New GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis said on Thursday that if he’s elected, he will “be aggressive” in using presidential pardons to free people charged or convicted through the weaponization of the Department of Justice, and that includes his main rival for the party’s nomination, former President Donald Trump.
“What I’m going to do is … on day one, I will have folks that will get together and look at all these cases, who people are victims of weaponization or political targeting, and we will be aggressive at issuing pardons,” the Florida governor told podcasters, Buck Sexton and Clay Travis.
DeSantis added that the DOJ and FBI have been weaponized in many ways under President Joe Biden, and he acknowledged that in some of the cases where people are charged with crimes, “people may have a technical violation of the law.”
“But if there are three other people who did the same thing, but just in a context like BLM [Black Lives Matter] and they don’t get prosecuted at all, that is uneven application of justice, and so we’re going to find ways where that did not happen,” said DeSantis. “And then we will use the pardon power — and I will do that at the front end.”
He said many presidents wait until the end of their administration, but he promised that his administration will “find examples where the government’s been weaponized against disfavored groups, and we will apply relief as appropriate.”
However, DeSantis also explained that the pardons will be considered “case by case,” meaning that a blanket pardon wouldn’t be given to Trump, who is facing several criminal probes.
“That could be from a grandma who got arrested and prosecuted too much all the way up to, potentially, Trump himself,” Travis said. He then asked the governor, “Is that fair to say when you analyze what the charges might have been brought on a federal level?”
“I would say any example of disfavored treatment based on politics or weaponization would be included in that review, no matter how small or how big,” DeSantis responded.
Democrats are communicating loud and clear that they support law enforcement so long as it abuses police power to serve their political goals. They want to defund police who enforce the law and expand police forces that use law as a political weapon on Democrats’ behalf.
One proof is that in last week’s hearing on FBI weaponization, support for the FBI was split exactly by political party. Democrats uniformly supported the FBI in face of evidence of gross and systemic abuse of power, while Republicans uniformly criticized it. This is a clear tell that Democrats consider the FBI to be working for them — a shocking and dangerous situation.
“Every single Republican on the Judiciary Committee is committed to fundamental change in how that [FBI secret warrant] process works,” Rep. Jim Jordan told Maria Bartiromo Sunday in a post-hearing interview. “…the FISA and the appropriations process is how you rein in this agency that targeted good men, like Garret O’Boyle, Stephen Friend, and Marcus Allen, who had the courage to come forward and testify this week and tell the American people what’s going on with their tax dollars in the Justice Department.”
The last week has surfaced numerous new facts about serious ongoing and systemic FBI abuses of law enforcement powers. Special Counsel John Durham’s report showed that the FBI acted in a clearly partisan manner in multiple situations, including protecting the Hillary Clinton campaign while placing informants and electronic wiretaps on the Trump campaign based on fabricated evidence their agents didn’t check.
In Thursday’s hearing, the three whistleblowers detailed the FBI’s cruel retaliation against themselves and their families when they filed legally protected ethics complaints about: the FBI surveilling parents who complained about Democrats’ education policies at school board meetings; the FBI pursuing a SWAT-style raid against a cooperative man who attended the Jan. 6, 2021 rally; and the FBI inflating “domestic terrorism” cases to bolster Democrats’ false and horrifying claim that their political opponents are terrorists.
Allen told the committee it appears the FBI is conducting a “purge” of conservatives. Michael Shellenberger and Madeleine Rowley reported, “No mainstream media journalist interviewed the FBI whistleblowers before demonizing them.”
During that hearing, it was also revealed that the Bank of America gave the FBI private banking information about any American who used BOA credit cards near the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, without any warrant, and regardless of whether those people committed any crimes or even were on the Capitol grounds that day.
“FBI leadership pressured agents to reclassify cases as domestic violent extremism (DVE), and even manufactured DVE cases where they may not otherwise exist, while manipulating its case categorization system to create the perception that DVE is organically rising around the country,” says a congressional staff report released May 18.
Saturday reporting on a secret court filing showed the FBI broke the law by spying on Americans 278,000 times, without any warrants, in 2021 alone. “For each American the FISA court permitted the FBI to target, the bureau illicitly surveilled almost 1,000 additional Americans,” reported the New York Post on Sunday. The whistleblowers noted that the FBI rewards agents for opening more warrantless surveillance and searches of Americans’ communications.
Then on Sunday a poll came out showing the majority of Americans believe the FBI covers up Democrats’ crimes — specifically those of the Biden family. It also showed that 70 percent of Americans are concerned the FBI and other intelligence agencies interfere with elections, and believe the agencies need “wide-ranging reform.”
Don’t forget, either, that the only former president’s home the FBI has ever raided was a Republican’s, while FBI officials bent over backward to avoid touching even convincing evidence of criminal behavior related to Clinton, according to Durham’s documentation. The FBI’s recent record is clearly partisan, and that’s why its support is also now partisan.
This partisanship is not just typical politics. It’s over fundamental issues, not differing ways to get to the same goal. It’s also very dangerous to our country.
When federal law enforcement becomes the shock troops of only one political party, you don’t have the rule of law anymore. Law is only legitimate if it is equally applied to all. When members of one party or set of political beliefs are above the law and use the law not for justice but as a weapon against their political enemies, that’s what we call a police state.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, revealed in a floor speech on Tuesday that material reviewed by his investigative staff supported whistleblower allegations that the FBI falsely labeled evidence of potential criminal conduct by members of the Biden family “Russian disinformation.” While Grassley had previously discussed the whistleblower allegations, he now confirmed for the first time that an independent review of the pertinent records supported the accusations.
In response to last week’s announcement by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that he planned to offer a resolution denouncing former President Donald Trump’s call to defund the FBI, Grassley excoriated Democrats for remaining silent while the country faced an uptick in violence against law enforcement officers and the radical left pushed to defund the police. The Iowa senator then chastised Democrats for offering a political resolution that ignored the weaponization of the FBI, proceeding then to catalog the DOJ and FBI’s many abuses.
Here, Grassley stressed that protected whistleblower disclosures made“clear that the FBI has within its possession very significant, very impactful, and very voluminous evidence with respect to potential criminal conduct by members of the Biden family.”
“I know the FBI falsely labeled that evidence as Russian disinformation to bury it,” Grassley continued, revealing that his staff had “independently reviewed records” that support the whistleblower allegations.
Tuesday’s comments came some six months after Grassley revealed that the FBI had possession of “a series of documents relating to information on Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, and his business and financial associations with Hunter Biden.” According to an October 2022 news release and an accompanying letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, Grassley said:
The documents in the FBI’s possession include specific details with respect to conversations by non-government individuals relevant to potential criminal conduct by Hunter Biden. These documents also indicate that Joe Biden was aware of Hunter Biden’s business arrangements and may have been involved in some of them.
At the time, Grassley noted it was “unclear whether the FBI followed normal investigative procedure to determine the truth and accuracy of the information or shut down investigative activity based on improper disinformation claims in advance of the 2020 election…” The senator also expressed concern over whether Weiss had independently evaluated the evidence.
Grassley concluded his October 2022 letter by requesting from the DOJ and FBI all records from Jan. 1, 2014, forward “that reference Mykola Zlochevsky, Hunter Biden, James Biden and Joe Biden.” While his letter sought “all records,” Grassley explicitly highlighted several forms including, among others, FD-209a, which is used to record an “asset contract”; FD-794b, which is used to request a payment; FD-1023, which is used for a source report; and FD-1040a, which is used to close a source.
The specific documents requested suggest the whistleblower had claimed the FBI had a source that provided information on the Burisma owner and the Biden family.
While it is unclear whether the DOJ and FBI provided the documents, Grassley’s floor statement on Tuesday shows his office had access to records corroborating the whistleblower claims that the FBI buried evidence derogatory to the Biden family by framing it as Russian disinformation.
This latest revelation follows last week’s news that an Internal Revenue Service whistleblower claimed FBI headquarters interfered in the investigation into Hunter Biden and that two Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys declined to file tax charges against the president’s son, against the recommendation of career prosecutors.
Yet Garland and Wray remain silent. If it weren’t for Grassley’s various letters and floor statements, Americans would know little about the FBI’s political favoritism and the “get out of jail free card” they seem to be handing out to Hunter Biden at every opportunity.
But now that we know that evidence, likely including a confidential human source, was buried under the guise that it was Russian disinformation, will anything change?
Sadly, for all of Grassley’s efforts to expose the scandal, the last seven years suggest not.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Legacy media claim so-called ‘election deniers’ are constantly threatening and harassing election workers throughout the country. But the facts say otherwise.
It didn’t take long after the 2020 election for legacy media to conjure up a new smear to use against conservatives. For two years, leftists have employed the malicious term “election denier” to silence any American with legitimate concerns about the integrity of U.S. elections.
But in the lead-up to and following the 2022 midterms, media began incorporating this smear into their next phony narrative, which is that these so-called Republican “election deniers” are constantly threatening and harassing election workers throughout the country. Prior to the Nov. 8 election, for example, left-wing outlets ran hit piece after hit piece warning that Republicans were secretly plotting to disrupt local precincts on Election Day.
And while their doomsday predictions (unsurprisingly) never came true, that hasn’t stopped Democrats from attempting to convince the public there’s a widespread conspiracy of Trump supporters threatening local election officials. Within the past several weeks, NBC News and The New York Times have run exposés highlighting election officials in Virginia and Texas, respectively, who recently resigned amid confrontations with fellow Republican officials.
When it comes to the Times’ reporting, however, the article’s headline distorts the reasoning behind the Texas official’s resignation. While the headline reads, “After Threats and Clashes With Republicans, Another Texas Election Official Quits,” the article tacitly admits that Heider Garcia, the elections director for Tarrant County, resigned due to the county’s “creation of an election integrity task force” — not because of the alleged threats against him.
Other outlets to publish similar articles in recent weeks include The Hill and USA Today.
The Facts Tell a Different Story
While there are certainly cases of threats being made against election workers, the relentless narrative pushed by the corporate press that it’s a widespread problem is not true. But you don’t have to take The Federalist’s word for it. President Joe Biden’s own Department of Justice (DOJ) has all but admitted so.
Back in July 2021, the DOJ launched a task force designed to address this alleged “rise in threats against election workers, administrators, officials, and others associated with the electoral process.” According to an agency press release, the task force would “receive and assess allegations and reports of threats against election workers” and work with U.S. attorneys’ offices and the FBI “to investigate and prosecute these offenses where appropriate.” As part of the initiative, the DOJ also launched an election worker hotline, where individuals can report “suspected threats or acts of violence against election workers” to the agency for review and potential investigation.
Predictably, the DOJ did not include any data to justify its claim that there was a “rise in threats against election workers.”
On Aug. 3, the Democrat-controlled Senate held a hearing, titled “Protecting Our Democracy’s Frontline Workers,” in which Judiciary Committee members heard testimony from various federal, state, and local election officials about their experiences working in recent elections. Testifying in the hearing’s first panel was Kenneth A. Polite Jr., the assistant attorney general for the criminal division of the Department of Justice.
In his opening statement, Polite Jr. claimed the DOJ’s Election Threats Task Force had reviewed and assessed roughly 1,000 allegedly “threatening and harassing” communications directed toward election officials, including one incident of physical violence against an election worker. Two days prior, however, the DOJ issued a press release revealing that only about 11 percent of those 1,000 contacts “met the threshold for a federal criminal investigation” and that the “remaining reported contacts did not provide a predication” for such an inquiry.
“In investigations where the source of a reported contact was identified, in 50% of the matters the source contacted the victim on multiple occasions,” the press release reads. “These investigations accordingly encompassed multiple contacts. The number of individual investigations is less than 5% of the total number of reported contacts.”
The DOJ also claimed the task force had charged five individuals at the time, a number Polite Jr. confirmed during his Aug. 3 Senate testimony.
So, to recap: In a country of roughly 331 million people, the DOJ — in the span of a year — received roughly 1,000 calls alleging threats toward election workers, in which only about 11 percent of cases warranted a federal investigation. On top of that, only five individuals had been charged with any type of crime as of the DOJ’s August 2022 press release.
The Verdict
So why are legacy media continuing to push the lie that election workers everywhere are under constant attack, despite publicly available data showing otherwise? And why are Democrats in states such as Nevada and New Mexico advancing legislation based upon this lie, even when there are federal statutes prohibiting the harassment of election workers?
For Democrats, the strategy is two-fold. The first reason is to further the narrative perpetuated by Biden that “MAGA Republicans” represent an existential threat to democracy and Democrats are the party of virtue, “voting rights,” and normalcy. The left hopes that by painting their political opponents as extremists, they’ll be able to sway moderates and independents to their side, even as their political allies use the justice system to target former presidents, chemically castrate children, and collude with Big Tech to censor dissenting voices online.
The second reason is to discourage conservatives with legitimate concerns about election integrity from partaking in completely legal forms of electoral oversight. Ahead of the 2022 midterms, for instance, the Republican National Committee recruited more than 70,000 new poll watchers and workers ahead of Election Day to “help deliver the election transparency that voters deserve.” And of course, Democrats went ballistic, parroting the same “threat to democracy” talking point.
Unlike Democrats, Republicans actually welcome transparency in the electoral process. The attempt by legacy media and leftist politicos to spin a false narrative about conservatives threatening election workers on a grand scale is an attempt to avoid accountability at the ballot box and cast their political opponents as enemies of democracy. It’s a strategy steeped in falsehoods and smears, which for Democrats is nothing new.
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Did Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in California and Washington, D.C., block the filing of criminal tax charges against Hunter Biden?
Accusations levied by an IRS whistleblower on Wednesday suggest the federal prosecutors did just that, contradicting Attorney General Merrick Garland’s recent congressional testimony and raising an avalanche of questions concerning the independence of the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office overseeing the Hunter Biden investigation. Given the severity of the claims, the U.S. attorney should speak up immediately.
A cryptic letter sent to a slew of congressional committee chairs on Wednesday revealed an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whistleblower’s claims of political interference in the criminal investigation of a high-profile, politically connected individual. While the letter omitted the specific details the whistleblower sought to present to the oversight committees, unnamed sources reportedly confirmed the criminal case concerned Hunter Biden; they also revealed several more scandalous claims.
In attorney Mark Lytle’s letter to the congressional chairs and ranking members, the Nixon Peabody partner explained that his client, “a career IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent,” sought to “make protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress.” After noting that his unnamed client “had been overseeing the ongoing and sensitive investigation of a high-profile, controversial subject since early 2020,” Lytle broadly identified three disclosures the whistleblower was prepared to make.
First, the whistleblower’s testimony would “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee,” the letter said. Second, according to Lytle, the career IRS agent would reveal the “failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case.” And finally, the letter claimed the whistleblower had detailed evidence of “preferential treatment and politics” that improperly infected “decisions and protocols.”
Individuals claiming to be “directly familiar with the case” put flesh on the barebones allegations summarized by Lytle. Those sources claim Hunter Biden is the “high-profile” individual under investigation and “that at least two Biden DOJ political appointees in U.S. attorneys’ offices have declined to seek a tax indictment against Hunter Biden despite career investigators’ recommendations to do so.” The sources further claimed career prosecutors in the Department of Justice tax division had cleared the prosecution of Hunter Biden — something generally required in criminal tax cases.
The whistleblower, who had previously filed complaints with the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General, decided to inform congressional oversight committees of the claimed political improprieties after hearing Garland’s March 1, 2023, testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, sources claim.
During the Judiciary Committee’s oversight hearing, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, questioned Garland on the ability of the federal prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden, Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, to pursue criminal charges in a different judicial district, without special counsel authority.
Garland responded that the Delaware U.S. attorney had been advised he has authority “to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it is necessary.” “If he needs to bring [a case] in another jurisdiction, he will have full authority to do that,” Garland assured.
It was that testimony by Garland, who was reportedly the unnamed “senior political appointee” referenced in Lytle’s letter, that the whistleblower’s disclosures would reportedly contradict. Specifically, sources claim the whistleblower intends to reveal that the Delaware U.S. attorney sought permission to bring tax charges in other districts, but two U.S. attorneys appointed by Biden denied the requests. The whistleblower allegedly also claims that Weiss had asked “to be named a special counsel to have more independent authority in the probe but was turned down.”
Weiss’s supposed need to enlist the Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys to move forward with criminal charges seemingly stems from a DOJ policy that criminal tax prosecutions proceed in the judicial district where the defendant lived at the time the pertinent tax returns were filed. And here, Grassley gave a clue of the U.S. attorney offices that allegedly refused to pursue criminal charges when he asked Garland whether the D.C. or California U.S. attorney’s offices had denied a request by Weiss to bring charges against Hunter Biden.
Garland responded that he did not know the answer to that question and did not want to “get into the internal decision-making” of the U.S. attorneys, but that Weiss had been advised he will not be denied anything he needs.
Grassley’s reference to the California and D.C. U.S. attorney’s offices meshes with details of Hunter Biden’s various residences. Before moving to California, the Biden son listed his residence in 2018 as his father’s house in Wilmington, Delaware, but he claimed a D.C. address prior to that. Hunter also rented office space in D.C. for Rosemont Seneca Advisors, one of his many LLCs — another basis for bringing a federal criminal tax case in D.C.
Biden has since moved to California, reportedly living in Hollywood Hills and Venice, establishing connections to the second judicial district Grassley referenced. Both Hollywood Hills and Venice fall in the Central District of California, so The Federalist asked the office of the Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney E. Martin Estrada whether he had rejected recommendations of career prosecutors to charge Hunter Biden. A press representative said they had no comment.
The Federalist also contacted the D.C. U.S. attorney’s press office for comment, and a representative of U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves said they neither confirm nor deny the existence of any investigation.
