran as Iranian proxies inflame hostilities connected to the war in Gaza by attacking Israeli and American targets.
Although Tehran has denied its involvement in recent attacks against U.S. targets, two years ago Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi blamed former President Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for Soleimani’s killing and threatened that Muslims will take out martyr’s revenge against them, Newsweek reported.
In addition, Shahram Poursafi, a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard, was indicted in 2022 for an alleged revenge plot to kill former national security adviser John Bolton, according to the New York Post.
After news of the latest threat, Pompeo and Brian Hook, former President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Iran, were given around-the-clock security, Semafor reported.
The U.S. Treasury Department in December announced sanctions against Farahani and another Iranian intelligence officer Mohammad Mahdi Khanpour Ardestani.
Soleimani oversaw a number of militias that targeted U.S. troops in Iraq, and had more “American blood on his hands” than any terrorist since Osama Bin Laden, according to a 2021 Department of Justice report on the Baghdad airstrike that killed him, the New York Post reported.
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
Does your children’s school take tips on hate from the Southern Poverty Law Center? The SPLC frames all responses to the border crisis as rooted in hate. (Photo: Getty Images)
When concerned mom Nicole Solas requested all emails from her Rhode Island school district to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the request turned up more than 8,000 pages of communications, and the district told her it would cost $6,629.25 for it to process the SPLC documents.
A brief refresher: The SPLC began as a civil rights nonprofit but has morphed into a far-left fundraising machine and smear factory. As I wrote in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” it weaponized its history of suing KKK groups into bankruptcy to smear its political and ideological opponents, placing mainstream conservative and Christian groups on a “hate map” alongside Klan chapters.
Solas, a Rhode Island mother, had briefly enrolled her daughter in kindergarten in the South Kingstown School District. She withdrew her daughter after the school district sued her on account of Solas’ multiple public records requests to reveal whether the district taught kids the principles of critical race theory, a lens that teaches kids to view white people as oppressors and black people as oppressed.
Solas told The Daily Signal that she requested “emails sent by [South Kingstown School District] employees” to “weed out spam emails automatically sent by SPLC to schools.”
There are 8,859 pages of emails sent by my school district to Southern Poverty Law Center, who thinks moms are "hate groups."
— Nicole Solas, Sued by the Teachers Union (@Nicoletta0602) March 1, 2024
The SPLC runs an education program long known as “Teaching Tolerance.” In 2021, after the George Floyd riots in Minneapolis, the SPLC apparently decided that “tolerance” wasn’t woke enough, so it rebranded the program to “Learning for Justice.” The program has advocated for lessons that inculcate critical race theory, transgender identity, and pornographic books in schools. Last year, the SPLC added parental rights groups, including Moms for Liberty, to its “hate map,” in part demonizing those groups for opposing sexually explicit books in school libraries.
The SPLC has bragged that it sent “over 400,000 educators” the “Teaching Tolerance” magazine, “reaching nearly every school in the country.” This language disappeared from the website, however, as more Americans look critically at the SPLC.
The SPLC hides its radical agenda behind benign-sounding initiatives such as celebrating diversity and inclusion. Many on the Left have adopted its rhetoric.
The SPLC’s “hate map” has caused real-world harm. In 2012, a terrorist targeted the Family Research Council for a mass shooting using the “hate map.” He told the FBI he aimed to kill everyone in the building, but the building manager prevented the slaughter, in the process sustaining bullet wounds. The shooter pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence.
Early in the 2000s, the SPLC began branding some activist groups that opposed illegal immigration “anti-immigrant hate groups” and putting them on the “hate map.” The SPLC maintains that hatred drives the movement calling for the enforcement of immigration laws, even as the Biden administration sets new records for the number of illegal aliens encountered at the southern border.
In the past two weeks, the SPLC has demonized Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, for attempting to close the border when the Biden administration refuses to do so. Abbott is attempting to enforce federal laws that Biden will not enforce, yet the SPLC claims Abbott is seeking to establish “state supremacy over the border.” The SPLC noted Abbott’s attempts to install razor wire between Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, and the southern border, the Biden administration’s decision to cut the wire, and the Supreme Court ruling allowing the Biden administration access.