Whether these two U.S. attorneys prevented the filing of criminal tax charges against Hunter Biden is unknown — at least to the public. Weiss, however, knows what happened, and rather than force the whistleblower to suffer through what will surely be months of attempted character assassination, Weiss should clear the record.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
American media has bombarded us daily from all directions to make sure we know that Donald Trump indirectly paid a woman to shut her mouth as she and her now-convict lawyer, Michael Avenatti, shook him down for money.
In New York, false financial accounting can be a low-level misdemeanor, but it’s rarely prosecuted. Now Alvin Bragg, a municipal prosecutor, is trying to make a name for himself by charging former President Trump with that crime.
This is the equivalent of a nationally televised jaywalking arrest to humiliate a person due solely to personal hate. George Soros, Bragg’s benefactor, must be grinning from ear to ear.
Hillary Clinton Got Off For a Worse Deed
Trump’s former lawyer accounted for the payment as consulting or attorney’s fees. Allegedly, so did President Trump, and $130,000 changed hands.
For perspective, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee paid $1 million for the infamous fictional “Steele dossier.” They paid for this using one of the Democratic Party’s most prominent lawyers, Marc Elias, as a cutout to hide who was paying for this opposition research that falsely claimed Trump was colluding with Russia.
They then laundered the dossier through various contacts to try to destroy Trump and get Clinton elected president. Those people officially accounted for the $1 million dossier expense as “legal fees.” So, one side paid people to lie. The other paid someone not to lie, or at least not to speak.
Clinton lives in New York, the state in which Trump is likely to be charged over a $130,000 payment. She has not been charged for the $1 million payment. Do these events really sound vastly different to you?
Bragg hopes to spin that unserious charge into a federal campaign finance violation. Meanwhile, the dossier fraud, which affected two presidential elections and two presidential impeachments, was settled with a $113,000 fine.
Bragg’s Case Is a Mess
City prosecutors cannot charge people with federal crimes. Only feds can charge federal crimes, not some city prosecutor. Bragg has allegedly met with the Secret Service about how they will react to a New York City police officer approaching President Trump with handcuffs (if they can find one who will do it). Bragg is way over his head and wading into deep political waters.
New York Attorney General Tish James ran for office almost exclusively on a “get Trump” platform. She hated the man and promised to find a crime he committed, rather than responding to a crime and looking for a perpetrator. After years of not finding anything, she did not charge Trump with any crimes. Same state. Same New York laws. More investigative tools. Yet she passed on the opportunity to arrest a president.
The U.S. Department of Justice investigated the same alleged crime and also chose not to prosecute. Every prosecutor in the state above Bragg’s office passed on this one knowing they could not prove President Trump committed a crime. Or they realized that no serious person could charge Trump and not also indict Democrats.
Bragg is the same Manhattan DA who has publicly decriminalized crimes in the name of wokeness. This alleged prosecutor will ignore criminal violence and release people on their own recognizance after a stern talking to for beating someone half to death or attacking police. But he wants to charge Trump for this garbage after every one of his superiors has declined to do so. Why? Incompetence? Tunnel vision? Irrational hate? Why choose?
Democrats’ Hate Could Prompt a Constitutional Crisis
Many Democrats want Trump arrested for anything. They want to see him in cuffs more than they want their own kids to be happy and healthy. They have been searching for someone stupid or reckless enough to “perp walk” the man for the cameras. They might very well have found him. If Bragg does it over this fluff, it will prove to be a poor career choice for him and could have much broader implications that are rungs above his pay grade.
Some Dems even want conservatives to riot if a cop cuffs Trump, just like a lack of security made it easy for people to barge into the Capitol through open doors just to be charged and arrested. They might get their wish. And it is likely a trap. If it happens and people protest, see whether New York City will give them all “room to vent” like city officials gave lefty rioters for months. Hopefully, any protests will be peaceful. I will not be involved in any of it.
A lot of people continue to be surprised at these events and have truly had enough of the second set of rules for conservatives. If the hard left keeps pushing this kind of thing, it will eventually be deeply sorry.
Feds raided Trump’s house with a tactical team over papers a librarian wanted. Oddly, CNN was present and ran the story on a loop. Joe Biden dropped 50 years of classified documents all over the country and the feds let his personal lawyers (who lacked security clearances) sort them before giving them to the government at their leisure.
They investigate Trump from all sides. They give Biden a pass on everything. The feds investigated Trump’s sons and son-in-law for any irregularity. Yet Hunter Biden, a man in a long line of alleged Biden bag men, lives in a $40,000-per-month Malibu beach house and sells splatter paintings to anonymous purchasers for exorbitant amounts.
Wildly Unequal Legal Treatment
Everyone is supposed to just sit back and accept the different treatment and think it is okay and normal. This is far from normal—it is a thumb in the eye of half the American population.
Even apparently peaceful Jan. 6, 2021 protestors have been in pre-trial detention for two years. Black Lives Matter and Antifa got carte blanch to riot and burn courthouses with impunity with at least tacit support from the White House and open support from the vice president, who encouraged people to donate money to bail the rioters out of jail.
Firebomb a pro-life crisis pregnancy center and take credit for it, and Biden’s inept AG will give you a pass. Pray in front of an abortion clinic and you will be charged with a list of felonies. This is not sustainable. People, in large numbers, will eventually stop taking it.
The Acceleration of Dangerous Trends
In accordance with their oaths, prosecutors are not supposed to charge people with crimes they cannot prove, since doing so can ruin people’s lives even if they are eventually acquitted. The citizenry remembers the charge, not the acquittal.
Likewise, presidents are not supposed to issue executive orders they know will be overturned as unlawful, just for political gain and show. Both have been happening for the last two years at a clip never before encountered. Team Biden is daring half the country. Stand up, but do not take the bait.
Many think Bragg will charge Trump soon because he can. These people might not be ready for the fallout they will provoke. And by that, I do not mean violence. I mean turnabout.
Republicans may politically finally address Democratic Party lawfare, taking an eye for an eye. Some have recently shown backbone their predecessors lacked. Their voters will increasingly elect officials who promise to do so. Trump himself was a harbinger of this.
Republicans Need to Respond, Good and Hard
If Bragg pulls the proverbial trigger, everyone had better be really sure about his next moves. Bragg and his upstream cronies will not be able to take it back, apologize, call for calm, or put that leftist authoritarian genie back in the bottle.
If they think they are right and their ideas the best, Democrats should square up and try to beat at the polls whomever the Republican candidate is in 2024. Another round of transparent politically driven rigging, especially like this, after the ridiculous failures of their impeachment efforts and Jan. 6 show trials, will light a dangerous fuse for which the American people have lost patience.
Most countries that fail to address unequal treatment start dying from within. Every American should want to avoid that for all our sakes. Bragg staying out of presidential politics and focusing on the skyrocketing violent crime rate in his own backyard would be a welcome next step.
When Republicans take the White House, they should make sure prosecutors at every level have every resource and unclassified document they require to investigate and, if mandated, charge everyone on team leftist. No letting things slide. If the Dems want old-fashioned dirty politics, the other side might finally give it to them good, hard, and thoroughly.
Thomas Crist is a husband, father, lawyer, and political conservative who loves his country and despises all myopic hypocrisy regardless of its source.
The Biden administration is “weaponizing” the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act to go after pro-life activists, an attorney who served under George W. Bush and Barack Obama told the Daily Caller.
The Biden administration has charged at least 16 pro-life activists with a maximum of 11 years in prison for alleged violations of the act, which prohibits obstructing people seeking reproduction services. Pro-life activist Mark Houck allegedly pushed an abortion escort to the ground after a verbal confrontation. FBI agents swarmed Houck’s house and took him away at gunpoint months after the initial charges against him were dropped.
Houck is being charged with the decade-long version of the FACE Act violation because the abortion escort “scraped his arm,” his attorney Peter Breen told the Daily Caller. “The charges shouldn’t apply at all, but even if they did, he’s being overcharged.”
“It’s outrageous that you would take a six-month misdemeanor … and turn it into a 10-year federal felony,” Breen added.
One of the other pro-lifers facing over a decade in prison, Paul Vaughn, never blocked the door of an abortion clinic, but was standing nearby, Breen claimed.
Video of the FBI's arrest of Paul Vaughn of Centerville, Tennessee. DOJ charged him with “conspiracy against rights secured by the FACE Act, and committing FACE Act violations" for blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic. Paul tells me the footage was taken by his wife. pic.twitter.com/KSDvLRSrlF
Severino, who served under both former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama from 2008 to 2015, said he’s “never heard of a charge being so excessive” as the 11-year maximum prison sentence and $350,000 fine put forth by the current administration for allegedly obstructing abortion clinic doors.
“This is law enforcement run amok. The FACE Act had always been enforced very rarely, because the pro-life movement is a movement of peace,” Severino said. “All of a sudden, they are inventing cases and doing sham prosecutions in an election year for purely political purposes to go after their political enemies.”
The DOJ did not respond to an inquiry from the Daily Caller asking if they have comment on whether the Biden administration has used the FACE Act more excessively than previous administrations.
Attack at Loreto House in Denton, Texas. Photo courtesy of Randy Bollig
The effort to arrest pro-lifers is specifically being pushed before the midterms, Department of Homeland Security official under the Trump administration, Ken Cuccinelli, told the Daily Caller.
“This has nothing to do with public safety. This is political virtue signaling to the radical-left base that has control of this administration,” Cuccinelli said.
“I think it will thoroughly backfire on them. I can’t think of a way they’ll get one more vote because they arrest these people, but I guarantee you, a lot [more] pro-lifers will stay home than might have for the midterm election,” he added.
An attorney with the voting rights division of the Department of Justice — which enforces federal laws related to voting — allegedly violated election law when she voted in the 2020 presidential election in North Carolina, a new memo by the American Accountability Foundation outlines.
Longtime DOJ attorney Janie Sitton cast a ballot in North Carolina’s 2020 general election, despite being a resident of Washington, D.C., at the time. While Donald Trump ended up carrying North Carolina by just 1.3 points, the race was a dead heat until the very end. This was not the case in the District of Columbia, however, where Trump earned only 5 percent of the vote. Perhaps this is why Sitton chose to vote in the Tar Heel State rather than D.C. — and it’s a prime example of how skirting election laws can contribute to rigged elections.
On Monday, the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) filed bar complaints in both North Carolina and D.C. over Sitton’s presumed misconduct. In the memo compiled by AAF, voter data shows Sitton as a resident and active voter in D.C. since Aug. 13, 2010, voting in five elections leading up to 2018. Since 2018, Sitton has claimed a D.C. homestead deduction on her tax filings. To claim that tax deduction, residents must declare that the property is their principal residence, according to the memo.
“Submitting a false statement on these property tax records can subject the applicant to criminal penalties, according to the fraud and false statement laws under 47-4106 of the Code of the District of Columbia,” according to AAF.
Sitton also owns a condominium in North Carolina, which she bought in 2002. Tax documents indicate Sitton’s mailing address for the condominium is her Washington, D.C., address.
In August 2020, however, Sitton registered to vote in North Carolina using the address of her condo, per the state’s Board of Elections Voter Database. Shortly after Sitton registered to vote in North Carolina, she cast a ballot in the 2020 general election as well as a municipal election in November 2021. In May 2022, Sitton abruptly restored her voter registration in Washington, per D.C. Board of Elections data.
Sitton was essentially voting in North Carolina as if that were her primary residence while claiming a homestead deduction on her apparently real primary residence in D.C. A year prior to casting her ballot in the 2020 election, Sitton even signed a mortgage agreement to keep her North Carolina condo as a second non-residence property, per AAF.
Such behavior ostensibly violates North Carolina state statute, which, according to AAF, defines “what is and is not considered residency for the purposes of registering to vote within the state.” The statute defines residency as:
(1) That place shall be considered the residence of a person in which that person’s habitation is fixed, and to which, whenever that person is absent, that person has the intention of returning….4) If a person removes to another state or county, municipality, precinct, ward, or other election district within this State, with the intention of making that state, county, municipality, precinct, ward, or other election district a permanent residence, that person shall be considered to have lost residence in the state, county, municipality, precinct, ward, or other election district from which that person has removed [emphasis added].
Presumably, Sitton never had the intention of making her North Carolina condo her primary residence when she cast her ballot in the 2020 election.
“Janie Sitton, a senior attorney in the DOJ Voting Section, lied about her residency to register to vote in North Carolina so she could vote in a competitive Presidential election,” AAF Founder Tom Jones told The Federalist. “If DOJ election attorneys are unwilling to abide by the most straightforward of election laws, how can we trust them to enforce voting laws in the upcoming election?”
Sitton’s alleged partisanship is nothing new to the DOJ, which has a history of politically motivated abuse of federal law. For example, the agency is actively involved in delaying election integrity efforts in Florida, has sued both Georgia and Texas over additional election integrity legislation, and is helping facilitate Biden’s federal takeover of elections. The DOJ’s current associate attorney general, Vanita Gupta, headed a DOJ lawsuit attempting to block voter ID laws in North Carolina in 2015.
Not to mention that the current head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division (which Sitton’s voting rights division falls under), Kristen Clarke, led a lawsuit against then-Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s election integrity policies as a private lawyer, peddled the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax, and in college argued that blacks are the superior race. In other words, it’s not just Sitton that appears to be a politically motivated actor, it’s pretty much the entire DOJ.
“Instances like this show how sophisticated election lawyers can game the system,” former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell told Breitbart. And ” how easily voting laws can be leveraged by those who know how those laws are written.”
The DOJ did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.
Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo Tuesday reiterating the prohibition on Department of Justice (DOJ) employees communicating with Congress. The memo directed DOJ employees to an existing guideline restricting DOJ employees’ communication with federal lawmakers, Senate and House committees and congressional staff. Garland explained that these rules help the DOJ prevent political interference in the department’s activities.
“Like the policies regarding communications with the White House, these policies ‘are designed to protect our criminal and civil law enforcement decisions, and our legal judgements, from partisan or other inappropriate influence, whether real or perceived, direct or indirect,’” the memo read. Garland also cited a section of the department’s manual that explained the guidelines also help preserve Congress’ ability to “carry out its legitimate investigatory and oversight functions.”
NEW: Attorney General Merrick Garland also sent a memo today reminding DOJ employees of the policies around communications with Congress. pic.twitter.com/8lN5tlyE7C
The memo reiterated DOJ’s policy that all communication with members of Congress is subject to approval by the Office of Legislative Affairs (OLA). This policy requires the Assistant Attorney General for the OLA to manage all communications between department members and Congress “to ensure that relevant Department or Executive Branch interests are fully protected.”
“No Department employee may communicate with Senators, Representatives, congressional committees, or congressional staff without advance coordination, consultation, and approval by OLA,” the policy states. “All congressional inquiries and correspondence from Members, committees, and staff should be immediately directed to OLA upon receipt.”
Garland issued a separate memo Tuesday prohibiting politically appointed DOJ officials from participating in political events. The memo revoked exceptions that allowed “non-career appointees” to attend partisan political events for “close family members who were running for political office” and to attend events for non-relative candidates “in their personal capacities on the evening of Election Day.”
“As Department employees, we have been entrusted with the authority and responsibility to enforce the laws of the United States in a neutral and impartial manner,” the memo read. “In fulfilling this responsibility, we must do all we can to maintain public trust and ensure that politics — both in fact and appearance — does not compromise or affect the integrity of our work.”
Garland announced August 11 that he had “personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant” for the FBI raid the former president’s private residence. The FBI said it retrieved 11 sets of classified documents, including four sets of top-secret material. Trump has disputed this account, claiming that he had declassified all the documents in question.
Republican Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley announced in a July letter to Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray that whistleblowers had told him the FBI downplayed and discredited intelligence concerning Hunter Biden’s alleged criminal activity in his overseas business dealings. Grassley later accused the FBI of a partisan double standard in a subsequent letter to Wray.
In subsequent letter to Wray, Grassley claimed that “political bias” had “infected the FBI’s Washington Field Office” and accused Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy Thibault of closing the case surrounding the president’s son without any valid reason. Thibault, who frequently shared partisan content on social media while working for the FBI, resigned Friday and was allegedly escorted out of the FBI building.
The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) redacted affidavit relating to the raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home was released on Friday. The document shows that the DOJ pointed to a number of classified materials already obtained from Trump’s home as reason for the August search warrant request.
Though much of the affidavit was redacted, unsealed portions of it revealed that the latest search came after the FBI reviewed 15 boxes that Trump turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in January, sparking further concern about other potential documents. Fourteen of these boxes had classification markings,” according to the affidavit.
The 14 boxes contained 184 documents – 25 of the documents had “top secret” markings, 92 were labeled “secret” and 67 had a “confidential” warning, according to the affidavit.
The affidavit also notes that the DOJ requested Trump secure the storage room at Mar-a-Lago, pointing out that the department sent a letter to “FPOTUS COUNSEL 1” on June 8, 2022. This letter “reiterated that the PREMISES are not authorized to store classified information and requested the preservation of the STORAGE ROOM and boxes that had been moved from the White House to the PREMISES.”
“As I previously indicated to you, Mar-a-Lago does not include a secure location authorized for the storage of classified information,” the letter reads, according to the affidavit. “As such, it appears that since the time classified documents [redacted] were removed from the secure facilities at the White House and moved to Mar-a-Lago on or around January 20, 2021, they have not been handled in an appropriate manner or stored in au appropriate location. Accordingly, we ask that the room at Mar-a-Lago where the documents had been stored be secured and that all of the boxes that were moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago (along with any other items in that room) be preserved in that room in their current condition until farther notice.”