“This is part of Abbott’s broader anti-immigrant agenda, which includes an attempt to stop a supposed ‘invasion’ of Texas by migrants,” SPLC’s Caleb Kieffer and Rachel Goldwasser wrote. “Claims of ‘invasion’ have become a trope among right-wing lawmakers and the hard right despite dangerous similarities to the racist ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory.”
The SPLC did not acknowledge that border agents encountered a record 3.2 million illegal aliens in fiscal year 2023 (a number larger than the combined populations of Hawaii, Alaska, and Vermont), nor that Democratic mayors are requesting help to deal with the large numbers of aliens in the country. This isn’t a “great replacement conspiracy theory”; it is a blatantly obvious fact that millions of illegals are taking root in the U.S., and the SPLC’s move to dismiss critics as racist in the face of that fact should set off alarm bells across America. PLEASE SEE https://wordpress.com/post/whatdidyousay.org/88628
The SPLC also demonized the effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for failing to enforce immigration law and prevent mass hordes of aliens from entering the country. In an article focused on a militia group’s efforts to take border enforcement into its own hands, Goldwasser claims the militia’s action represents “a product of the anti-immigrant environment produced by the xenophobic posturing of hate groups and politicians, and the controversial impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, the first Latinx and immigrant to lead the Department of Homeland Security.”
Goldwasser suggested that Mayorkas faces an impeachment effort not because he has failed to enforce immigration law and prevent the border crisis, but because he is the first Latino to head the Department of Homeland Security. She used “Latinx,” a transgender neologism, in order to avoid the clear masculine ending in Spanish for “Latino.”
The SPLC did not reserve all its vitriol for Republicans, however. Kieffer and Goldwasser noted that President Joe Biden has supported a Senate bill that included minor border security measures and changes to the asylum process in exchange for funding to Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s invasion.
“The bill worried immigration advocates, who viewed it as being extremely harsh and out of step for the needs of border communities,” they wrote. “The Senate relief package debacle shows the same anti-immigrant animus undergirding impeachment of Mayorkas and the standoff in Eagle Pass.”
It seems the SPLC’s partisan attacks against pro-enforcement groups have so unmoored the organization from reality that it is unwilling to accept the blatantly obvious truth. Recent polls have showed former President Donald Trump, who currently leads in the Republican presidential nominating proces, ahead of Biden in key swing states. Americans give Biden poor marks on the border, which helps explain the president’s belated support for some immigration restrictions. Biden knows he has to make up ground on this issue, and he’s furiously working to make it seem like the border crisis is Republicans’ fault.
Yet the SPLC hasn’t gotten the memo. It’s so focused on branding as “hateful” anyone who dares to speak the plain truth about the border crisis that it turns against Biden, the very president the SPLC brags about influencing and with whom SPLC leaders have met at least six times personally.
The SPLC’s radical agenda of critical race theory, transgender lessons, and apparent hatred for the very idea of national borders has no place in America’s classrooms. Solas is right to demand answers from her Rhode Island school district, and parents across the country should be on the lookout for the SPLC’s influence in schools.
Chloe Cole speaks as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., looks on during a news conference on Capitol Hill on Sept. 20, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Detransitioners have been trying to warn the public that so-called gender-affirming care—transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers—is both experimental and dangerous, especially for minors. Now, thanks to the efforts of journalist Michael Shellenberger, we know that World Professional Association for Transgender Health doctors and medical experts pushing these practices were well aware of the experimental and lasting nature of the procedures they were recommending. Yet these so-called health professionals pushed forward, despite alarming awareness of tumors developing from hormones, reduced sexual function, lack of proper informed consent for minors, and more, according to Shellenberger’s reporting.
“Let the reckoning begin,” says Luka Hein, a young woman who underwent a double mastectomy when she was only 16 years old, believing that she would be happier if she could become a boy. “Because of organizations like WPATH I’m missing body parts and struggle with pain.”