FILE PHOTO: An aerial view of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home after Trump said that FBI agents raided it, in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S. August 15, 2022. REUTERS/Marco Bello/File Photo
Multiple media organizations, including CNN and The New York Times, pushed for the affidavit – which would shed light on the reasoning behind the unprecedented raid – to be released because of intense public interest and the unparalleled nature of the situation. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart – who also signed off on the search warrant used in the FBI’s August 8 raid – ordered the DOJ to submit redactions to the affidavit after formally rejecting the department’s push to keep the document private. Reinhart approved the redactions on Thursday and noted the affidavit would be released by noon on Friday.
In the wake of the FBI’s search, Trump slammed the incident as being politically motivated. He encouraged the “immediate release of documents” relating to the search of his Florida home and, on August 22, filed a lawsuit asking for a “special master” to be appointed to independently oversee the review of various materials that had been taken. (RELATED: FBI Agents Remove 11 Sets Of Classified Documents From Mar-a-Lago)
The DOJ on Friday also released a document detailing its proposed redactions to the affidavit and reasons for the redactions – though notably the reasons for keeping portions of the affidavit under wraps were also redacted. In this document, the DOJ noted that the redactions are an effort to protect a “significant number of civilian witnesses.”
The Justice Department's reasons for keeping large portions of its Mar-a-Lago warrant application sealed are themselves sealed. pic.twitter.com/H86pYcnQL2
MORE: Here is "a chart identifying the government's proposed redactions as belonging to different categories of protected information," per the DOJ. But, as you can see, it's really hard to say. https://t.co/nqiAZfIWympic.twitter.com/XgaZOVFojX
— Chris “Subscribe to Law Dork!” Geidner (@chrisgeidner) August 26, 2022
Multiple conservative organizations penned an open letter Friday, sharply criticizing Department of Justice (DOJ) Attorney General Merrick Garland and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray for politicizing both agencies. The letter, exclusively obtained by The Daily Caller, was signed by individuals representing organizations including the Conservative Partnership Institute, the Media Research Center, and the Leadership Institute. The contents of the letter called for the release of all documents related to the raid on President Trump’s home in Florida as well as the confiscation of Congressman Scott Perry’s cellphone, stating both actions “undermined the rule of law in America.”
“In overseeing these actions, you and FBI Director Christopher Wray have grossly failed in your mission to oversee an impartial and equal application of the law,” the letter reads.
WASHINGTON, DC – JULY 12: FBI director nominee Christopher Wray testifies during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee July 12, 2017 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
The letter stipulated several other examples of what the organizations claimed pointed to a “politicized” DOJ and FBI, including labeling parents at school board meetings domestic terrorists, perpetuating the Russia collusion narrative about Trump and turning a blind eye to the crimes of Hunter Biden.
“Under your leadership and that of Mr. Wray, the DOJ and FBI have breached the public trust. This blatant politicization of the federal justice system is a dangerous escalation without precedent, and incompatible with the United States Constitution,” the letter said.
“Accordingly, we, the undersigned hereby demand that you immediately make public all underlying information relied upon or referenced in both the warrants executed against former President Trump and Congressman Perry this week,” the letter concluded.
The FBI raided Trump’s home in Florida last week, in an apparent effort to retrieve classified documents the former president had allegedly taken with him when he left the White House. The FBI obtained 11 sets of classified documents from Trump’s house, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller Friday.
Arrests and convictions over contempt of Congress. Police enforcement of bureaucratic and relatively obscure archivist laws. FBI raids on former presidents (and future political opponents?). In their rage, the Democratic Congress and administration have written a vicious battle plan — one that conservatives will do well to follow when they return to power if they’re at all serious about restoring any semblance of respect for law in our country. In weeks past, there’s little reason to believe conservatives are; but Monday night’s raid might finally have changed that.
Just over one year after President Joe Biden’s election to the White House, his Department of Justice arrested Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former political director. Bannon was arrested for contempt of Congress, or, refusing to answer a congressional subpoena. After he was convicted last month, Bannon became the first American to face a prison sentence for contempt since the House Un-American Activities Committee sent 10 uncooperative, suspected Hollywood communists to prison in 1948. In the more than 70 years between the Hollywood Ten’s sentencings and Bannon’s conviction, contempt of Congress had devolved into more of a political tool used to investigate the other party, but rarely brought to its legal conclusion.
While Democrats tried to prosecute contempt of Congress twice during the Reagan years, the administration only let one prosecution come to pass (in which the defendant was ultimately found innocent of contempt). Decades later, when Republicans tried to bring a similar case against President Barack Obama’s obstinate attorney general, Eric Holder declined to prosecute himself, citing executive privilege. Two years later, when Republicans sought answers from the IRS’s Lois Lerner over her targeting of political opponents, Holder also declined to prosecute. Later, when Democrats tried to bring criminal contempt charges against Trump’s secretary of commerce and attorney general, Bill Barr similarly declined to prosecute himself.
Criminal enforcement is extremely rare because the reality is Congress can refer who they like, but the administration prosecutes whomever the administration chooses to prosecute.
The Biden administration has made clear they’ll prosecute their political opponents every chance they get. That means that despite Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s threat to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland accountable in the next Congress, he will only be empowered to hold Garland accountable under a Republican administration (unless he complies with Republican congressional oversight, which he won’t).
True: Arresting an administration official after he’s left office is a dangerous precedent, but it’s one Democrats gleefully set this past year. And contempt of Congress is far from the only weapon the administration has wielded against their out-of-power opponents: Tuesday’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s home, for example, reportedly centered on his handling of classified information (and the Watergate-era Presidential Records Act).
While politicians such as Hillary Clinton have been accused of similar crimes, prosecution is extremely rare — and focuses on the most egregious cases. For example, Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, was prosecuted in 2004 for stealing and destroying classified documents on the Clinton administration’s handling of terrorism prior to his testimony before the 9/11 Commission. Gen. David Petraeus was similarly charged for sharing classified documents with his mistress. Neither Berger nor Petraeus was charged with so much as a felony, instead pleading guilty to misdemeanors. Neither Berger nor Petraeus’s homes were ever raided, either, and, neither man ever served a day in prison. Most importantly, neither was a former president of the opposing party — nor a potential political opponent in the next general election.
That’s what makes the FBI’s raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home so shocking — so disconcerting that voices from former Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to the liberal Bloomberg editorial board to D.C.-groupthink mouthpiece Playbook have all voiced their unease.
These liberals’ unease stands in contrast with Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, who ignored a reporter’s Tuesday afternoon question on the subject and didn’t issue so much as a peep of concern for the first 23 hours after the raid was publicized. He was joined in his silence by Senate Republican Whip John Thune (who issued a statement at the same time, Tuesday night), Senate Republican Policy Committee Chairman Roy Blunt (who remained silent as of 9 p.m. on Tuesday), and the Senate’s premier “thoughtful conservative” cosplayer, Ben Sasse. Why the silence? While after five years of increasingly unrealistic (and unproven) conspiracies and accusations against the former president, some Republicans still somehow trust the FBI. The reality is that others, such as McConnell, are pleased by the raid. But regardless of their private thoughts and motivations, their impotent silence in the face of the Biden administration’s charges, arrests, and raids on its political opponents exposes their inability to handle the crisis the American state finds itself in.
While over the coming years, still other Republicans will cite this dead norm or that gutted precedent as they hesitate to use the Democrats’ own battle plans back on them, one-sided disarmament is no strategy at all. The only way to fight back is to make the kinds of people who’ve weaponized and undermined the American state suffer for their actions. They’ve arrested their enemies, revived obscure rules as pretexts for partisan attacks, and raided their opponents’ homes, and they won’t be sorry until they’ve felt the same pain.
They aren’t sorry at all — yet.
Christopher Bedford is a senior editor at The Federalist, a founding partner of RightForge, vice chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, a board member at The Daily Caller News Foundation and National Journalism Center, and the author of “The Art of the Donald.” His work has been featured in The American Mind, National Review, the New York Post and the Daily Caller, where he led the Daily Caller News Foundation and spent eight years. A frequent guest on Fox News and Fox Business, he was raised in Massachusetts and lives across the river from D.C. Follow him on Twitter.
The 2021-2022 school year is coming to a close. As usual, students, parents, teachers, and administrators are looking over the past year to see what worked, what didn’t, and how to improve.
This year, the educational establishment’s report card is even worse than usual. It has failed to address the learning losses due to unnecessary Covid lockdowns and inspired parental uproar over critical race theory and LGBT advocacy in the classroom. It has suffered a surprising electoral defeat in Virginia and a not-so-surprising legislative setback in Florida, as well as an unprecedented number of school board recall elections. Most damaging of all, close to 2 million students have abandoned government schooling for greener (not to mention safer) pastures.
Faced with such massive public losses, one might think a little self-reflection would be in order. Instead, the educrats, with the help of their friends in the legacy media, have decided to address these serious problems by gaslighting the American public.
Avoiding Accountability at All Costs
The most recent example of this deception comes from the continuing saga of the National School Boards Association’s (NSBA) effort last fall to smear parents who complain at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists.” The now infamous letter and even more infamous Department of Justice memo that followed it represent the depths to which the educational establishment was willing to sink to protect itself from accountability to the families it theoretically serves.
A recently completed independent review exonerated the NSBA’s board from culpability in this fiasco, fixing the blame for “both the ‘origin and substance of the letter’” on former Interim Director and CEO Chip Slaven. The review also found that while unnamed members of the Biden administration “collaborated” with Slaven, it “did not find direct or indirect evidence suggesting the administration requested the letter.”
In an effort to “clear the record,” Slaven recorded an interview last week with Fox News Digital, where he whined about being “betrayed” and “completely backstabbed” by the organization that he led. He also admitted that he disagreed with the NSBA board’s futile efforts to walk back the language of the letter, claiming that “it drenched an already inflamed and out-of-control narrative with another helping of gasoline.”
Neither Slaven nor the NSBA’s announcement bothered to address the elephant in the room: that the
organization sees engaged parents and community members who attend school board meetings as potential threats that need to be watched and possibly prosecuted by federal authorities. When pressed about this during the interview, Slaven lamely defended the substance of the letter he penned by saying, “The word ‘parents’ is not in the letter anywhere,” despite the examples cited in the letter’s footnotes.
The NSBA has offered vague platitudes about “advocat[ing] for local control” and being “committed to parent engagement” as it pursues its “nonpartisan” goals. These attempts to rewrite history come as 25 state school boards have chosen“to withdraw membership, participation, or dues from NSBA.”
Meanwhile, an FBI whistleblower has claimed that “counterterrorism tools” were indeed used against parents in accordance with the DOJ’s memo. It remains unclear whether these efforts continue presently despite the NSBA’s repudiation of the letter and its alleged author.
Legacy Media Provide Covering Fire
Of course, the left-wing corporate media have gone all in to support educrats’ efforts to deceive the public into believing they remain the valiant heroes in this ongoing drama. Lately, they’ve decided to focus their attacks on a favorite target of the left: homeschooling families.
This is hardly surprising, as the number of these families at least doubled during the lockdowns of 2020-2021. What’s more, that number has been largely maintained despite schools re-opening in the fall of 2021.
On Mother’s Day, Keith Olbermann fired an opening salvo in this new campaign against educational choice when he tweeted that a homeschooling mom was “ruin[ing] the lives of five innocent children.” Not to be outdone, MSNBC columnist Anthea Butler initiated a preemptive strike against Kirk Cameron’s upcoming documentary “The Homeschool Awakening” by disingenuously linking homeschooling not just with conservative Christianity, but also with the “segregation academies” of the post-Brown v. Board of Education South.
After grudgingly admitting the recent increase in homeschooling “may [in part] be attributed to Black parents and other diverse groups” who might not otherwise dare to disagree with her leftist party line, Butler ended her hatchet job with a dire warning:
Homeschooling may have greater appeal now because of these debates and the desire for parents to play a big part in their children’s educational life. It may also arise out of pandemic concerns, but parents unfamiliar with the existing networks of homeschooling run the danger of being drawn into Christian conservative networks and theocratic teaching. [Cameron] says that people choosing homeschooling are having an awakening, but the public needs to awaken to the reality that public schools may disappear if people with his extreme beliefs have their way.
The left’s message to parents is loud and clear: Exercise your right to homeschool your kids and you are complicit in the cold-blooded murder of public schooling.
Institutional Suicide
In these efforts, Slaven, Olbermann, Butler, and their comrades studiously deflect from the simple truth: If American government-run schools are dying, it is not a case of murder, but of suicide.
The self-inflicted wounds keep coming despite all the warning signs of the past academic year. Last month, the school district in Kiel, Wis., accused three middle schoolers of sexual harassment for failing to refer to another student by her chosen pronouns. What parent wants to go through that as a consequence of sending his kids to public schools?
Meanwhile, in Virginia, Fairfax County Public Schools is planning to adopt a policy to suspend or even expel students who “maliciously misgender” classmates. The vote, originally scheduled for May 26, has been suspiciously delayed until June 16, perhaps so the happy chaos of the last day of school will allow the board to avoid further public scrutiny and outrage.
As kids across the nation start their summer vacations, the battle for their minds and souls rages on. True to form, the educational establishment fights dirty, using cheap manipulation tactics to distract the public from its pursuit of ideological “business as usual.”
Robert Busek is a Catholic homeschooling father of six who has taught history and Western Civilization in both traditional and online classrooms for over twenty years. His essays have also been published in The American Conservative and The American Spectator. The views he expresses here are his own.
World Food Program USA Board Chairman Hunter Biden (L) and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden attend the World Food Program USA’s Annual McGovern-Dole Leadership Award Ceremony at Organization of American States on April 12, 2016 in Washington, DC. / Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images
According to CBS News’ sources, Department of Justice officials, at the direction of Attorney General William Barr, have been “quietly” reviewing over the past “several weeks” records and documents related to the “Ukraine matter,” including documents provided by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.
Citing a source familiar with the matter, CBS News’ Catherine Herridge and Clare Hymes reported Tuesday that “staff outside of Main Justice in Washington have been assigned by Attorney General William Barr to review the Ukraine matter, adding that the review is being handled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Pittsburgh and is separate from U.S. Attorney John Durham’s probe into the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe.”
Among the materials reportedly being reviewed by Justice Department officials at Barr’s behest are some provided by Giuliani, who was specifically mentioned by President Trump in his famous July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and who appears to have served as point man for the pursuit of investigations into allegations of corruption involving former Vice President Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden, and Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings.
Herridge and Hymes note that that investigation also “goes beyond” matters related to the Bidens, according to the source.
In the call which sparked the Democrats’ impeachment campaign, President Trump asked Zelensky to “look into” the allegations involving the Bidens and Burisma. After a whistleblower complaint accused Trump of attempting to pressure Ukraine into investigating his political rival, Democrats launched an impeachment inquiry resulting in two articles of impeachment, which passed in the House but for which Trump was acquitted by the Senate.
As Herridge and Hymes reports, the allegations involving the Bidens and Ukraine “have gained new life” since Trump’s acquittal, with Barr stating Monday that the department has established an “intake process in the field” for material concerning Ukraine.
During the impeachment trial in the Senate, Trump’s lawyers repeatedly brought up the issue of corruption in Ukraine, around which Trump’s request to Zelensky centered. At one point, President Trump’s deputy counsel Patrick Philbin connected the “Ukraine matter” to the whistleblower whose complaint sparked the impeachment.
“If the whistleblower, as is alleged in some public reports, actually did work for then-Vice President Biden on Ukraine issues, exactly what was his role?” asked Philbin. “What was his involvement when issues were raised — we know from testimony that questions were raised — about the potential conflict of interest that the vice president then had when his son was sitting on the board of Burisma. Was the alleged whistleblower involved in any of that and in making decisions to not do anything related to that? Did he have some reason to want to put the deep-six on any question raising any issue about what went on with the Bidens and Burisma and firing Shokin and withholding a billion dollars in loan guarantees and enforcing a very explicit quid pro quo — you won’t get this billion dollars until you fire him? We don’t know. And because Manager [Rep. Adam] Schiff was guiding this whole process, because he was the chairman in charge of directing the inquiry and directing it away from any of those questions, that creates a real due process defect in the record that has been presented here.”
President Trump and his administration have long been focused on the issue of immigration, particularly as it pertains to those who would enter our nation in a clandestine, secretive manner.
Of course, given that there seems to be an automatic resistance to everything that Trump does, the left has attempted to portray this push to legalize all immigration through the naturalization process as somehow inherently racist.
This, in turn, has spawned the advent of so-called “sanctuary cities”, where Democrat leaders refuse to comply with the national legal standards when it comes to undocumented migrants. The Trump administration has repeatedly attempted to crack down on this sort of behavior, and is now employing the DOJ in their efforts.
Charging that so-called “sanctuary” cities that protect illegal immigrants are jeopardizing domestic security, Attorney General Bill Barr announced a slew of additional sanctions that he called a “significant escalation” against left-wing local and state governments that obstruct the “lawful functioning of our nation’s immigration system.”
Speaking at the National Sheriff’s Association 2020 Winter Legislative and Technology Conference in Washington, D.C., Barr said the Justice Department would immediately file multiple lawsuits against sanctuary jurisdictions for unconstitutionally interfering with federal immigration enforcement, and implement unprecedented national reviews of left-wing sanctuary governments and prosecutors.
“Let us state the reality upfront and as clearly as possible,” Barr began. “When we are talking about sanctuary cities, we are talking about policies that are designed to allow criminal aliens to escape. These policies are not about people who came to our country illegally but have otherwise been peaceful and productive members of society. Their express purpose is to shelter aliens whom local law enforcement has already arrested for other crimes. This is neither lawful nor sensible.”
The news comes after the Department of Justice filed an official complaint against the State of New Jersey after Garden State authorities attempt to codify insubordinate behavior by local authorities when it came to partnering with federal customs enforcement.
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 22: U.S. President Donald Trump (C) shakes hands with James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), during an Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception in the Blue Room of the White House on January 22, 2017 in Washington, DC. Trump today … Andrew Harrer-Pool/Getty Images
The Department of Justice (DOJ) inspector general (IG) released his report, which found that the FBI had an authorized “purpose” to investigate the 2016 Trump campaign; however, the agency committed a series of wrongdoings in the process.
The IG report found that the FBI made “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the agency’s applications to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, stating agents “failed to meet the basic obligation” to make sure their applications were accurate.
We do not speculate whether the correction of any particular misstatement or omissions, or some combination thereof, would have resulted in a different outcome. Nevertheless, the department’s decision-makers and the court should have been given complete and accurate information so that they could meaningfully evaluate probable cause before authorizing the surveillance of a US person associated with a presidential campaign.
House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jordan said that this report revealed that the FBI spied on more people than previously known as part of its investigation into the Trump campaign.
Jordan said in a statement Monday:
We thought they spied on two Americans, we now know it was four. The Inspector General’s report confirms what many of us feared: James Comey’s FBI ignored guidelines and rules in spying on President Trump’s campaign in 2016. We now know that within one week of the investigation opening, the FBI was surveilling the campaign and four specific individuals associated with it.
“The U.S. government’s powerful tools designed and authorized for international intelligence gathering were deployed to monitor the activities of a Presidential campaign,” Jordan added. “This is a grave matter that should deeply trouble Americans of all political stripes. There are many lingering questions and I expect both Chairman Nadler and Chairwoman Maloney to convene hearings with Inspector General Horowitz as soon as possible.”
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
Mainstream media dedicated quite a few headlines to Mueller’s testimony. And there’s been a great deal of speculation over what will and won’t be said. But an interesting development just surfaced. Apparently, Mueller asked for the limitations being imposed.
Attorney General Bill Barr [says it was] former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team who asked the Justice Department to send Mueller a letter telling him to keep his upcoming testimony to House lawmakers “within the boundaries” of the public version of his Russia probe report.
The letter provoked criticism from Democrats ahead of Wednesday’s highly anticipated hearing, with House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler calling it “incredibly arrogant.” Asked by Fox News why the Monday letter was sent, Barr said Mueller’s staff asked the department for guidance ahead of the hearing.
“At his press conference, Bob had said that he intended to stick with the public report and not go beyond that,” Barr said in an interview. “And in conversations with the department, his staff was reiterating that that was their position and they asked us for guidance in writing to explain or to tell them [what] our position was. So we responded in writing. The department sent the guidance that they requested.”
Asked directly if it was Mueller who asked for the letter, Barr replied, “Yes.”
The letter, obtained by Fox News on Monday, was signed by Associate Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer.
The letter said, “Should you testify, the Department understands that testimony regarding the work of the Special Counsel’s Office will be governed by the terms you outlined on May 29 — specifically, that the information you discuss during your testimony appears in, and does ‘not go beyond,’ the public version of your March 22, 2019 report to the Attorney General or your May 29 public statement.”
Speaking to Fox News, Barr also hit back at Nadler, who during a CNN interview Tuesday called the letter “incredibly arrogant” for trying to “instruct” Mueller what to say.
“He was misinformed as to the facts,” Barr said.
So, where is the apology from Nadler? Or CNN? Have they bothered to correct the narrative they falsely framed? Of course not. Because it’s ok for the liberal media get the facts twisted. I’d like to know where the factcheckers are? Further, exactly why did they sit this one out? Because the conservative media is crucified for being “Fake News” even when the facts are undeniable.
Just last week The Black Sphere was hit with “limited distribution” from Facebook after our article explained the flaws in the theories of climate change. But by all means, tell us AGAIN how Mueller delivered Trump to the Democrats all wrapped up in collusion with a bow on his head.
Mueller on Repeat
Wednesday Mueller will finally testify in front of the House Intelligence Committee and the House Judiciary Committee. It will be a long day picking apart the same report Congress already read. However, they’re hoping Mueller can bring his boring words to life enough to grab an indictment. Let me save them a little time. “Don’t count on it.”
Fox continues:
Mueller, meanwhile, also has asked that Aaron Zebley, his former chief of staff and his top aide on the Russia investigation, accompany him at the witness table during Wednesday’s hearing.
Republicans are opposed to the request. Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the Judiciary panel’s top Republican, called the move an “apparent stunt” by Democrats. He said it “shows the lengths Democrats will go to protect a one-sided narrative from a thorough examination by committee Republicans.”
Mueller has only spoken in public once about his investigation – in May, when he signaled his disinterest in testifying, saying, “There has been a discussion about an appearance before Congress. Any testimony from this office would not go beyond our report. It contains our findings and analysis, and the reasons for the decisions we made. We chose those words carefully and the work speaks for itself.”
Still, Democrats – as some in the party push to impeach President Trump – subpoenaed Mueller to testify.
During his press conference in May, Mueller said there “was not sufficient evidence to charge a conspiracy” over whether members of the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government during the 2016 presidential election. But he declined to reach a conclusion over whether the president took steps to obstruct his investigation – something Democrats are expected to focus their questions on Wednesday.
Let that sink in for a moment. Mueller already said there wasn’t sufficient evidence against the President to amount to hill of beans. Thus, this is just another waste of taxpayers’ money in hopes of poisoning the public against the President.
Meanwhile, Trump’s approval rating just hit another high.
The Justice Department announced Wednesday it would hand over documents related to the Obama-era Fast and Furious gun scandal to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Former President Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder had previously refused to produce documents requested by Oversight, documents which former Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz at the time called “critical” to pursuing the investigation.
US President Barack Obama (R) talks to outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder at the portrait unveiling ceremony at the Justice Department in Washington, DC on February 27, 2015. The event marks Holder’s anticipated departure after more than six years of service. (YURI GRIPAS/AFP/Getty Images)
The original Fast and Furious operation — conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — somehow allowed nearly 2,000 firearms to find their way into the hands of Mexican cartel members.
Firearms connected to the program were found at multiple crime scenes in both the United States and Mexico, including the murder scene of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – MARCH 20: Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) speaks a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence hearing concerning Russian meddling in the 2016 United States election, on Capitol Hill, March 20, 2017 in Washington, DC. While both the Senate and House Intelligence committees have received private intelligence briefings in recent months, Monday’s hearing is the first public hearing on alleged Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 election. (Photo by Zach Gibson/Getty Images)
Amanda Gonzalez, Gowdy’s communications director, told The Daily Caller the Oversight Committee “seeks all relevant facts so we can learn from the mistakes made by the Justice Department.”
“We have a responsibility to uncover why they worked so hard to hide this information from the Committee, the family of Brian Terry, and the American people,”she added.
President Obama did a lot of bad things, but pound for pound, one of the worst was the January 2014 “Dear Colleague”letter sent jointly by his Education and Justice Departments to all public schools threatening lawsuits over racial discrimination in student discipline. The letter came after years of his administration browbeating schools for their failure to discipline every race of student at the same rate.
As the Huffington Post put it: “American Schools Are STILL Racist, Government Report Finds.”The evidence? “Five percent of white students were suspended annually, compared with 16 percent of black students, according to the report.”Q.E.D. According to theory, there’s NO WAY blacks and Hispanics are doing things that require more school discipline than whites or Asians. So if more black students are expelled than Asians, well, gentlemen, we have our proof of racism. To comply, schools would have to stop suspending black kids for breaking a teacher’s jaw, but suspend Asians for dropping an eraser.
Using the same logic, I could close the achievement gap between blacks and Asians in a single day by going to every principal’s office in the country and burning the transcripts. (Liberalsare saying, “You know, that’s not a bad idea.”)
The “school-to-prison pipeline” argument for racial quotas in discipline was hatched in education schools and black studies departments. What I want to know is: How did they test the idea?
To validate the theory that recording students’ criminal behavior produces students with criminal records, we divided students into two groups. Group A we continued to suspend when they acted up; Group B we would not suspend no matter what — even when they engaged in their little mischief, like cracking heads with crowbars, dropping teachers off buildings, using a switchblade to cut other students’ eyes out.
RESULT: At the end of the year, Group B had better records.
Were the researchers really in suspense about how the experiment was going to turn out? I could have told them at the beginning that their odds of success were tremendous — unless they forgot halfway through and began accidentally suspending students in Group B. But the Obama administration said: Wow! That’s amazing. Do you think other schools could replicate those results?
One of the administration’s models was Broward County, Florida. Which is kind of important, now that we know that it was Broward’s official policy to make it impossible to arrest students like Nikolas Cruz, thus allowing him to amass a cache of firearms, walk into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and murder 17 people.
The “school-to-prison pipeline”nonsense may not be the explanation for every school shooting, but it is absolutely the explanation for THIS school shooting.No matter what Cruz did, no matter how many times his crimes were reported to the sheriff or school officials, there was no way a lad with a name like “Nikolas Cruz” was ever going to leave school with a record.
Broward County’s innovative idea of eliminating school discipline captivated Obama’s Department of Education. It was expressly cited by the department’s Civil Rights Division with the notation: “New model for other jurisdictions?”
Last October — nearly a year into the Trump administration — Broward Schools Superintendent Robert W. Runcie humbly noted that the district was receiving “invitations from around the country, including from The White House and Federal Office of Civil Rights, to share details about the historic reforms”on school discipline. Either: Liberals truly believe that all races commit crimes at exactly the same level, frequency and intensity; OR they are willing to have people die for their political agenda.
Conservatives didn’t pick this school shooting as the test case for gun control. It was liberals who were going to ride the Parkland shooting all the way to the midterms. They thought they had a beautiful story about the evil NRA.
Not the mass shooting in Orlando — because of the obvious immigration angle. Not San Bernardino — for the same reason. Not Las Vegas — probably for the same reason, but we’ll never know because law enforcement has issued only lies and nonsense about that shooting.
The media did all the hard work of making sure Parkland was the only topic on anyone’s mind, with everyone demanding that we “do something!”
And then we got the facts. Cruz’s criminal acts were intentionally ignored by law enforcement on account of Broward’s much-celebrated “school-to-prison pipeline”reforms.
Thank God for the internet, or we’d never have known the truth.
Admittedly, most of the harm done by the policy that enabled Cruz is not usually a mass shooting. The main damage done by the “school-to-prison pipeline” idiocy is: broken bones, smashed teeth, traumatized students, making it impossible for other students to learn, having a bad influence on marginal students and teachers sinking into depression.
Check at your local school for the full results. Thanks to the Obama administration, this crackpot theory is sweeping school districts across the nation! The next time Democrats control Congress and the presidency, we will have racial quotas for prisons, too. When that happens, you better hope the government hasn’t taken your guns.
An important player in multiple high-level investigations which have dominated national headlines is about to go from being relatively unknown to becoming a household name – his name is Michael Horowitz.
Horowitz is the inspector general at the Department of Justice and is heavily involved in the Russia investigation and the investigation into how the FBI handled the criminal investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – a report expected to come out in the next couple months.
A political appointee in both the Bush and Obama administrations, Horowitz’s yearlong investigation already reportedly contributed to the early resignation of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe. And his work has been felt in other ways.
Horowitz also uncovered a series of text messages between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page that led special counsel Robert Mueller to remove Strzok from his team. Those texts have fueled accusations among GOP lawmakers that Mueller’s probe is tainted by partisanship.
Those who know Horowitz portray him as an independent voice.
Bill Hamel, former inspector general for investigations at the Department of Education, heaped praise on Horowitz for his character.
“He is really one of the smartest and fairest people I have ever had the pleasure to work with,” Hamel said. “He’s a straight shooter and a fair guy. He’s an honest broker.”
“They have to be independent to do that job,” Hamel continued. “They can’t be swayed by political issues.”
People arrested this week for being members of the MS-13 Mara Salvatrucha street gang among other crimes, flash their gang’s hand sign from inside a jail cell at a police station in San Salvador October 12, 2012. REUTERS/Ulises Rodriguez
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) bagged the senior MS-13 leader for the Northeast U.S. along with 11 other high-ranking members of the gang in a Thursday crackdown operation, the New York Post reported.
The 17 defendants — five of whom are not MS-13 members — are facing charges including second-degree murder, drug trafficking, and conspiracy. They face up to 25 years in prison if convicted, the Post reported Thursday. The unnamed Long Island-based leader operated two cells, code-named “Hollywood” and “Sailors.” He reported and transferred proceeds directly to MS-13 heads in El Salvador, according to the DEA.
“It started as a small-scale drug investigation on Long Island, a DEA investigation which is still growing, and as it went along and we brought other agencies on, we saw a violent threat that pushed us to get even more agencies involved and eventually apprehend this regional leader of MS-13,” DEA Special Agent in Charge James Hunt said in a statement. “Not only did we arrest the highest-level Mara Salvatrucha leader in the Northeast who reports to MS-13 in El Salvador, but we sent a message that we will continue to investigate their violent crimes and bring justice to their victims.”
The crackdown is the most recent operation against MS-13 since President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have made it a top priority to bring down the cartel. Sessions has heavily criticized sanctuary cities as well, claiming they are sanctuaries for crime.
The Justice Department has also partnered with several South American countries to bring down the gang. The DOJ took part in an international operation in October alongside El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras that charged 3,800 gang members.
“MS-13 is one of the most violent and ruthless gangs in America today, endangering communities in more than 40 states. But under President Trump’s strong leadership, the Department of Justice is taking them off our streets,” Sessions said at the time. “MS-13 coordinates across our borders to kill, rape, and traffic drugs and underage girls; we’ve got to coordinate across our borders to stop them.”
“That’s exactly what our courageous and professional DOJ agents and attorneys are doing,” he added. “We will continue to maintain this steadfast policy and dismantle this gang.”
FILE PHOTO: The seal of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission hangs on the wall at SEC headquarters in Washington, DC, U.S. on June 24, 2011. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo
The Trump administration switched sides Wednesday in a case pending before the Supreme Court that could retroactively nullify tens of thousands of agency decisions.
The case, Lucia v. SEC, has major implications for the process by which federal agencies try or punish those in violation of laws or regulations.
The litigation concerns an agency’s decision to allow career bureaucrats to preside as the functional equivalent of judges during enforcement proceedings. These officials, called administrative law judges (ALJs), are hired by career bureaucrats. They are not appointed by the president, a court or an agency head, but they exercise significant authority on behalf of the U.S. government in official proceedings. ALJs can, among other things, issue subpoenas, make decisions about the credibility of witnesses or the admissibility of evidence, and issues provisional rulings that are generally upheld on final review — if a final review occurs at all.
The Constitution requires that the president, the courts, or the head of an executive department appoint all “inferior officers” of the United States.
A group of investment managers challenged the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) use of ALJs in an enforcement proceeding convened against them for alleged violations of securities law. The managers argue these proceedings are unlawful, because the ALJs are exactly the sort of “inferior officer” who must be appointed by the president, the court, or the head of an agency, since they exercise meaningful discretion on behalf of the federal government.
A lower federal court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, found in favor of the SEC. A three-judge panel found for the SEC, and the full court affirmed that decision on a five to five vote. The investment managers then appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Obama Justice Department sided with the SEC in the dispute, but Trump’s new solicitor general, Noel Francisco, changed positions Wednesday, and backed the money managers.
“Upon further consideration, and in light of the implications for the exercise of executive power under Article II, the government is now of the view that such ALJs are officers because they exercise ‘significant authority pursuant to the laws of the United States,’” Francisco wrote in a new brief at the Supreme Court.
A Supreme Court ruling against the SEC could have important implications for similarly-situated officials in other agencies. ALJs often preside in actions brought by a whole host of federal agencies. A finding against the SEC would potentially jeopardize, and perhaps invalidate, the legal status of thousands of other agency proceedings.
The Justice Department generally represents federal agencies before the high court. Accordingly, the solicitor general asked the justices to appoint another lawyer to represent the SEC as the litigation continues.
The high court could decide to take the case as soon as January.
Nearly 300 MS-13 gang members are behind bars following the conclusion of a joint international law enforcement effort led by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “Operation Raging Bull” resulted in the arrests of 214 MS-13 members and affiliates in the U.S. and 53 in El Salvador.
ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agents executed Operation Raging Bull in support of the Department of Justice’s recent prioritization of enforcement actions against violent transnational gangs.
“MS-13 has long been a priority for ICE. However we are now combating the gang with renewed focus and an unprecedented level of cooperation among DHS’s components and our domestic and international partners,” ICE Deputy Director and Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Director Thomas Homan said in a statement obtained by Breitbart Texas. “ICE has the ability to pursue complex criminal cases using our statutory authorities and to prevent crime by using our administrative arrest authorities to remove gang members from the country. We will not rest until every member, associate, and leader of MS-13 has been held accountable for their crimes, and those in this country illegally have been removed.”
Phase one of the operation followed up on the results of an 18-month investigation in El Salvador. The probe led to the arrests of 53 MS-13 gang members and affiliates in El Salvador. In early October, the second phase began in the States. Running from October 8 to November 11, law enforcement officers and agents from federal, state, and local agencies arrested 214 gang members and affiliates across the U.S.
“With more than 10,000 members across 40 states, MS-13 is one of the most dangerous criminal organizations in the United States today,” Sessions said in a statement on Thursday. “President Trump has ordered the Department of Justice to reduce crime and take down transnational criminal organizations, and we will be relentless in our pursuit of these objectives.”
“So far this year, we have secured convictions against more than 1,200 gang members and worked with our partners in Central America to arrest and charge some 4,000 MS-13 members,” the AG explained. “These 267 arrests are the next step toward making this country safer by taking MS-13 off of our streets for good.”
Ninety-three of the 214 arrests made in the U.S. were based on federal and/or state criminal charges, officials stated. Those charges include: murder, aggravated robbery, racketeering influenced corrupt organization (RICO) offenses, violent crime in aid of racketeering (VICAR) offenses, narcotics trafficking, narcotics possession, firearms offenses, domestic violence, assault, forgery, driving under the influence, and illegal entry/reentry. Immigration violations made up the remaining 121 arrests.