The WPATH medical professionals acknowledge in the messages that some of the minors who are being given puberty blockers have no idea that they will be sterilized. Other messages reveal WPATH doctors saying they went ahead with performing surgery on patients with severe mental health problems, even though they were worried the patients couldn’t give full informed consent.
“I’m relieved the files are out in the world for everyone to read,” Shellenberger told my colleague Tyler O’Neil, sharing that the files reveal WPATH’s “whole paradigm falling apart over the last three years.”
The news prompted a number of detransitioners to speak up, sharing the mental and physical anguish that they have gone through as a result of this ideology.
“I was a scared kid who thought doctors were going to help me…and look at how these butchers talk about what happened to those like me behind closed doors,” Hein added in another X post.
On a more positive note, since I reposted the scar picture, I want to put it side by side with a more recent picture. I am determined to thrive, in spite of what has happened. #detrans#detransitionpic.twitter.com/ua0Yfi3MaX
A detransitioner is someone who attempted to transition to another gender, then realized that such an attempt is impossible, and “de-transitioned.” Many of these individuals, like Hein, say they were betrayed into irreversible hormonal and surgical procedures by doctors and therapists who ignored biological realities in favor of ideology.
I document numerous stories of these transitioners in my upcoming book, “Detrans: True Stories of Escaping the Gender Ideology Cult,” an intimate look at the lived experiences of detransitioners, including the manipulative therapy sessions, botched surgeries, and attempts to construct phantom body parts.
“WPATH gave my therapist the green light to destroy my body,” said Abel Garcia, a young man who attempted to transition to become a girl by taking hormone and undergoing breast augmentation surgery. “The people who hurt me sleep with no problem, while I live in emotional, physical & mental pain.”
“These files prove what detransitioners have always said but now it’s coming from their own mouth,” he added. “Let the truth prevail.”
WPATH gave my therapist the green light to destroy my body. The people who hurt me sleep with no problem, while I live in emotional, physical & mental pain.
These files prove what detransitioners have always said but now it’s coming from their own mouth. Let the truth prevail https://t.co/DTpy5bz9PO
Chloe Cole, a young woman who underwent a double mastectomy as part of her teenaged gender transition, specifically addressed WPATH conversations reported by Shellenberger about developmentally delayed 13 year olds attempting transition.
“There is no ethical approach to taking an already developmentally delayed child and preventing them from going on the only path they have towards growing into an adult,” she said. “We are leaving vulnerable children stunted for life.”
“This is unimaginable levels of cruelty,” added Cole.
Laura Becker, another female detransitioner who has become an outspoken advocate against gender ideology, commented on Shellenberger’s revelation that doctors asked permission of all the “alters,” or alternative identities, of one client who had dissociative identity disorder (DID).
“I can’t believe this,” she wrote. “WPATH doctors got ‘consent’ from all a patient’s ‘alter’ personalities before doing surgery… instead of you know, treating the DID symptoms. Absolutely unethical.”
Some detransitioners called for punishments for the medical professionals who led them down this path.
“Justice for all victims,” wrote Richie, a man who attempted to transition to become a woman. “Jail time for the surgeons that held the scalpel, and the therapists that signed off the surgery. If I took everything from them, we still wouldn’t be even.”
“I didn’t think anyone should be jailed when I first ‘came to’ post-transition,” chimed in Michelle, another detransitioned woman, on X. “Changed my mind now. Probably would’ve still had some mercy in me if we hadn’t been gaslit so badly.”
Prisha Mosley, a young woman who has detransitioned and travels the country testifying in defense of biological sex, emotionally shared on Monday evening that she could not yet bring herself to read “The WPATH Files”: “No one deserves this monstrous form of irreversible medical harm…”
WPATH standardized blackmail and abusive medical experimentation and exploitation.