Operation Raging Bull – Nations of Origin chart – ICE
Only 16 of those arrested were U.S. citizens, the report states.Illegal aliens made up the overwhelming majority of those arrested. Officials arrested a total of 198 immigrants — 193 of which had no legal status. The MS-13 gang members came from El Salvador (135), Honduras (29), Mexico (17), Guatemala (12), Ecuador (4) and Costa Rica (1).
Of those arrested after entering the U.S. illegally, ICE officials reported that 64 came to the U.S. as Unaccompanied Alien Children — most of those are now adults.
Operation Raging Bull – Arrest Map – ICE
ICE officials provided examples of the types of crimes carried out by these MS-13 gang members:
In Baltimore, Maryland, the arrest and indictment of four MS-13 members on charges that include violent crimes in aid of racketeering and conspiracy to commit murder in aid of racketeering.
In McKinney, Texas, the arrest of an MS-13 gang member and citizen of El Salvador who is wanted for homicide by the National Civil Police of El Salvador (PNC).
In Denver, Colorado, the arrest of an MS-13 gang member and citizen of El Salvador who is wanted on an outstanding warrant for DUI and was found with three machetes in his possession.
In Los Angeles, California, the arrest of an MS-13 member and citizen of El Salvador, subject of an INTERPOL Red Notice for gang offenses and involvement with the murder of an PNC officer in El Salvador.
In San Francisco, California, the arrest of an MS-13 member and citizen of El Salvador, who is a wanted fugitive in El Salvador on an arrest warrant for violent crimes including homicide.
ICE officials added six MS-13 gang members to their most wanted list, including one wanted in Montgomery County, Texas, on murder charges. The other five fugitives are suspected of murdering Salvadoran police officers.
Operation Raging Bull – Most Wanted List – ICE
ICE uses the following criteria in confirming MS-13 gang membership or affiliation:
Individuals are confirmed as gang members if they admit membership in a gang; have been convicted of violating Title 18 USC 521 or any other federal or state law criminalizing or imposing civil consequences for gang-related activity; or if they meet certain other criteria such as having tattoos identifying a specific gang or being identified as a gang member by a reliable source.
Gang associates are individuals who exhibit gang member criteria but who are not formally initiated into the gang. Law enforcement officers encountering these individuals will determine whether indications of gang association are present by referring to the gang membership criteria.
Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX, GAB, and Facebook.
The Trump administration has just announced that they’ll be making some drastic changes to the way that the federal government hands out money.
The administration has announced that it will block Byrne Justice Assistance Grants, which is a HUGE pool of money that goes to helping cities and states with their law enforcement issues.
However, many so-called “Sanctuary Cities”refuse to obey federal laws or to even work with federal law enforcement agencies when it comes to dealing with illegal alien criminals. This reticence to abide by federal law has led the Trump administration to remove millions in federal funds from these lawless sanctuary cities.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Tuesday that sanctuary jurisdictions will lose access to certain federal law enforcement grants in 2017 if they prohibit officials from communicating with ICE, if they block ICE from interviewing jail inmates, or if they fail to notify ICE of the pending release of criminal aliens ICE is seeking to deport.
These particular grants, known as the Byrne Justice Assistance Grants, are the largest source of federal criminal justice funds for state, local, and tribal authorities.
This move is helping fulfill one early promise of the Trump administration: to impose consequences on the most egregious of the more than 300 sanctuary jurisdictions.
It is significant because a large share of the funds awarded in this program go to sanctuary jurisdictions.
For example, according to DOJ records, the four largest grants, and seven out of the top 10 recipients of the Byrne/JAG grants are sanctuaries. Under the new rules announced by Sessions, these four top grant-getters (New York City, Cook County, Ill., the City of Los Angeles, and Philadelphia) are likely to be disqualified from these grants in the future if they maintain their current policies toward ICE.
These cities received more than $10 million in grants in 2016.
You can see the list of Sanctuary Cities and the money they’ll be losing below.
Sanctuary Jurisdictions Receiving Byrne/JAG Grants in 2016
Awardee
Award Amount
Location
New York City Major’s Office of Criminal Justice
$4,298,245
N.Y.
City of Chicago
$2,333,428
Ill.
City of Los Angeles
$1,870,503
Calif.
City of Philadelphia
$1,677,937
Pa.
Clark County
$975,604
Nev.
Milwaukee County
$937,932
Wisc.
County of Alameda, CA
$876,345
Calif.
City of Baltimore
$743,842
Md.
City of Seattle
$673,166
Wash.
County of San Bernandino
$626,025
Calif.
Hennepin County
$564,510
Minn.
City of San Diego
$546,793
Calif.
City of Newark Police Department
$525,446
N.J.
City and County of San Francisco
$522,943
Calif.
City of Albuquerque
$479,125
N.M.
City of Portland
$465,810
Ore.
City of Boston
$447,390
Mass.
City of Riverside
$429,942
Calif.
City and County of Denver
$426,590
Colo.
City of Stockton
$383,843
Calif.
City of Orange
$377,708
Calif.
Baltimore, County of
$336,110
Md.
County of Sedwick
$331,032
Kan.
Prince Georges County
$312,667
Md.
Dekalb County
$306,768
Ga.
City of Tacoma
$287,469
Wash.
City of Fresno
$269,208
Calif.
City of New Orleans
$265,832
La.
City of Saint Paul
$260,540
Minn.
City of Sacramento
$256,776
Calif.
City of Colorado Springs
$255,100
Colo.
Sacramento County
$241,650
Calif.
City of Providence
$225,539
R.I.
City of New Haven
$217,907
Conn.
City of Hartford
$196,347
Conn.
City of Long Beach
$196,217
Calif.
City of Bridgeport
$195,781
Conn.
Contra Costa County
$194,562
Calif.
City of Aurora
$175,123
Colo.
County of Kern
$168,552
Calif.
County of Union
$167,034
N.J.
County of Stanislaus
$165,937
Calif.
Spokane County
$154,903
Wash.
County of Delaware
$154,093
Pa.
Montgomery County
$147,560
Md.
City of Bakersfield
$145,769
Calif.
City of North Las Vegas PD
$143,777
Nev.
City of Vallejo
$136,511
Calif.
City of Reno
$130,850
Nev.
City of Syracuse
$117,888
N.Y.
City of Oxnard
$112,635
Calif.
Santa Barbara County
$108,100
Calif.
Clayton County
$107,853
Ga.
City of Salinas
$98,308
Calif.
City of Pueblo
$95,787
Colo.
City of Compton
$95,747
Calif.
Clark County
$91,717
Wash.
City of New Brunswick
$90,341
N.J.
City of Lakewood
$87,988
Colo.
City of Topeka
$85,769
Kan.
Lane County
$84,217
Ore.
County of Jackson
$76,389
Calif.
City of Council Bluffs
$73,440
Iowa
City of Salem
$69,968
Ore.
City of Pomona Police Dept
$69,550
Calif.
City of Lancaster
$68,883
Calif.
City of Greeley
$65,164
Colo.
City of Palmdale
$64,321
Calif.
City of Gainesville
$63,771
Fla.
City of Yakima
$63,434
Wash.
City of Allentown
$62,429
Pa.
Inglewood City
$61,413
Calif.
City of Santa Cruz
$59,519
Calif.
Chesterfield County
$55,163
Va.
City of Pawtucket
$54,601
R.I.
City of Oceanside
$53,730
Calif.
City of Merced
$51,649
Calif.
City of Fort Collins
$51,561
Colo.
City of Redding
$50,688
Calif.
Linn County
$50,045
Iowa
City of Hawthorne
$50,021
Calif.
City of Waterbury
$49,914
Conn.
City of Boulder
$49,602
Colo.
City of Santa Rosa
$48,367
Calif.
Sonoma County
$48,287
Calif.
City of Woonsocket
$47,961
R.I.
Chula Vista City
$47,700
Calif.
Adams County
$46,754
Colo.
City of Escondido
$46,313
Calif.
Municipality of Norristown
$46,294
Pa.
County of Tulare
$46,020
Calif.
City of Everett
$45,593
Wash.
Arlington County
$44,203
Va.
City of Erie
$43,588
Pa.
City of Stamford
$43,468
Conn.
City of Elk Grove
$42,765
Calif.
City of Gallup
$42,240
N.M.
Shasta County
$42,045
Calif.
City of South Gate
$41,484
Calif.
County of Merced
$41,458
Calif.
City of Visalia
$40,764
Calif.
County of Washington
$39,976
Ore.
City of Bellingham
$39,398
Wash.
City of New Britain
$39,287
Conn.
Town of Hamden
$38,895
Conn.
Kitsap County
$38,053
Wash.
Incorporated Village of Hempstead
$37,982
N.Y.
City of Hanford
$37,643
Calif.
Yolo County
$37,455
Calif.
City of New London
$36,107
Conn.
City of Thornton
$34,968
Colo.
Henderson Police Department
$34,400
Nev.
City of Concord
$33,988
Calif.
Hernando County
$33,767
Fla.
Deschutes. County of
$33,730
Ore.
City of Norwalk
$33,712
Conn.
Tulare City
$33,694
Calif.
Snohomish County
$33,664
Wash.
City of Vista
$33,348
Calif.
City of Farmington New Mexico
$33,277
N.M.
West Haven City
$32,841
Conn.
City of Cambridge
$32,576
Mass.
City of Las Cruces
$31,665
N.M.
City of Norwalk
$30,840
Calif.
City of Roswell
$30,672
N.M.
City of Huntington Park
$30,440
Calif.
City of Turlock
$30,066
Calif.
Madera County
$29,426
Calif.
City of Central Falls
$28,961
R.I.
City of El Cajon
$28,759
Calif.
City of El Monte
$28,492
Calif.
City of Grand Junction
$28,487
Colo.
City of Iowa City
$28,453
Iowa
City of Santa Monica
$28,199
Calif.
City of Rancho Cordova
$28,012
Calif.
City of Citrus Heights
$27,692
Calif.
City of Cranston
$27,195
R.I.
City of Westminster
$27,169
Colo.
Valencia County
$26,889
N.M.
City of Downey
$26,358
Calif.
San Juan County
$26,237
N.M.
Thurston County
$25,982
Wash.
Clackamas County Juvenile Department
$25,771
Ore.
City of Spokane Valley
$25,628
Wash.
City of National City
$25,397
Calif.
City of Meriden
$25,175
Conn.
Dona Asta County
$24,904
N.M.
City of Santa Clarita
$24,677
Calif.
City of Chico
$24,570
Calif.
City of Bremerton
$23,752
Wash.
City of Bellflower
$23,370
Calif.
County of San Mateo
$23,317
Calif.
City of Lodi
$22,863
Calif.
City of Hillsboro
$22,297
Ore.
Town of East Hartford
$22,213
Conn.
Placer County
$22,116
Calif.
City of West Hollywood
$21,903
Calif.
City of Gardena
$21,556
Calif.
City of Delano
$21,289
Calif.
San Luis Obispo County
$20,862
Calif.
City of Bethlehem
$20,854
Pa.
Mesa County
$20,546
Colo.
County of Mendocino
$20,222
Calif.
City of Watsonville
$20,115
Calif.
City of Somerville
$20,004
Mass.
City of Roseville
$19,928
Calif.
City of Pico Rivera
$19,822
Calif.
City of West Covina
$19,662
Calif.
City of Santa Fe
$19,631
N.M.
City of San Mateo
$19,475
Calif.
City of Napa
$19,208
Calif.
City of Whittier
$18,915
Calif.
City of Paramount
$18,808
Calif.
City of Commerce City
$18,766
Colo.
City of Baldwin Park
$18,675
Calif.
El Dorado County
$18,435
Calif.
City of Carlsbad
$18,408
Calif.
City of Clovis
$17,616
N.M.
City of Grants Pass
$17,547
Ore.
City of Arvada
$17,484
Colo.
City of Lakewood
$17,447
Calif.
City of Manteca
$17,421
Calif.
City of Bell
$17,341
Calif.
City of Beaverton
$17,239
Ore.
City of Yuba City
$17,181
Calif.
City of Olympia
$17,168
Wash.
City of Daly City
$16,887
Calif.
City of Rio Rancho
$16,871
N.M.
City of Azusa
$16,834
Calif.
Norwich City
$16,638
Conn.
City of Loveland
$16,451
Colo.
City of Clovis
$16,434
Calif.
City of Longview
$16,389
Wash.
City of La Mesa
$16,354
Calif.
City of Everett
$16,288
Mass.
City of DeKalb
$16,225
Ill.
City of Glendale
$16,007
Calif.
City of Danbury
$15,985
Conn.
County of Lake
$15,980
Calif.
City of Centennial Colorado
$15,668
Colo.
County of Yuba
$15,553
Calif.
City of Dinuba
$15,527
Calif.
City of Burbank
$15,046
Calif.
County of Nevada
$15,020
Calif.
Douglas County Government
$14,813
Colo.
City of Santa Clara
$14,806
Calif.
City of Selma
$14,753
Calif.
Imperial County
$14,726
Calif.
City of Porterville
$14,726
Calif.
City of Petaluma
$14,566
Calif.
City of Atwater
$14,513
Calif.
City of Gilroy
$14,299
Calif.
City of Torrance
$14,193
Calif.
Village of Freeport
$14,140
N.Y.
Reedley Police Department
$14,113
Calif.
Town of Manchester
$14,068
Conn.
City of San Luis Obispo
$13,873
Calif.
City of Pittsburg
$13,659
Calif.
City of Sanger
$13,659
Calif.
City of Culver City
$13,579
Calif.
City of Redondo Beach
$13,552
Calif.
City of Newton
$13,458
Kan.
Tehama County District Attorney
$13,419
Calif.
Eureka Police Department
$13,232
Calif.
City of Arvin
$13,206
Calif.
City of Hollister
$13,152
Calif.
Township of Lakewood
$13,149
N.J.
City of Lawndale
$12,966
Calif.
City of Marysville
$12,956
Wash.
City of Sunnyvale
$12,832
Calif.
City of Alhambra
$12,805
Calif.
City of East Providence
$12,785
R.I.
City of El Centro
$12,725
Calif.
City of Mountain View
$12,485
Calif.
City of Ceres
$12,299
Calif.
Brighton Police Department
$12,036
Colo.
City of Redmond
$11,874
Ore.
City of Coalinga
$11,738
Calif.
City of Santee
$11,738
Calif.
City of Rosemead
$11,712
Calif.
Village of Los Lunas
$11,692
N.M.
City of Pearland
$11,670
Texas
City of Las Vegas
$11,537
N.M.
City of Tracy
$11,365
Calif.
City of Wheat Ridge
$11,288
Colo.
City of Northglenn
$11,217
Colo.
City of Puyallup
$11,115
Wash.
City of Walla Walla
$11,115
Wash.
City of Lemon Grove
$10,858
Calif.
Town of Stratford
$10,715
Conn.
City of Belen
$10,700
N.M.
City of La Puente
$10,671
Calif.
Covina Police Department
$10,645
Calif.
City of Moses Lake
$10,619
Wash.
City of Monterey
$10,351
Calif.
City of Red Bluff
$10,324
Calif.
City of Los Banos
$10,244
Calif.
City of Encinitas
$10,164
Calif.
City of Ridgecrest
$10,138
Calif.
City of South Lake Tahoe
$10,031
Calif.
Total
$32,737,204
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Onan Coca
Onan is the Editor-in-Chief at Romulus Marketing. He’s also the managing editor at Eaglerising.com, Constitution.com and the managing partner at iPatriot.com. Onan is a graduate of Liberty University (2003) and earned his M.Ed. at Western Governors University in 2012. Onan lives in Atlanta with his wife and their three wonderful children. You can find his writing all over the web.
Democratic super-lobbyist Tony Podesta grossed more than $500,000 to represent a Chinese company criminally convicted in March of sending illegal shipments of telecom equipment to Iran, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has learned.
The seriousness of the illegal sales to Iran were so extreme and continued for so long — from 2010 to last year — the Department of Justice (DOJ) imposed a record $1.19 billion fine on the ZTE Telecommunications company, making it the largest penalty ever imposed in a U.S. sanctions case.
The Chinese firm hired the Podesta Group, one of Washington’s biggest and best-connected lobbying companies in the nation’s capital, in January 2016. ZTE retained Podesta’s personal help as negotiations intensified for a final resolution with DOJ during the final year of President Barack Obama’s tenure in the White House.
The Shenzhen-based company pleaded guilty on March 7 to violating a 22-year-old ban on shipments to Iran, including “conspiring by illegally shipping … U.S.-origin items to Iran, obstructing justice and making a material false statement,”according to the DOJ.
The Department of Commerce also released other documents showing ZTE executives had “ongoing projects in all five major embargoed countries — Iran, Sudan, North Korea, Syria and Cuba.”
“We are putting the world on notice: The games are over,”said Commerce Secretary Wilbur L. Ross when the guilty plea settlement was announced. “Those who flout our economic sanctions and export control laws will not go unpunished — they will suffer the harshest of consequences.”
The ZTE equipment included network servers, optical devices and other telecommunication equipment, but also shipped surveillance software that could be used to spy on Iranian dissidents, DOJ said.
While Podesta was lobbying the Obama administration, his brother, John Podesta, was campaign chairman of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run.The brothers’ relationship meant Tony had special clout within the Obama administration as ZTE’s negotiations with DOJ progressed.
Podesta also had personal connections throughout the Democratic Party. He was former President Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign director and worked for four prior Democratic candidates, including former Sens. George McGovern, Edward Kennedy and Walter Mondale, as well as former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.
ZTE paid Podesta $35,000 per monthas negotiations peaked in 2016, according to data provided by the Center for Responsive Politics. The payments to the Podesta Group began in January 2016 and continue to this day, according to his company’s lobbying disclosure forms. Podesta’s lobbying firm grossed $530,000 from ZTE through the first quarter of 2017.
The firm reported its activities to the clerk of the U.S. Senate, including actively lobbying officials at the departments of Justice, Commerce, Treasury and State, as well as the White House National Security Council (NSC). Podesta did not report his representation of ZTE to DOJ under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), and reports to the Senate clerk are much less detailed than those required under FARA. Last year, Podesta also avoided FARA regulations with another foreign-based client, Sberbank, Russia’s largest bank. Podesta received $170,000 for six months of work as he sought to lift U.S. economic sanctions then weighing on the Russian bank, but did not report it under FARA, as reported by TheDCNF on March 6 and March 7.
ZTE’s problems did not occur overnight but have been known throughout the nation’s capital since 2012. The case broke that year when the House Intelligence Committee released a scathing report that criticized the national security risks posed by ZTE and its Chinese competitor Huawei. The House Intelligence Committee concluded that “Huawei and ZTE have failed to assuage the committee’s significant security concerns presented by their continued expansion into the US … In fact, given their obstructionist behavior, the committee believes addressing these concerns have become an imperative for the country.” Huawei eventually abandoned the U.S. market after intelligence officials alleged it was a national security threat to the United States as a potential cyber mole for the Chinese government.
Podesta also represented ZTE in 2013 to encourage the departments of Defense and State to maintain “open and transparent markets in U.S.-China trade relations,” according to a Reuters report that estimated ZTE paid Podesta $1.44 million in fees though March 2016.
Podesta organized a team in January 2016 comprised of 11 lobbyists to defend ZTE in the criminal investigation. Ten members of the team previously worked at either the departments of State, Defense or Commerce, or the NSC, including David Adams, who was the assistant secretary of state under Hillary Clinton. Another team member was Mark Tavlarides, who served as a special assistant for international security affairs at the Defense Department and at NSC under former President Bill Clinton.
ZTE’s stonewalling of federal agencies has been considered legendary. The UK’s Guardian, which covered the case, reported the company “refused to provide any documents on its activities in Iran, but did provide a list of 19 individuals who serve on the Chinese Communist Party committee within the company.” ZTE tried to keep documents from federal prosecutors by citing China’s secrecy laws. The DOJ reported that “ZTE’s most senior managers constructed an elaborate scheme to evade detection by U.S. authorities.”
Matthew Whitaker, a former U.S. attorney who founded the nonprofit government watchdog group Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT), told TheDCNF, “ZTE clearly understood what they were doing. The extreme level of deception of their lawyers and their consultants is why the U.S. Government used such a heavy hand.”
Another lawyer who represented one of the U.S. companies affected by ZTE’s illegal activities told TheDCNF that “they are persona non-grata within the government because of the intelligence concerns that have been raised in the past.”
The attorney, who requested anonymity, said he wasn’t surprised by ZTE’s hiring of Podesta. “When you have a desperate client, a desperate client goes to desperate means. And Podesta was so close to the prior administration,” he said.
TheDCNF sought comments from ZTE, its attorneys and the Podesta Group but none were received.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has granted a temporary reprieve to two of the 46 Obama-appointed U.S. attorneys he dismissed late last week, so that they may fulfill the requirements necessary to collect federal retirement benefits.
U.S. attorneys Deirdre Daly of the District of Connecticut and Richard Hartunian of the Northern District of New York have both worked in the U.S. Department of Justice in various capacities for over 19 years, and are just a few months away from reaching the 20-year threshold necessary for certain federal benefits. Sessions agreed to allow them to stay on for a few more months in order to reach the 20-year mark.
Daly and Hartunian both expressed gratitude to Sessions and President Donald Trump, thanking them for their graciousness and promising to oversee a quick and orderly transition.
“I thank the Attorney General and the Administration for affording me the opportunity to remain as the U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut so that I might complete 20 years of service to the Department of Justice in October,”Daly said in a statement. “I look forward to continuing to work on behalf of the residents of Connecticut in my remaining time, and I will focus on an orderly transition as I complete what has been a rewarding tenure in the Office.”
“The Attorney General has graciously permitted me to remain as United States Attorney for the Northern District of New York through June of 2017 so that I can complete twenty years of service to the Department of Justice,”Hartunian said. “I am very grateful to the Attorney General and the Administration for this opportunity to finish up a 20-year career and I will do everything I can to assist in the orderly transition to my successor.”
An additional Obama-appointee, Dana Boente, will also remain in his post as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Boente served as acting attorney general after the president dismissed Sally Yates for refusing to defend his first executive order on refugees and migrants in court. Boente oversaw efforts to defend the directive’s legality during his brief tenure. He is now serving as acting deputy attorney general pending the confirmation of Rod Rosenstein, the president’s nominee for that post.
The day after Hillary Clinton testified in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi last October, John Podesta, the Democrat’s campaign chairman, met for dinner with a small group of well-connected friends, including Peter Kadzik, a top official at the Justice Department.
The dinner arrangement, revealed in hacked Podesta emails released by WikiLeaks, is just the latest example of an apparent conflict of interest between the Clinton campaign and the federal agency charged with investigating the former secretary of state’s email practices.
Podesta and Kadzik, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, were in frequent contact, other emails show. In one email from January, Kadzik and Podesta, who were classmates at Georgetown Law School in the 1970s, discussed plans to celebrate Podesta’s birthday. And in another sent last May, Kadzik’s son emailed Podesta asking for a job on the Clinton campaign.
The post-Benghazi dinner was attended by Podesta, Kadzik, superlobbyist Vincent Roberti and other well-placed Beltway fixtures.
The exchanges are another example of the Clinton campaign’s “cozy relationship” with the Obama Justice Department, one former U.S. Attorney tells The Daily Caller.
“The political appointees in the Obama administration, especially in the Department of Justice, appear to be very partisan in nature and I don’t think had clean hands when it comes to the investigation of the private email server,” says Matthew Whitaker, the executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, a government watchdog group.
“It’s the kind of thing the American people are frustrated about is that the politically powerful have insider access and have these kind of relationships that ultimately appear to always break to the benefit of Hillary Clinton,”he added, comparing the Podesta-Kadzik meetings to the revelation that Attorney General Loretta Lynch met in private with Bill Clinton at the airport in Phoenix days before the FBI and DOJ investigating Hillary Clinton.
Kadzik, who started at the DOJ in 2013, helped spearhead the effort to nominate Lynch, who was heavily criticized for her secret meeting with the former president.
In the trenches
Podesta and Kadzik have a long history — one which has largely gone unnoticed during the ongoing Clinton email scandal.
Kadzik represented Podesta during the Monica Lewinsky investigation. And in the waning days of the Bill Clinton administration, Kadzik lobbied Podesta on behalf of Marc Rich, the fugitive who Bill Clinton controversially pardoned on his last day in office.
That history is cited by Podesta in another email hacked from his Gmail account.
In a Sept. 2008 email, which the Washington Free Beacon flagged last week, Podesta emailed an Obama campaign official to recommend Kadzik for a supportive role in the campaign.
Podesta, who would later head up the Obama White House transition effort, wrote that Kadzik was a “fantastic lawyer” who “kept me out of jail.”
It is unclear to which case Podesta was referring and whether he was joking about prison. But Podesta was caught in a sticky situation in both the Lewinsky affair and the Rich pardon scandal.
As deputy chief of staff to Clinton in 1996, Podesta asked then-United Nations ambassador Bill Richardson to hire the 23-year-old Lewinsky.
In April 1996, the White House transferred Lewinsky from her job as a White House intern to the Pentagon in order to keep her and Bill Clinton separate. But the Clinton team also wanted to keep Lewinsky happy so that she would not spill the beans about her sexual relationship with Clinton.
Richardson later recounted in his autobiography that he offered Lewinsky the position but that she declined it.
Podesta made false statements to a grand jury impaneled by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr for the investigation. But he defended the falsehoods, saying later that he was merely relaying false information from Clinton that he did not know was inaccurate at the time.
“He did lie to me,”Podesta said about Clinton in a National Public Radio interview in 1998. Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in Feb. 1999 of perjury and obstruction of justice charges related to the Lewinsky probe.
Kadzik, then a lawyer with the firm Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky, represented Podesta through the fiasco.
Podesta had been promoted to Clinton’s chief of staff when he and Kadzik became embroiled in another scandal.
Kadzik was then representing Marc Rich, a billionaire financier who was wanted by the U.S. government for evading a $48 million tax bill. The fugitive, who was also implicated in illegal trading activity with nations that sponsored terrorism, had been living in Switzerland for 17 years when he sought the pardon.
To help Rich, Kadzik lobbied Podesta heavily in the weeks before Clinton left office on Jan. 20, 2001.
A House Oversight Committee report released in May 2002 stated that “Kadzik was recruited into Marc Rich’s lobbying campaign because he was a long-time friend of White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.” The report noted that Kadzik contacted Podesta at least seven times regarding Rich’s pardon.
On top of the all-hands-on-deck lobbying effort, Rich’s ex-wife, Denise Rich, had doled out more than $1 million to the Clintons and other Democrats prior to the pardon. She gave $100,000 to Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate campaign and another $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library.
WikiLeaks revelations
The first mention of personal contact between Podesta and Kadzik in the WikiLeaks dump is in an Oct. 23, 2015 email sent out by Vincent Roberti, a lobbyist who is close to Podesta and his superlobbyist brother, Tony Podesta. In it, Roberti refers to a dinner reservation at Posto, a Washington D.C. restaurant.
The dinner was set for 7:30 that evening, just a day after Clinton gave 11 hours of testimony to the Benghazi Committee.
Podesta and Kadzik met several months later for dinner at Podesta’s home, another email shows. And in an email sent on May 5, 2015, Kadzik’s son asked Podesta for a job on the Clinton campaign.
Kadzik’s help for Clinton during email probe
As head of the Office of Legislative Affairs, Kadzik handles inquiries from Congress on a variety of issues. In that role he was not in the direct chain of command on the Clinton investigation. The Justice Department and FBI have insisted that career investigators oversaw the investigation, which concluded in July with no charges filed against Clinton.
But Kadzik worked on other Clinton email issues in his dealings with Congress. Last November, he denied a request from Republican lawmakers to appoint a special counsel to lead the investigation.
In a Feb. 1, 2016 letter in response to Kadzik, Florida Rep. Ron DeSantis noted that Kadzik had explained “that special counsel may be appointed at the discretion of the Attorney General when an investigation or prosecution by the Department of Justice would create a potential conflict of interest.”
DeSantis, a Republican, suggested that Lynch’s appointment by Bill Clinton in 1999 as U.S. Attorney in New York may be considered a conflict of interest. He also asserted that Obama’s political appointees — a list which includes Kadzik — “are being asked to impartially execute their respective duties as Department of Justice officials that may involve an investigation into the activities of the forerunner for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.” Kadzik does not appear to have responded to DeSantis’ questions.
Kadzik’s first involvement in the Clinton email brouhaha came in a Sept. 24, 2015 response letter to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley in which he declined to confirm or deny whether the DOJ was investigating Clinton.
Last month, Politico reported that Kadzik angered Republican lawmakers when, in a classified briefing, he declined to saywhether Clinton aides who received DOJ immunity were required to cooperate with congressional probes.
Kadzik also testified at a House Oversight Committee hearing last month on the issue of classifications and redactions in the FBI’s files of the Clinton email investigation.
The Justice Department declined to comment on the record for this article.
Undated photo from a social media account of Omar Mateen (Photo: Myspace/Handout via REUTERS)
The Justice Department has released the transcript of Omar Mateen’s phone call with Orlando police after he opened fire in a gay nightclub, which Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Monday will help people understand Mateen’s motives. Despite explicit statements from Mateen — a gay Muslim terrorist — that he was inspired to carry out the shooting on behalf of the Islamic State, and a history of threatening violence based on Islam, as well as revelation that he was the subject of two FBI investigations for suspected terrorist ties, some still question his motives.
Several Heritage Foundation researchers gave their reaction to the spending bill that was announced this week:
Early Wednesday morning, the House Rules Committee posted text for the Consolidated Appropriations Act of the 2016 fiscal year (FY). This $1.1 trillion spending package, known as the omnibus, shows Washington at its worst.
Lawmakers are being asked to sign off on 2,200 pages (with an additional 1,000 pages of explanatory materials), at the 11th hour, without having had sufficient time to analyze its contents.
The House plans to begin consideration of the bill on Friday morning, with final votes expected to come Friday afternoon before the House leaves town until Jan. 5. Exact timing of when the Senate will vote on the bill is unclear, but lawmakers are expected to wrap up consideration quickly and begin their vacation, perhaps as early as Friday night. In the meantime, another short-term continuing resolution will be necessary to avoid a government shutdown at midnight.
The omnibus spending package, along with the tax extenders package, is full of provisions that were negotiated behind closed doors.
Heritage experts have combed through the bill’s numerous provisions and have provided their analysis on several key issues below:
Once again, Congress has missed a critical opportunity to abide by the Budget Control Act spending caps and will not rein in wasteful and excessive spending. Base spending for the omnibus comes in at $1.066 trillion, the level agreed upon in the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015. The defense and non-defense subcategories are at the agreed upon levels as well.
Overall, FY2016 base discretionary spending in the omnibus is $50 billion higherthan the original Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA) levels.
The Bipartisan Budget Act set a maximum amount of discretionary spending, not a spending goal that had to be obtained. Since its enactment in 2011, the Budget Control Act caps set by the law have been exceeded each year.
With the Bipartisan Budget Act’s revised FY2017 spending level already set to bust the caps and be above the FY2018 cap, unless Congress starts making the tough spending decisions and abiding by the Budget Control Act, we are poised to continue this trend in the future.
War Account as Slush Fund
Funding for Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) is also at the $73.7 billionlevel agreed upon in the Bipartisan Budget Act, with defense receiving $58.8 billion and non-defense receiving $14.9 billion in FY 2016. The Bipartisan Budget Act increased Overseas Contingency Operations funding by $16 billion for each of the next two years.
The $8 billion designated for non-defense is likely to be used to cover base budget needs of the State Department rather than for continuing war efforts, once again using Overseas Contingency Operations money as a slush fund to increase non-defense discretionary spending up to the president’s requested level while defense remains underfunded.
Even Higher Spending With Gimmicks
On top of the base discretionary funding and Overseas Contingency Operations funding agreed upon in the Bipartisan Budget Act, the omnibus also includes other above-the-cap spending for purposes such as disaster and emergency declarations and program integrity initiatives.
The bill includes $7.1 billion in disaster spending, which funds responses to presidential declarations for natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires, among other purposes.
The omnibus also provides $1.5 billion for program integrity initiatives that aim to combat Medicaid waste, fraud, and abuse. An additional $698 million is also appropriated to the Department of the Interior for emergency declarations. While some of these may be worthwhile and necessary purposes, these expenses (which recur almost every year) should be accounted for in the base budget. Funds in excess of the discretionary cap should be appropriated only when a true emergency or unforeseen disaster occurs. They should not be used as another gimmick to circumvent the spending caps.
The omnibus also relies on Changes in Mandatory Programs (CHIMPs) to bust through the (already inflated) spending caps. These are changes to mandatory spending and entitlements that affect current-year budget authority and are treated as changes in discretionary spending for the purpose of scoring appropriations bills.
Sometimes these are real savings and may be used as an acceptable offset, but most of the time they are simply a way to increase discretionary spending in the current year with no real savings ever being realized.
The FY2016 Conference Budget Resolution took a first step in reining in CHIMPs spending by limiting the total amount that could be used as an offset over the each of the next four years. However, the agreement still allows for over $19 billion in additional spending this fiscal year. This is purely additional discretionary spending over the agreed upon budget caps. Moving forward, the use of CHIMPs should be eliminated completely.
—Justin Bogie, senior policy analyst, Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies
Sanctuary Cities Spared
The omnibus does not restrictDepartment of Homeland Security or Department of Justice grants to cities that resist the enforcement of federal immigration law, also known as sanctuary cities. Federalism gives local governments some latitude in choosing to oppose or not assist the federal government in enforcing immigration law, but the federal government does not have to reward or pay for the results of such policies.
No Additional Assurances on Vetting Refugees
The omnibus also does not request additional assurances, intelligence assessments, or risk-based plans for the refugee process. If Congress is genuinely concerned about the vetting of refugees, then it should have requested additional information with which to oversee such vetting programs.
Similarly, while the bill makes small improvements to the Visa Waiver Program (VWP), it also adds largely unhelpful and even counterproductive restrictions to the program by denying Visa Waiver Program to individuals who have travelled to Iraq, Syria, or other countries. Importantly, it also does not expand the program in order to reap additional security benefits.
—David Inserra, policy analyst for homeland security and cybersecurity, Allison Center for Foreign and National Security Policy
Risk Corridor Bailouts Avoided
The bill also continues a provision to prohibit the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Program Management funds from being used to make payments under Obamacare’s risk corridor program. This will prohibit the administration from using undedicated funds to bail out unprofitable qualified health insurance plans in the individual and small group markets.
Planned Parenthood Affiliates Still Funded
The trillion-dollar budget deal would continue to allow hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds, from both discretionary funding under Title X and from Medicaid reimbursements, to flow to Planned Parenthood Federation of America affiliates—despite recent disturbing videos showing Planned Parenthood officials haggling over the price of body parts of aborted babies.