Detransitioners have been saying it for a while now: Doctors have forgotten their oath to Do No Harm. #WPATHFileshttps://t.co/wRs8evulsH
Calling it “one on a huge list of priorities,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) announced that he will be reintroducing a prior bill with Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Eric Swalwell to disqualify not just Trump but a large number of Republicans from taking office. The alternative, it appears, is unthinkable: allowing the public to choose their next president and representatives in Congress. It appears that the last thing Democrats want is for the unanimous decision to actually lead to an outbreak of democracy. Where the Court expressly warned of “chaos” in elections, Raskin and others appear eager to be agents of chaos in Congress.
Soon after the decision, Raskin went on the air at CNN to assure people that he and his colleagues would not stand by and allow the right to vote be restored to citizens in the upcoming election. He pledged to offer a prior bill that would declare Jan. 6 an “insurrection” and that those involved “engaged in insurrection.”
I previously wrote about these “ballot cleansing” efforts because it would not just disqualify Trump but potentially dozens of sitting Republican members of Congress. Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) sought to bar 126 members of Congress under the same theory. Similar legislation offered by Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) to disqualify members got 63 co-sponsors, all Democrats.
Raskin’s participation in this effort is crushingly ironic. In 2016, he sought to block certification of the 2016 election under the very same law as violent protests were occurring before the inauguration. The prior bills were sweeping and included members who did not engage in any violent acts (no member has been charged with such violence or even incitement) but merely opposed certification.
Raskin recently offered a particularly Orwellian argument for the disqualification of Trump and his colleagues in Congress: “If you think about it, of all of the forms of disqualification that we have, the one that disqualifies people for engaging in insurrection is the most democratic because it’s the one where people choose themselves to be disqualified.” In other words, preventing voters from voting is “the most democratic” because these people choose to oppose certification . . . as he did in 2016.
After the ruling, Raskin added the curious claim that the justices “didn’t exactly disagree with [the disqualification theory]. They just said that they’re not the ones to figure it out. It’s not going to be a matter for judicial resolution under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, but it’s up to Congress to enforce it.”
That was sharply different from the pre-decision Raskin who insisted that there was no real question legally and that the case before the justices was “their opportunity to behave like real Supreme Court justices.”
Well, they did act as “real Supreme Court justices” by unanimously opposing what the Court described as the “chaos” that would unfold with such state disqualification efforts. Raskin, however, is seeking a new avenue for chaos through Congress.
Raskin’s statement is also bizarre in claiming that somehow the justices agreed with him and the others pushing disqualification. No one, not even the Trump team, questioned that Congress could act to bar people from office. It is expressly stated in the Constitution. It is not an “argument” but a fact.
Of course, the Democrats would need to craft the legislation correctly to satisfy the standard and secure the support of both houses. Neither appears likely at this point.
However, Raskin is succeeding in one respect. He and his colleagues have bulldozed any moral high ground after January 6th. Most of us condemned the riot on that day as a desecration of our constitutional process. Yet, the Democrats have responded with the most anti-democratic efforts to prevent voters from exercising their rights in the upcoming election. For these members, citizens cannot be trusted with this power as Trump tops national polls as the leading choice for the presidency. It is the political version of the Big Gulp law, voters like consumers have to be protected against their own unhealthy choices.
Raskin has continued to accuse the nine justices of being cowards in not supporting ballot cleansing. He told CNN that the court “doesn’t like the ultimate and inescapable implications of just enforcing the Constitution, as written.” In other words, all nine justices, including the three liberals justices, are disregarding clear constitutional mandates to protect Trump. It is the same delusional view echoed by other liberals who were enraged by the decision. Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann declared that “the Supreme Court has betrayed democracy. Its members including Jackson, Kagan and Sotomayor have proved themselves inept at reading comprehension. And collectively the ‘court’ has shown itself to be corrupt and illegitimate. It must be dissolved.”
After all, nothing says democracy like ballot cleansing and dissolving courts before a national election.
With the resumption of efforts to disqualify Republicans from running on ballots, Raskin and his colleagues seem to be channeling the spirit of former Mayor Dick Daley in the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.
With allegations of abuse by the police in cracking down on protests, Daley declared “the policeman isn’t there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder.” With Democrats preparing to return to Chicago for their convention this year, Raskin and others appear to be responding to the Court that “the party isn’t there to create chaos, the party is there to preserve chaos.”
SCOTUS Rules in Trump favor. It is unconstitutional for states to kick a presidential candidate off the ballot based on the 14th Amendment.
Supreme Court Puts Trump Back on Colorado Ballot – UNANIMOUS DECISION – Trump Responds
By Cristina Laila
The US Supreme Court on Monday unanimously ruled Trump can stay on the Colorado primary 2024 ballot. The Supreme Court said the states lack the power to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution against Presidential candidates. “For the reasons given, responsibility for enforcing Section against federal officeholders and candidates rests with Congress and not the States. The judgment of the Colorado Supreme Court therefore cannot stand,” the high court’s ruling said. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
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An appeals court on Saturday reversed a lower court’s decision to block Texas from enforcing a new state law that would make illegal immigration a state crime. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals went against U.S. District Judge David A. Ezra’s order to block Texas’ Senate Bill 4 but also put its own ruling on hold for seven days should the Biden administration want to appeal to the Supreme Court.
The new law allows state authorities to arrest and jail illegal immigrants and would give state judges the power to order deportations. The law was initially set to go into effect on March 5 but will now be put on hold until March 9 unless the Supreme Court intervenes.
Under Texas’ Senate Bill 4, state authorities could arrest and jail illegal immigrants and allow state judges to order deportations. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)
Ezra, who presides in the Western District of Texas, ruled last week that states “may not exercise immigration enforcement power except as authorized by the federal government.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, however, maintained that the state “has the right to defend itself” from the invasion at our southern border.”
“Texas will immediately appeal this decision, and we will not back down in our fight to protect our state – and our nation – from President Biden’s border crisis,” Abbott said in a statement at the time.
Asylum seekers cross the Rio Grande from Mexico into the United States on Sept. 30, 2023, in Eagle Pass, Texas. (John Moore/Getty Images)
The law was one of several moves by Texas to curb the flow of migrants into the state. Abbott has repeatedly accused the Biden administration of failing to enforce immigration laws amid record numbers of migrant entries and encounters at the southern border.
Fox News’ Louis Casiano contributed to this report.
Rep. Adam Schiff’s Republican primary challenger in California’s Senate race warned voters in the Golden State have been “suppressed” by the Democrats as he remains in a “statistical tie” to fill the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s seat.
Steve Garvey, a former 10-time MLB All-Star, joined “Fox & Friends” to discuss his candidacy and why he believes Californians are “mad” about the state’s Democratic leadership.
“The people of California, who have been suppressed by one party, are saying they’re mad,” Garvey told Brian Kilmeade on Monday.
“They’re not going to take it anymore,” said the longtime Dodgers first baseman, adding that voters in the state know “his heart” and believe that he’ll represent their best interests.
“These are career politicians who have failed the people, and it’s time for change, a fresh young face, with new ideas… Somebody that knows that he can make a difference, and I think people believe that I can.”
Garvey is in a “statistical tie” against opponent Adam Schiff, according to a poll from the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies. The data indicates 27% of voters would back Garvey compared to Schiff’s 25%, which is a steep increase from data back in January.
Garvey emphasized the importance of the border crisis, arguing the issue is top of mind for voters as cartels continue to wage “war against America.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) sources told Fox that in just the last 72 hours, there have been more than 21,000 migrant encounters and 3,600 in the San Diego border sector alone.
“Once I started running, they started listening to my common sense, compassionate, consensus-building plea to them,” Garvey said. “And I said, ‘Well, let me fight crime in the streets for you. Let me try to get the homeless off the streets and get care for them. Let me help fight the border.’ By the way, the cartels are the true terrorists. They’re the ones that infiltrate. They organize. … It’s the true war against America.”
On March 5, California voters will head to the ballot box to fill the late senator’s seat, which is currently being filled temporarily by Laphonza Butler. Four candidates are in the running for her seat – Adam Schiff, Katie Porter and Barbara Lee alongside Garvey, who is the only Republican in the race.