No federal funds should be going to Planned Parenthood Federation of America or any of its affiliates or health centers. Disqualifying Planned Parenthood affiliates from receiving Title X family planning grants, Medicaid reimbursements, and other federal grants and contracts should not reduce the overall funding for women’s health care. The funds currently flowing to Planned Parenthood affiliates should be redirected to health centers that offer comprehensive health care without entanglement in abortion on demand. Members of Congress had the opportunity with the year-end funding bill to end both mandatory and discretionary federal funding of Planned Parenthood and end taxpayer entanglement with the largest abortion provider in the country, but they failed to do so.
Failure to Protect Conscience Rights
While long-standing pro-life riders are included in the omnibus, a much-needed policy to address serious conscience violations is missing from the spending bill.
In August 2014, the Department of Managed Health Care in California mandated that almost every health plan in the state include coverage of elective abortions, including those plans offered by religious organizations, religious schools, and even churches. The Weldon Amendment prohibits federal, state, and local governments that receive certain federal funds from discriminating against health care entities, including health care plans, that do not “provide, pay for, provide coverage of or refer for abortions.”While that policy has been included in appropriations bills since 2004 (including the current omnibus), enforcement of the conscience policy is left to the discretion of officials in the Department of Health and Human Services, which has a poor track record of moving quickly (if at all) on complaints. The Obama administration has so far effectively ignored requests to HHS for help obtaining relief from California’s mandate.
In response to this urgent problem, Congress should provide victims of discrimination the ability to defend their freedom of conscience in court, not leave them to wait on bureaucrats in the Obama administration. The Abortion Non-Discrimination Act would do just that. The act is currently part of the Health Care Conscience Rights Act, H.R. 940, a bill that would address other conscience issues in Obamacare.
—Sarah Torre, policy analyst, DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society
More Bad Than Good on Energy Provisions
If you were to put a jelly bean for each energy provision on a two-sided scale, one side being good free-market provisions and the other being corrupt energy provisions, the bad side of the scale would be hitting the floor.
The good provision is a very good provision, indeed. Lifting the crude oil export ban would generate more jobs for Americans, supply the United States and the world with more affordable energy, and provide important geopolitical benefits for Washington and its allies.
But the numerous bad provisions waste taxpayer money and provide targeted tax credits to politically connected companies. They include:
A five-year extension of the wind production tax credit (PTC). The wind PTC, which has been around since 1982, artificially propped up an industry, advanced special interests, and allocated labor and capital away from more competitive uses in the marketplace.
A five-year extension of the solar investment tax credit (ITC), which companies can now take when they begin construction rather than when they start producing power. Solar companies would be better off in the long run without the ITC. They would understand their true price point to be competitive in the short and long run.
A ramp up in Department of Energy spending for renewables, energy efficiency provisions, fossil fuels, and nuclear. The Department of Energy has ballooned by subsidizing and forcing energy technologies into the marketplace. The private sector has demonstrated countless times that it is far better equipped than government to allocate resources and develop commercially viable technologies.
A handout for the oil industry. The legislation would provide a targeted tax credit for small, independent refiners and allow independents to exempt 75 percent of transportation costs when calculating their Section 199 manufacturing deductions. This is nothing more than obvious compensation for lifting the ban on crude oil exports. Further, the energy tax provisions in the omnibus speak to the need for the federal government to stop using the tax code to pick winners and losers for all energy sources and technologies.
A three-year extension of the Land and Water Conservation Fund. The massive amount of land owned and managed by the U.S. government has resulted in land mismanagement, stifled opportunities for recreation and resource production, and poor environmental stewardship. Reauthorizing the LWCF is a recipe for prolonging mediocre and often poor federal control of America’s land. Permanently eliminating the LWCF is recognition that improved economic growth and environmental quality are born not out of Washington, but in the states.
Absent from the text are provisions that would block the Obama administration’s climate change regulations, regulations that will drive up energy costs no climate benefit. Instead, the federal government has hundreds of millions of dollars to dole out internationally through the Climate Investment Fund and Strategic Climate Fund. Notably missing from the omnibus spending bill is a provision prohibiting spending on the Green Climate Fund.
This is no compromise, but instead a large extension of government intrusion in energy markets where it does not need to be.
—Nick Loris, Herbert and Joyce Morgan fellow, Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies
Failure on WOTUS (EPA Water Rule)
The omnibus bill fails to prohibit funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s and Army Corps’ controversial “waters of the United States” rule, which would greatly expand the types of waters that could be covered under the Clean Water Act, from certain man-made ditches to so-called waters that are actually dry land most of the time.
In addition to this rule being an attack on both property rights and the states’ role in protecting the environment, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) just ruled that the EPA broke the law in developing it.
The policy problems and the agency overreach should have been more than enough to block funding for the rule. Both the House and the Senate have already passed different bills that would repeal the rule (the same bill still needs to be passed by both chambers). Attorneys general and agencies from at least 31 states are suing the federal government regarding the rule. Even environmental groups are suing.
If it somehow wasn’t a no-brainer to block funding for the water rule before, then it certainly should have been after the GAO’s opinion. The GAO found that the EPA violated the law when developing the rule by trying to inappropriately gin up support for the rule through improper lobbying activities and covert propaganda.Their illegal actions, according to GAO, were focused not just on the regulatory process, but also on encouraging opposition to legislation that would have blocked efforts to undermine the rule. The legislative process itself, and the work of many members of Congress, was itself being undermined by EPA’s actions. Yet Congress still allowed the rule to go forward. If Congress won’t use the power of the purse to block this rule, when will it ever use the power of the purse to block any rule?
Funding Barred for Unrelated Dietary Guidelines
Every five years, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services issue dietary guidelines to advise the public on healthy eating. The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) submitted its scientific report, which helps to inform the final guidelines, in February. Throughout the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee process, there has been a focus on non-dietary issues such as sustainability, climate change, and other environmental factors.
The omnibus bill does prohibit funding for guidelines that are not limited to nutritional and dietary information (Division A, Sec. 734). It would also direct the Secretary of Agriculture to work with the National Academy of Medicine to study the Dietary Guidelines process (Division A, Sec. 735). The problem, though, is that any new Dietary Guidelines, even if claimed to be based on nutritional and dietary factors alone, will have no legitimacy, because the process was dominated by environmental concerns, not dietary concerns.
Repeals Mandatory Country of Origin Labeling
The mandatory country of origin labeling (COOL) requirements for certain meat products has been the subject of significant controversy. Both Canada and Mexico have correctly alleged that COOL has a discriminatory effect on their livestock exports to the United States, violating trade obligations. COOL is merely a non-tariff trade barrier, having nothing to do with health or safety, which is supposed to provide consumers information.
Yet the government doesn’t need to impose such a requirement if consumers value such information; the market will respond accordingly. As it turns out, consumers don’t value this information. The World Trade Organization (WTO) has repeatedly agreed with Canada and Mexico. After just receiving WTO authorization, Canada and Mexico are about to impose over a billion dollars in retaliatory tariffs on the United States. The omnibus bill would repeal COOL before this costly retaliation is imposed on a wide range of industries (Division A, Sec. 759).
—Daren Bakst, research fellow in agricultural policy, Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies
Small Steps on School Lunch Funding
The omnibus continues funding for the USDA’s new school lunch standards, which were implemented as part of the Healthy and Hunger Free Kids Act of 2010.
However, these standards have been burdensome to schools and should not be funded. For example, a January 2014 report by the GAO shows that since the implementation of the new standards, participation in the school lunch program has declined, there has been an increase in food waste among students, and some schools have dropped out of the program at least partially due to the new standards.
The new standards have also imposed greater costs on schools, such that some have even have had to draw from their education funds to cover them.
The omnibus takes small steps in the right direction by
1) allowing states to exempt schools from the whole grain requirement if a state can “demonstrate hardship, including financial hardship, in procuring specific whole grain products which are acceptable to the students and compliant with the whole grain-rich requirements,” and by
2) prohibiting funds to go toward rules that would require a reduction in sodium in school meals until scientific research can establish that such a decrease is beneficial to children.
The decision of what children eat is best left to parents, not bureaucrats in Washington. Congress should prohibit any funding from going toward these costly and heavy-handed standards.
—Rachel Sheffield, policy analyst, DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society; and Daren Bakst, research fellow in agricultural policy, Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies
Congress Is at It Again With Tax Extenders
The tax extenders are a yearly exercise that Congress is long overdue to end. Lawmakers should go through the various policies in the package, extend those that are sound policy, and eliminate those that are not, all in a revenue-neutral manner. Once again, Congress did not follow this sensible approach.
To its credit, Congress made several policies permanent. Importantly, it made the Research and Development Credit, section 179 expensing for small businesses, and the exemption from subpart F income of active financing income permanent. These are all necessary policies, given the dilapidated state of the tax system. It will be a relief in future years that they are no longer set to expire.
The price of these permanent extensions was steep. Congress also made permanent the stimulus’ expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the Child Tax Credit, and the American Opportunity Credit. These permanent expansions increase spending by nearly $160 billion over the next 10 years. Congress should have offset this spending with spending cuts in other areas.
The bill also extends bonus depreciation, better called 50 percent expensing, for five years. It would have been better had Congress made it permanent, too, but a five-year extension is better than a two-year continuance.
Disappointingly, Congress also included a five-year extension of other policies that are not sound, including the New Markets Tax Credit and the Work Opportunity Credit. These policies are examples of Congress using the tax code to pick winners and losers. They should have been among the first extenders to be permanently excised instead of receiving an expanded extension.
The rest of the extenders get the at-this-point standard two-year extension. Since the extenders were expired for 2015, the two-year bill extends them retroactively for 2015 and through 2016. Congress will be back at this game either in the lame duck session at the end of 2016 or sometime in 2017.
Obamacare’s Taxes
A two-year moratorium on Obamacare’s medical device tax, for 2016 and 2017, is also included in the tax bill. It is a bad tax, but suspending it should not be confused with repealing Obamacare.
Strangely, the omnibus spending bill includes a two-year delay of the beginning of the Cadillac tax on high-cost health insurance plans from 2018 to 2020, as well as the delay of the tax on health insurers, and an extension of various alternative energy credits, including the production tax credit. The policies should not have been extended, especially since Congress did not adopt equivalent Obamacare spending cuts.
Delaying the start of the Cadillac tax was the wrong approach, especially since Congress did not adopt equivalent Obamacare spending cuts. Congress should instead use it as a pivot to capping the tax exclusion of employer-provided health insurance.
Even though it is long past time for Congress to end its practice of dealing with the extenders semiannually, it did make certain important policies permanent. That will make the extenders easier to deal with next time and lowers the revenue baseline for tax reform. These are steps in the right direction after years of standing still.
Curtis Dubay, research fellow for tax and economic policy, Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies
“Disagreement is not hatred, and the truth is not hate speech. Somebody needs to tell that to President Obama.”
If you have ever wondered whether President Obama has an abiding hostility to people of Christian faith, wonder no more. He believes we are a threat to national security. If you are a sincerely devoted follower of Jesus Christ, your president believes you are a potential domestic terrorist.
I do not exaggerate. Ina gathering at George Washington Universitythis week, Obama’s assistant attorney general for national security, John Carlin, revealed that the Department of Justice is creating a brand new position just to monitor us. The position, domestic terrorism counsel, will be created to combat the “real and present threat” of domestic terrorism.
And where, pray tell, does this threat come from? From the Muslim Brotherhood, which has a stated goal of exterminating Western civilization and sabotaging our miserable house from within? Nope. From ISIS, which is actively recruiting jihadists in all 50 states? Nope. Jihadists who are sneaking into the United States disguised as Syrian refugees? Nope.
No, the real threat to our national security, according to our president and his minions, is coming from the Family Research Council and the American Family Association.
Carlin lauded the work of the thoroughly discredited Southern Poverty Law Center, which is so blatantly and maliciously biased against Christians that other parts of Obama’s administration – the FBI, the Pentagon, and the U.S. Army – are getting as far away from the SPLC as they can.
But the folks at SPLC are still useful to the DOJ, which is desperate to paint conservative Christians as a greater threat to our domestic tranquility than people who are determined to decapitate us in the name of Allah.
According to Carlin, the SPLC does the noble work of “examining what the threat is, observing it, and reporting on it,” and claimed that its work is “very important.”
The SPLC, mind you, is the group whose “hate group” map was used by domestic terrorist Floyd Corkins to identify the Family Research Council as his target for a massacre. Only the bravery of an unarmed security guard prevented what could have been one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history. In other words, if anybody’s the hate group here, it’s the SPLC.
Heidi Beirich, the SPLC’s intelligence project director, teamed with Carlin to demonize pro-family groups. She told a reporter that the SPLC classifies groups as hate groups “on the basis of ideology.” In other words, the SPLC will vilify groups because of what they believe, not because of what they do or because they have demonstrated any propensity toward violence.
And she flatly admits it. “We post groups on the basis of ideology, not whether they’re violent or not.”
And then she identified two groups by name: Family Research Council and American Family Association. “[W]hat they’re putting out is anti-gay material so gay people are pedophiles, or molesters, or whatever the case may be, and that’s why they’re on the list and that’s the direct analogy.”
We – FRC and AFA – “are simply pushing propaganda that [the SPLC] consider(s) hateful.”She acknowledges that theirs is a purely subjective standard: “It’s our opinion that it’s hateful, and that’s basically it.”
The plain truth is that we at FRC and AFA don’t hate a living soul. We love homosexuals enough to tell them the truth about the physical and spiritual dangers of the homosexual lifestyle. We want something better for them than the darkness and disease associated with homosexual behavior. We want them to come out of that darkness into the light of the gospel of Christ. We are for the homosexual, and so we must be against the normalization and promotion of homosexuality.
Note the SPLC is no longer accusing FRC and AFA of hate or of violence based on some objective standard. They have simply made a purely subjective assessment that our beliefs about human sexuality and our defense of natural marriage are so offensive to them that we must become the target of the unlimited resources of the federal government.
Do we disagree with the homosexual lobby about homosexuality? Of course. Do we hate them? Absolutely not. Do we advocate violence against them? Never have, never will. We are simply determined to tell the moral, spiritual, and physical truth about non-normative sexual behavior.
Bottom line: disagreement is not hatred, and the truth is not hate speech. Somebody needs to tell that to the president.
Bryan Fischer hosts “Focal Point with Bryan Fischer” every weekday on AFR Talk (American Family Radio) from 1:00 – 3:00 p.m. (Central).
Sadly, the 18 month investigation into the IRS targeting of conservative groups isn’t over, and it may be worse than anyone thought. A federal judge has broken loose more emails that the DOJ had surely hoped would never surface. The picture it reveals isn’t pretty. The documents prove that Lois Lerner met with DOJ’s Election Crimes Division a month before the 2010 elections.
It has to be embarrassing to the DOJ, which may not be the most impartial one to be investigating the IRS. In fact, the DOJ withheld over 800 pages of Lerner documents citing “taxpayer privacy” and “deliberative privilege.” Yet these internal DOJ documents show Ms. Lerner was talking to DOJ officials about prosecuting tax-exempt entities (yes, criminally!) two years before the IRS conceded there was inappropriate targeting.
Ms. Lerner met with top officials from the DOJ’s Election Crimes Branch in October of 2010. Although Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the DOJ (Judicial Watch v. Department of Justice, No. 14-cv-01239), the DOJ coughed up dirt only on court order. Even then, the DOJ handed over only two pages of heavily redacted emails.
What’s more, the DOJ withheld 832 pages in their entirety. They revealed that Mr. Obama’s DOJ called an October 8, 2010 meeting with the IRS “concerning 501(c)(4) issues.” On September 30, 2010, the DOJ’s Election Crimes prosecutor emailed Ms. Lerner:
“Hi Lois-It’s been a long time, and you might not remember me, I’ve taken on [REDACTED] duties. I’m looking forward to meeting you, Can we chat in advance? I’m a [REDACTED]”
Ms. Lerner responded on October 2, 2010:
“Sure-that’s a good Idea [sic]. I have a meeting out of the office Monday morning, but will try you when I get back sometime early afternoon. You can try me at 202 283-8848.”
Documents from a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the IRS show that Ms. Lerner asked the DOJ whether tax-exempt entities could be criminally prosecuted. This May 8, 2013 email by Ms. Lerner went to Nikole C. Flax, Chief of Staff to Acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller, who would later be fired by President Obama:
“I got a call today from Richard Pilger Director Elections Crimes Branch at DOJ … He wanted to know who at IRS the DOJ folk s [sic] could talk to about Sen. Whitehouse idea at the hearing that DOJ could piece together false statement cases about applicants who “lied” on their 1024s–saying they weren’t planning on doing political activity, and then turning around and making large visible political expenditures. DOJ is feeling like it needs to respond, but want to talk to the right folks at IRS to see whether there are impediments from our side and what, if any damage this might do to IRS programs. I told him that sounded like we might need several folks from IRS…”
DOJ’s Mr. Pilger admitted that DOJ officials met Ms. Lerner in October 2010. Moreover, according to congressional investigators, a Lerner email from October 5, 2010 shows the IRS sent the FBI and DOJ a “1.1 million page database of information from 501(c)(4) tax exempt organizations” that contained confidential taxpayer information.
In her May 2013 answer to a planted question about the alleged targeting of Tea Party and conservative groups, Ms. Lerner suggested that the alleged targeting occurred due to an “uptick” in 501 (c)(4) applications to the IRS. In reality, there was a decrease, and as for targeting (what targeting?), well, you know the rest.
Remember those rogue IRS employees in Cincinnati? They were confused. And while all Americans should be concerned, Judicial Watch sounds fit to be tied.
“No wonder the Department of Justice under Eric Holder has done no serious investigation of the Obama IRS scandal,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “These new documents dramatically show how the Justice Department is up to its neck in the IRS scandal and can’t be trusted to investigate crimes associated with the IRS abuses that targeted Obama’s critics,” he said. “Richard Nixon was impeached for less.”