From left to right: Rep. Barbara Lee, Rep. Katie Porter, Republican Candidate Steve Garvey, and Rep. Adam Schiff. (Getty Images)
Whichever two of the four candidates receives the highest number of votes in the March primary will advance to the November general election, no matter which party each candidate represents.
“I’ll meet with all 99 senators. I’ll stick out my hand, and I’ll tell them I want to work with them,” Garvey said.
“But it’s the people that I serve, people of California, people of this country. They know where my heart is. It’s a campaign of grace and civility, and people are standing up and answering with their votes.”
Far left commentator Keith Olbermann vitriolically condemned the Supreme Court on Monday after the justices unanimously ruled individual states could not decide whether Donald Trump could be on their presidential ballots this fall. Pictured: Olbermann hosts a Trump impersonator on Comedy Central’s “The President Show” on April 27, 2017, in New York City. (Photo: Brad Barket/Getty Images)
Liberals on Monday bemoaned the Supreme Court overturning a state supreme court’s ruling tossing former President Donald Trump off the state’s ballot. The U.S. Supreme Court said that Congress alone had the power to enforce the “insurrection clause” of the 14th Amendment in a 9-0 ruling that was unsigned. The Colorado Supreme Court had decided that Trump was disqualified under the provisions of the 14th Amendment in a 4-3 ruling Dec. 19.
“The Supreme Court has betrayed democracy,” former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann posted on X. “Its members including [Ketanji Brown] Jackson, [Elena] Kagan, and [Sonia] Sotomayor have proved themselves inept at reading comprehension. And collectively the ‘court’ has shown itself to be corrupt and illegitimate. It must be dissolved.”
The Supreme Court has betrayed democracy. Its members including Jackson, Kagan and Sotomayor have proved themselves inept at reading comprehension. And collectively the "court" has shown itself to be corrupt and illegitimate.
“Supreme Court rules that an adjudicated insurrection can still be president, unless Congress acts,” MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner posted. “Not unexpected, but more proof that our institutions of government are not up to the task of saving American democracy. Once again, it’s up to We The People. #VoteLikeHell”
Supreme Court rules that an adjudicated insurrection can still be president, unless Congress acts. Not unexpected, but more proof that our institutions of government are not up to the task of saving American democracy. Once again, it’s up to We The People. #VoteLikeHellpic.twitter.com/mK8kAe3TPE
MSNBC contributor Anand Giridharadas called the decision “another corrupt Supreme Court ruling” while linking to an article offering what he put forth as a course of action to counteract what he called “another round of despair bait.”
Another day, another corrupt Supreme Court ruling, another round of despair bait in the news.
The Ink is trying to do something different: offering tangible actions you can take today to help save and more fully realize democracy.
“The Supreme Court has decided to keep Donald Trump on the Presidential ballot. We knew this was coming,” Democratic congressional candidate Eugene Vindman posted. “Today’s Supreme Court decision won’t impact what will happen in November. We are going to defeat Donald Trump and take back the House from MAGA extremists.”
The Supreme Court has decided to keep Donald Trump on the Presidential ballot. We knew this was coming.
Today's Supreme Court decision won't impact what will happen in November.
We are going to defeat Donald Trump and take back the House from MAGA extremists.
Also on MSNBC, former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal tried to spin the ruling.
“What it doesn’t put aside is the 14th Amendment, Section 3, is not just about courts, it’s not just about—you know, about ballot—you election officials disqualifying someone. It’s also a rule of thumb for you and me,” Katyal told MSNBC host Ana Cabrera. “I mean, one of the most important moments in our history after the Civil War, our nation came together and said, ‘Look, insurrectionists should not be on the ballot.’ The court today is not saying that Donald Trump is free of the charges of being an insurrectionist.”
“It may be that Congress hasn’t implemented legislation to enforce it, but you and I enforce the 14th Amendment, too, by what we do at the ballot box,” Katyal added.
Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold of Colorado expressed disappointment in the ruling on X.
“I am disappointed in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision stripping states of the authority to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment for federal candidates,” Griswold posted. “Colorado should be able to bar oath-breaking insurrectionists from our ballot.”
I am disappointed in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision stripping states of the authority to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment for federal candidates. Colorado should be able to bar oath-breaking insurrections from our ballot.
In its affidavit supporting criminal charges, the Justice Department showed Air Force lieutenant colonel Larry Rendall Brock on the Senate floor on January 6, 2021 in a helmet and combat gear. That outfit only magnified the anger of many of us over the riot and the interruption of our constitutional process of certification. However, while there was little question of the validity of the charges against him, U.S. District Judge John Bates in March 2023 imposed a two year sentence based on a common enhancing factor cited by the government in many of these cases for the “substantial interference with the administration of justice.” A panel on the D.C. Circuit has now ruled against the use of that enhancer in a decision that could compel the resentencing of dozens of defendants from the January 6th riot.
The Justice Department has long been accused of excessive charging and abusive detention conditions for January 6th defendants. The heavy-handed treatment was apparently by design. In a controversial television interview, Justice official Michael Sherwin proudly declared that “our office wanted to ensure that there was shock and awe … it worked because we saw through media posts that people were afraid to come back to D.C. because they’re, like, ‘If we go there, we’re gonna get charged.’ … We wanted to take out those individuals that essentially were thumbing their noses at the public for what they did.”
District court judges just went along with the use of the enhancement, even though it was based on a highly attenuated claim. As the D.C. Circuit found, “Congress’s certification of electoral college votes does not fit the ‘administration of justice’ mold.” It then noted:
“Considered in context, Congress’s counting and certification of electoral votes is but the last step in a lengthy electoral certification process involving state legislatures and officials as well as Congress. Taken as a whole, the multi-step process of certifying electoral college votes—as important to our democratic system of government as it is—bears little resemblance to the traditional understanding of the administration of justice as the judicial or quasi-judicial investigation or determination of individual rights.”
The argument of the Biden Administration always seemed curious to me given the claims of former President Donald Trump that Vice President Michael Pence had the authority to reject state certifications. I disagreed with that view. However, arguing that this is a type of judicial proceeding would seem to enhance the Trump argument. Yet, that is what the Justice Department did in many of these cases to enhance sentencing.
Ultimately, Judge Bates’ sentencing was not as high as what the Justice Department wanted. Judge Bates detailed the considerable evidence against Brock in his preparation for violence. He wrote before the riot “Do not kill LEO [law enforcement officers] unless necessary… Gas would assist in this if we can get it.” It was also short of the maximum under the guidelines of 30 months. The sentence may have been reduced by as much as nine months without the enhancer.
There could also be substantial reductions for a couple of hundred of other defendants who were sentenced with the enhancer. It is not clear if the government will appeal the ruling.
We are also waiting for the oral argument in Fischer v. United States, which will consider the use of the felony charge of obstructing an official proceeding against defendants tied to the January 6th riot. Trump is also being prosecuted in part for that crime.
Brock is currently serving his two-year prison term at MCFP Springfield in Missouri.
Below is my column in the Hill on a controversial criminal case involving a conservative journalist who was arrested after the January 6th riot. The prosecution of Steven Baker exposes the growing tensions in the media over the role of reporters as advocates.
Here is the column:
Former New York Times writer (and now Howard University journalism professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones declared recently that “all journalism is activism.” Advocacy journalism is all the rage in journalism schools and on major media platforms. Given that shift in journalism, one would think that these editors and journalists would love Steven Baker.
Baker was arrested for covering what he viewed as a citizen protest defying the government and demanding justice. He did not hide his support for their cause as he reported on what became a riot. Baker, however, is a conservative journalist and the protest that he was covering became the Jan. 6th riot. Now, the Biden administration has arrested Baker on four misdemeanor charges linked to his entry into the Capitol on that day.
Baker would later not only supply stories to his main media outlet, Blaze News, but also sell videos to The New York Times and HBO.
Journalists often accompany protesters and even mobs as stories unfold. Indeed, there were many reporters in the crowd that entered the Capitol. But Baker, the conservative journalist, was charged while others were not. The response from most media figures and groups has been crickets.
The Justice Department leaves little doubt why they pursued Baker. The criminal complaint and an FBI agent’s affidavit repeatedly reference Baker’s support for those who stormed the Capitol. Entering through a broken door like hundreds of others, he walked past Capitol police, who stood by and even directed some protesters. Baker was in the building for only approximately 37 minutes before police led him out.
The government claims that the Texas-based writer “antagonized” police officers when they blocked his effort to get through a door. They quote him as asking “Are you going to use that (gun) on us?” They also quote him as later stating, in an interview with a local television station, that he was “quite excited to see this going on. Do I approve of what happened today? I approve 100 percent.”
He also pointed out his image in footage while emphasizing that his red hat was not a MAGA hat but a Yorktown, Virginia hat. He would joke about what a shame it was that he did not get his hands on Nancy Pelosi’s computer, given what he might have found.
In any other context, Baker might be the poster boy for the new journalism. “J-schools” now encourage students to leave “neutrality behind” and push “solidarity [as] ‘a commitment to social justice that translates into action.’”
A recent series of interviews with over 75 media leaders by Leonard Downie Jr., former Washington Post executive editor, and Andrew Heyward, former CBS News president, reaffirmed this shift. As Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle, stated: “Objectivity has got to go.” But that advocacy seems to depend heavily upon what ideology you are advocating.
For example, NPR employees objected to efforts to maintain a neutral tone in reporting and declared that “civility is a weapon wielded by the powerful.” The NPR leadership went even further to unleash the advocates within journalists, by allowing them to cross over from covering to participating in protests. The public-subsidized NPR declared that reporters could join political protests when the editors believe the causes advance the “freedom and dignity of human beings.”
Something tells me that NPR editors would not have found Baker’s brand of advocacy to be “dignified.”
NPR recently hired a new CEO, Katherine Maher, who has declared that “white silence is complicity” and has publicly denounced Trump and his supporters. The message seems clear about what kind of protests would be considered advancements of freedom.
Would the government have charged an NPR reporter who accompanied Black Lives Matter rioters in the police station they occupied in Seattle? If not, then what exactly is the dividing line between crime and advocacy journalism? Is it an ideological line?
In the George Floyd riots, at least 126 journalists were arrested or detained in 2020. Virtually all of the charges against them were dropped. Des Moines Register reporter Andrea Sahouri was tried on simple misdemeanors for failure to disperse and interference with official acts. She was acquitted. The difference is that a long list of journalistic organizations came to her aid. That is not the case for Baker.
Before Baker’s arrest, Washington media was already facing criticisms over double standards. Recently, CBS was embroiled in a controversy after it fired acclaimed investigative journalist Cathrine Herridge, who had clashed with the liberal network over her work on stories unpopular with the Biden White House and many Democratic establishment figures. Not only did they lay Herridge off, but CBS brass even seized her files and forced her union to take legal action before giving them back. The files contained confidential source information. While this was unfolding, Herridge was in court, fighting to protect her confidential sources. After CBS fired her, she was held in contempt this week for refusing to violate journalistic confidentiality. The same week, despite firing Herridge and seizing her files, CBS President Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews was honored at the 33rd annual First Amendment Awards.
Likewise, this week, Julian Assange is facing deportation and prosecution for publishing the Wikileaks files, exposing abuses in the U.S. government. Although legacy media routinely publish classified material from whistleblowers, Assange has embarrassed many in Washington and will have to pay for it.
That brings us back to Baker. He is not charged with property damage or violence. The question is whether, on that day, he was an advocate, a journalist or an advocate journalist.
So, what exactly is journalism? Major media figures have actively erased the distinction between advocates and journalists. It is now subject to the same test that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once used to identify pornography in the case Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964): “I shall not today attempt further to define [it]…But I know it when I see it.”
Jonathan Turley is the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at the George Washington University Law School.
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