Perhaps the latter is an overstatement. Yet it is getting harder and harder to simply accept President Obama’s ‘no smidgen of corruption’ remark made to Fox News in February, no matter how sincere and forthright his delivery.
You can reach me at Wood@WoodLLP.com. This discussion is not intended as legal advice, and cannot be relied upon for any purpose without the services of a qualified professional.
Little-noticed provision would dramatically expand DOJ’s authority at the polls
11:56 AM 03/28/2014
Robert D. Popper
Senior Attorney, Judicial Watch
Imagine if we were confronted with another dispute over the outcome of a presidential election like that between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000. Now imagine that a highly political Attorney General – let’s call him Eric – were authorized by federal law to intervene in that dispute, and to throw the weight of the U.S. Justice Department behind the claims of one of the candidates. That disturbing scenario is entirely plausible under a proposed amendment to federal voting law that would dramatically expand the jurisdiction of the Justice Department and revolutionize the way it litigates voting rights lawsuits.
In early February, Republican and Democratic sponsors introduced the “Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2014,” ostensibly to repair the provisions of the Voting Rights Act struck down by the Supreme Court last June in Shelby County v. Holder. The bill has been roundly (and rightly) criticized, primarily because its application would depend on the existence of “violations” that do not entail any actual discrimination, because its protections depend on race-based distinctions, and because it imposes burdensome new reporting requirements.
What has escaped comment so far, however, is the fact that a little-noticed provision of the bill would abolish the longstanding legal principle that the U.S. Attorney General has no authority to sue directly for certain violations of the Constitution. An amendment buried deep in the final pages of the bill alters the Voting Rights Act to allow the Attorney General to seek an injunction against “any act prohibited by the 14th or 15th Amendment” of the Constitution. Under current law, the Attorney General is only authorized to bring civil rights claims under specific statutes, typically those prohibiting discrimination. Private plaintiffs can, and do, allege violations of the Constitution, but the Justice Department does not.
The proposed change is a major power grab by the Justice Department, allowing it to become involved in a whole range of 14thAmendment cases which it previously would have been unable to pursue. These cases include some of the most partisan, politically charged disputes that arise in any given election cycle. The Justice Department’s new jurisdiction would extend to lawsuits concerning the validity or counting of ballots – like, for example, Bush v. Gore. The Justice Department could also intervene in partisan redistricting disputes regarding the principle of “one person, one vote” or unconstitutional gerrymandering. Any Justice Department would have a difficult time maintaining even the appearance of neutrality in handling such cases. A politicized Justice Department could engender one political or even constitutional crisis after another.
Eric Holder may be the most politically partisan Attorney General since John Mitchell. But pick your poison. Would you want a Justice Department under either Eric Holder or John Mitchell taking sides in disputes over who won a congressional or presidential election, in decennial redistricting fights, or in challenges to partisan gerrymanders?
There is no need for this change, as private plaintiffs have shown themselves fully capable of suing to enforce their own 14th Amendment rights. The fact that prevailing parties may recoup attorney’s fees and other expenses means that there is no shortage of plaintiffs willing to litigate any potential 14th Amendment claim.
Certainly the Justice Department has done nothing to justify this extraordinary expansion of its powers. To the contrary, an Inspector General’s report issued in March 2013 documented, among other things, partisan harassment of conservative and Republican employees of the Voting Section and race-based enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.
In the best of times, the proposed change would threaten to corrupt the Justice Department’s neutral enforcement of federal law. Under a politicized Justice Department it is courting disaster.Robert D. Popper is a Senior Attorney for Judicial Watch and formerly the Deputy Chief of the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
People accused of malfeasance aren’t usually tasked with investigating themselves for obvious reasons. The guy caught with his hand in the cookie jar has a tendency to conclude that the cookies are all present and accounted for.
Attorney General Eric Holder, on the other hand, is routinely tasked with investigating his own shenanigans and routinely determines that everything is on the level. Amidst the furor concerning the DOJ’s spying on Associated Press and FOX News journalists, President Obama ordered the formation of a panel to “review existing Department of Justice guidelines governing investigations that involve reporters.” Heading up the panel will be AG Holder, hardly a disinterested party.
Holder initially testified before Congress that “with regard to the potential prosecution of the press for disclosure of material, that is not something that I’ve ever been involved in, heard of or would think would be a wise policy.” That’s a comprehensive statement with no wiggle room. Hear no evil, see no evil. Then came a bombshell: Holder personally approved a search warrant on FOX News reporter James Rosen’s emails and phone records. Holder knew about at least one such investigation and perjured himself all the same.
The DOJ now says that Holder’s statement was technically true because no one was seriously considering prosecuting Rosen. Apparently the DOJ investigates reporters for violations of the Espionage Act whom it never intends to prosecute. Either prosecuting Rosen was on the table or the investigation was a time-consuming fishing expedition pursued at great cost to the taxpayer. I suspect the former.
This is not the first time that America’s top law enforcement official has been caught telling fibs under oath and for the same purpose—so that he can feign ignorance about what happens in his own DOJ. His defense seems to be that he isn’t responsible for the department’s transgressions because he’s irresponsible and unaccountable. We’ll call this “the doofus defense.”
On May 3, 2011, he testified before Congress that he had only learned of Operation Fast and Furious, the ill-fated gunwalking scandal that placed American guns into the hands of Mexican mobsters, “for the first time in the past few weeks.” His testimony was contradicted by a July 2010 internal DOJ memo directed to Holder that outlined the program by name. Holder invoked the doofus defense, claiming that he doesn’t read many of his briefing memos.
But the memos kept coming. During the summer of 2010, National Drug Intelligence Center Director Michael Walther sent Holder five memos concerning the operation. Lenny Breuer, the head of the DOJ’s criminal division, sent Holder yet another memo relevant to the operation in November of 2010. That’s seven memos that Holder is now claiming not to have read.
Baloney. He knew. The doofus defense may work once but not seven times.
Eric Holder has thus perjured himself on multiple occasions and never faced legal consequences. Obama’s AG is entirely above the law.
Not only is he entitled to lie but also to blow off congressional subpoenas. During the aforementioned Fast and Furious investigation, Holder was ordered to turn over documents relevant to the case. He initially refused, then backtracked. In hopes of staving off a contempt resolution, the AG promised to deliver them personally to Congressman Darrell Issa at a private meeting. When the day arrived, Holder delivered a briefing on the contents of the documents rather than the documents themselves. Congress then voted to find Holder in contempt, which he undoubtedly was.
Lesser mortals would be in jail right now but not Eric Holder. The job of prosecuting the DOJ chief fell to the DOJ. Sound familiar? Deputy AG James M. Cole, a subordinate of Holder, explained in a letter to Congress that, “The longstanding position of the Department of Justice has been and remains that we will not prosecute an Executive Branch official under the contempt of Congress statute for withholding subpoenaed documents pursuant to a presidential assertion of executive privilege.”
Oh, darn. The DOJ would really love to prosecute the DOJ but they simply can’t because Obama won’t let them. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that the defendant, if charges were to be brought, would be the big cheese at the very department pursuing the prosecution.
Eric Holder has decided that Eric Holder did nothing wrong. Eric Holder is free to go now.
The man appointed to enforce the nation’s laws can’t be bothered to follow them himself. He spies on reporters and furnishes underworld figures with boatloads of guns, then lies under oath and stonewalls congressional investigators to cover his tracks. America’s top cop is a law unto himself, both untouchable and unashamed
A few weeks ago, President Obama advised graduates at Ohio State University that they need not listen to voices warning about tyranny around the corner, because we have self-government in America. He argued that self-government is in and of itself an adequate safeguard against tyranny, because voters can be counted upon to elect democrats (lowercase “d”) not tyrants. His argument defies logic and 20th-century history. It reveals an ignorance of the tyranny of the majority, which believes it can write any law, regulate any behavior, alter any procedure and tax any event so long as it can get away with it.
FoxHistory has shown that the majority will not permit any higher law or logic or value — like fidelity to the natural law, a belief in the primacy of the individual or an acceptance of the supremacy of the Constitution — that prevents it from doing as it wishes.
Under Obama’s watch, the majority has, by active vote or refusal to interfere, killed hundreds of innocents — including three Americans — by drone, permitted federal agents to write their own search warrants, bombed Libya into tribal lawlessness without a declaration of war so that a mob there killed our ambassador with impunity, attempted to force the Roman Catholic Church to purchase insurance policies that cover artificial birth control, euthanasia and abortion, ordered your doctor to ask you whether you own guns, used the IRS to intimidate outspoken conservatives, seized the telephone records of newspaper reporters without lawful authority and in violation of court rules, and obtained a search warrant against one of my Fox colleagues by misrepresenting his true status to a federal judge.
James Rosen, my colleague and friend, is a professional journalist. He covers the State Department for Fox News. In order to do his job, he has cultivated sources in the State Department — folks willing to speak from time to time off the record.
One of Rosen’s sources apparently was a former employee of a federal contractor who was on detail to the State Department, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim. Kim is an expert in arms control and national defense whose lawyers have stated that his job was to explain byzantine government behavior so we all can understand it. When he was indicted for communicating top secret and sensitive information, presumably to Rosen, his lawyers replied by stating that the information he discussed was already in the public domain, and thus it wasn’t secret.
Prior to securing Kim’s indictment, the Department of Justice obtained a search warrant for Google’s records of Rosen’s personal emails by telling a federal judge that Rosen had committed the crime of conspiracy by undue flattery of Kim and appealing to Kim’s vanity until Kim told Rosen what he wanted to hear. In a word, that is rubbish. And the FBI agent who claimed that asking a source for information and the federal judge who found that the flattering questions alone constituted criminal behavior were gravely in error.
Reporters are protected in their craft by the First Amendment, and the Supreme Court has ruled that they can ask whatever questions they wish without fear of prosecution. If Kim revealed classified information to Rosen — a charge Kim vigorously denies — that is Kim’s crime, not Rosen’s. The Supreme Court ruled in the Pentagon Papers case that it is not a crime for a journalist to seek secrets, to receive them, to possess them and to publish them so long as they affect a matter of material public interest.
The government’s behavior here is very troubling. Government lawyers and FBI agents are charged with knowing the law. They must have known that Rosen committed no crime, and they no doubt never intended to charge him, and they never have. They materially misled the judge, who saw the phrase “probable cause” of criminal activity (taken from the Fourth Amendment) in their affidavit in support of the search warrant they sought, and he signed. The judge should have seen this for the ruse it was. It is inconceivable that a person could conspire to commit a crime (release of classified information) that is impossible for that person to commit, particularly with a Supreme Court case directly on point.
This misuse of the search warrant mechanism by misrepresentation of the status of the target continues the radicalization of federal criminal procedure now typical of this Department of Justice. It has claimed that it can release military weapons to foreign criminal gangs just to see where the weapons end up, and that its agents cannot be prosecuted for harm caused by those who received the weapons. It has held that the serious consideration given in the White House by high-ranking government officials to the identity of persons the president wants to kill somehow is a constitutional substitute for due process and thus enables the president to use drones to kill people uncharged with federal crimes. It has extended the public safety exception to the Miranda rule from the few seconds at the scene of the crime spent securing the prisoner, where the Supreme Court has said it resides, to more than 72 hours.
And now this.
The reason we have the due process safeguards imposed upon the government by the Constitution is to keep tyranny from lurking anywhere here, much less around the corner. Due process is the intentionally created obstacle to government procedural shortcuts, which, if disregarded, will invite tyranny to knock at the front door and sneak in through the back. Justice Felix Frankfurter warned of this 70 years ago when he wrote, “The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.” That was true then, and it is true now.
Obama DOJ: We Don’t Need Clear Evidence To Kill Americans With Drones
“The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” reads a confidential Justice Department memo defending the U.S. government’s ability to order the killing of American citizens if they believe them to be “senior operational leaders” or “an associated force,” even if they don’t have any evidence that the person targeted is actually engaged in or plotting an attack on the U.S.
Tribesmen this week examine the rubble of a building in southeastern Yemen where American teenager Abdulrahmen al-Awlaki and six suspected al-Qaida militants were killed in a U.S. drone strike on Oct. 14, 2011. Al-Awlaki, 16, was the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, who died in a similar strike two weeks earlier.All of the controversy stemmed from the September 2011 drone strike in Yemen that killed alleged al-Qaida operatives Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. Both were U.S. citizens who had never been indicted by the U.S. government nor charged with any crimes.
The memo states that “no clear evidence of a specific attack on persons and interests” is needed, nor does the “operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States” in order to be targeted for assassination by the Federal government.
“This conclusion is reached with recognition of the extraordinary seriousness of a lethal operation by the United States against a U.S. citizen, and also of the extraordinary seriousness of the threat posed by senior operational al Qaeda members and the loss of life that would result were their operations successful,” the memo reads.
As in Holder’s speech, the confidential memo lays out a three-part test that would make targeted killings of American lawful: In addition to the suspect being an imminent threat, capture of the target must be “infeasible, and the strike must be conducted according to “law of war principles.” But the memo elaborates on some of these factors in ways that go beyond what the attorney general said publicly. For example, it states that U.S. officials may consider whether an attempted capture of a suspect would pose an “undue risk” to U.S. personnel involved in such an operation. If so, U.S. officials could determine that the capture operation of the targeted American would not be feasible, making it lawful for the U.S. government to order a killing instead, the memo concludes.
The undated memo is entitled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associated Force.” It was provided to members of the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees in June by administration officials on the condition that it be kept confidential and not discussed publicly.
Although not an official legal memo, the white paper was represented by administration officials as a policy document that closely mirrors the arguments of classified memos on targeted killings by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which provides authoritative legal advice to the president and all executive branch agencies. The administration has refused to turn over to Congress or release those memos publicly — or even publicly confirm their existence. A source with access to the white paper, which is not classified, provided a copy to NBC News.
Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in an interview with NBC said the document was “chilling.”
“Basically, it argues that the government has the right to carry out the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen. … It recognizes some limits on the authority it sets out, but the limits are elastic and vaguely defined, and it’s easy to see how they could be manipulated,” Jaffer said.
Justin Sink recalls, “In November, the New York Times reported that the White House was working to codify rules to govern the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones. The codification work was begun during last year’s presidential election. According to the report, the Obama administration wanted to provide Mitt Romney with a clear set of procedures and standards for the use of drone strikes, were he to be elected.”
“The president himself has spoken publicly about the need to better codify the use of drone strikes,” he writes.
“One of the things we’ve got to do is put a legal architecture in place,” he continued, “and we need Congressional help in order to do that, to make sure that not only am I reined in but any president’s reined in terms of some of the decisions that we’re making,” Obama said during an appearance on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” shortly before the election.”
There is something in place. It’s called the Constitution, something Barack Obama and members of Congress swore to support and defend. Specifically it’s called the Sixth Amendment that is being violated here. I realize that many people will scream about “terrorists” and all sorts of things, but the issue is that this administration and its thug partners are already defining those who believe that the Federal government is “too big for its britches” and are overstepping their bounds as “domestic terrorists.”
Sadly, many Republicans like Representative Peter King (R-NY) who serves as the Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee calls Obama’s kill list “totally right and totally constitutional.”
In addition, I would like to point out the hypocrisy of those making the decisions to murder those who have not engaged in any acts of terrorism nor have they been proven to actually be plotting attacks on the United States. These same people within the Obama administration have supplied aid to the organization they say they are opposed to in Libya and more than likely in Syria, yet they do not target themselves, do they? No, they hide behind executive privilege and government charades.
We don’t see them coming clean on matters where they have put weapons in the hands of Mexican drug cartels that have resulted in the deaths of untold numbers of Mexicans and at least two federal agents.
This is not just chilling, it’s unlawful. It’s unconstitutional. It’s a mockery of our Constitution and before you say that you would never find yourself on the presidential “hit list,” perhaps you should consider the open talk of assassination by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta as he told CBS’ 60 Minutes, “If someone is a citizen of the United States and is a terrorist (I’ll note, is not proved to be a terrorist, just claimed to be one by the government) who wants to attack our people and kill Americans (again that would make a person a suspect and should be innocent until proven guilty) in ‘my book’ that person is a terrorist.”
I point this out because Panetta openly claims that the Federal government can bypass the Constitution and just do whatever they want to American citizens. How long before they start targeting State militia groups, true patriots, those that believe in the Second Amendment (contrary to Jesse Jackson’s claims), and even those opposed to the Obamacare mandate? How long before those “bitter clingers” of religion and guns are targeted as terrorists? Think about it.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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Reported by Christian Datoc | Breaking News and Engagement Editor | 3:02 PM 03/07/2018
agencies. ALJs often preside in actions brought by a whole host of federal agencies. A finding against the SEC would potentially jeopardize, and perhaps invalidate, the legal status of thousands of other agency proceedings.
jurisdictions will lose access to certain federal law enforcement grants in 2017 if they prohibit officials from communicating with ICE, if they block ICE from interviewing jail inmates, or if they fail to notify ICE of the pending release of criminal aliens ICE is seeking to deport. 
program go to sanctuary jurisdictions. 
Richard Pollock | Reporter | 9:46 PM 03/27/2017
Kevin Daley | Legal Affairs Reporter | 5:09 PM 03/14/2017
The day after Hillary Clinton testified in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi last October, John Podesta, the Democrat’s campaign chairman, met for dinner with a small group of well-connected friends, including Peter Kadzik, a top official at the Justice Department.
It is unclear to which case Podesta was referring and whether he was joking about prison. But Podesta was caught in a sticky situation in both the Lewinsky affair and the Rich pardon scandal.
ames Rosen, my colleague and friend, is a professional journalist. He covers the State Department for Fox News. In order to do his job, he has cultivated sources in the State Department — folks willing to speak from time to time off the record.
What Did You Say? 
Several Heritage Foundation researchers gave their reaction to the spending bill that was announced this week: