While Hunter Biden enjoys the privileges of a sweeping presidential pardon, Rachel Powell, a Pennsylvania mother of eight, is spending the holidays locked away from the people she loves. While President Joe Biden’s corrupt son enjoys a get-out-of-jail-free card erasing a long list of felonies and potential offenses, Powell, marked as an “insurrectionist” for a property damage crime at the Capitol, languishes in a federal prison.
It’s the punctuation mark on the perversion of justice that has defined the Biden years, an era of lawlessness in which “no one is above the law” but this president, his grifting family and his constitution-ripping cronies.
Biden’s unconditional pardon of his ne’re-do-well progeny, issued as Americans were still drowsy from their Thanksgiving leftovers, covers more than a decade of felonies and sundry crimes that Hunter “committed or may have committed.” Legal experts are calling the act of absolution “unprecedented,” exceeding President Gerald Ford’s pardon of the man he succeeded, Richard Nixon, post-Watergate. Even that wide pardon only covered Nixon’s presidency — Jan. 20, 1969 to Aug. 9. 1974.
Joe Biden’s 11-year blanket pardon of Hunter is even more expansive than the pardon Gerald Ford gave to Richard Nixon in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. pic.twitter.com/9ThNOEGyo5
The only thing surprising about Biden’s broad act of leniency gifted to his crack-addled son is that anyone is surprised by it. But Never Trumpers like Joe Walsh sound absolutely heartbroken that Biden has once again been shown to be the unrepentant liar he is after insisting on multiple occasions that he would not pardon Hunter, who faces sentencing on gun-related and tax evasion felony convictions.
“I said I would abide by the jury’s decisions, and I will do that, and I will not pardon him,” the president told ABC News’ David Muir, press puppet for the Democratic Party and their presidential candidates, in an interview in June.
After hearing that Biden is breaking his word, a dispirited Walsh sounded like a cuckolded lover.
“They’re all like that,” the Trump-hating former Republican congressman from Illinois moaned Sunday evening on MSNBC. “So, the next time any of us complain about anything Trump does, this — this pardon is just deflating. For those of us who have been out there for a few years now yelling about what a unique threat Donald Trump is, for Joe Biden to do something like this, Trump — ‘nobody’s above the law,’ we’ve been screaming.”
Walsh and his fellow Never Trumpers have joined Democrats in their full-throated support of one of the darkest chapters in U.S. history — the politically-driven witch hunts of pro-Trump protesters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. For nearly four years, Biden’s Department of Justice, led by his Javert, Attorney General Merrick Garland, in arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning hundreds of political prisoners. Like 44-year-old Rachel Powell. The Biden administration and their pals in the Pravda press continue to paint the eventual riots over a rigged 2020 election as a coordinated “insurrection” driven by their No. 1 political enemy: Donald J. Trump, the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president of the United States.
‘You’re Going to Take Eight Years of Her Life Away?’
Nearly 1,600 people have been caught up in the Biden Justice Department investigations. More than 500 people“have been sentenced to periods of incarceration,” some on an “obstruction of an official proceeding”charge tossed out earlier this year by the U.S. Supreme Court. Interestingly, the high court’s ruling found the DOJ employed an “inappropriately broad interpretation” of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
The DOJ hit Powell, who became known as the “bullhorn lady” in the press, with the obstruction charge. She also was charged with civil disorder, disorderly conduct in a Capitol building, destruction of government property, and entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon — the “ice axe and battering ram” that law enforcement officials say she used to break through a window and “breach the Capitol” as Congress convened to count the 2020 electoral votes. Powell told Newsweek that she “used the axe and the cardboard battering ram to break a window so that some in the group near the tunnel could move to open spaces,” and a bullhorn “to flag a nearby safe haven that she saw on the other side of the glass she had shattered.”
Powell is serving a nearly five-year prison sentence after D.C. District Judge Royce Lamberth threw the book at her in October 2023. Before that, Powell spent years on strict house arrest awaiting trial and sentencing.
“She had an ankle monitor. She was not allowed to leave her home,” said Cynthia Hughes, founder and president of the Patriot Freedom Project, a nonprofit organization providing support to J6 political prisoners and their families. Hughes was interviewed on an upcoming edition of The Federalist Radio Hour podcast. Her nephew, Tim Hale, spent three years in prison on J6-related, trumped up charges, including a year in solitary confinement.
Powell “missed her daughter’s wedding. She missed the birth of her two grandchildren. She couldn’t even go to a doctor appointment if one of her children needed the assistance of her mother,” Hughes added.
Powell’s youngest child was just 7 when she was sent to prison.
While Powell did damage government property, Hughes said she didn’t assault anyone or hurt law enforcement officials during the riot and she had no previous criminal record. Yet, the mother of eight received harsher treatment than many of the Black Lives Matter protesters engaged in riots that burned down government buildings, destroyed private property and brutally assaulted police.
“Yeah, she broke a window but you’re going to take eight years of her life away?” Hughes said. She’s lost her home, she lost custody of her children for a small minute. She had a terrible public defender.”
And now Powell is serving a nearly five-year prison sentence followed by 36 months of supervised release. Hunter Biden, who faced years in prison and more than $1.3 million in fines is a free man. He owes nothing. If it’s any consolation to the J6 political prisoners learning of the pardon from behind prison bars, the younger Biden says he will never forget the kindness bestowed on him by his powerful father and that he will commit himself to “helping those who are still sick and suffering.”
He remains defiant, despite his father’s forbearance.
Jerry Broussard of WhatDidYouSay.org
“I have admitted and taken responsibility for my mistakes during the darkest days of my addiction – mistakes that have been exploited to publicly humiliate and shame me and my family for political sport,” Hunter said in a statement to the press.
‘Miscarriage of Justice’
Biden defended his son and his sweeping pardon, insisting that “Hunter was treated differently” under the law. Well, welcome to the club, Hunter. The hundreds of J6 political prisoners his father’s administration has persecuted over the past four years know what disparate treatment feels like.
President-elect Trump has met with some the families of the people he has described as hostages. He has said that he would pardon a “large portion” of the people convicted on federal charges related to the Capitol riots. On Truth Social earlier this year Trump wrote that one of his “first acts as your next president” will be to “Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned.”
Following Biden’s generous gift to his repugnant son, Trump asked on his Truth Social account, “Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years? Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!”
Joe Biden didn’t just pardon Hunter for the gun crimes for which he was convicted. He pardoned Hunter for *EVERY SINGLE FEDERAL CRIME HE COMMITTED* over the last decade—including several years during which Joe Biden was VP and the entirety of Joe Biden’s presidency. pic.twitter.com/wjvwXTL8r6
The president-elect raises a good point. Trump could and should pardon the J6 political prisoners as one of his first acts in office, or at least commute sentences. He likely will stop the prosecutions and end the witch hunt that the Biden administration has carried out. But Biden should spend the last days of his shameful presidency rectifying of the bigger injustices of his time in office. He should pardon the political enemies his DOJ has prosecuted as “insurrectionists.”
He claims his disgraced boy is a victim of politics, “singled out only because he is my son — and that is wrong.” Many of the protesters who showed up to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, are victims of vendetta political politics. That was wrong. It remains so.
But Biden is as political as he is corrupt. So the people locked away on political crimes will have to await deliverance from the man the Biden regime desperately tried but failed to defeat, imprison, even murder.
Trump, unlike Biden, is a man of his word, Hughes said. “He keeps his promises,” the Patriot Freedom Project founder said.
And when Trump does follow through on his promise of pardons, Democrats, Never Trumpers and their accomplice media friends will have no standing to complain.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
Former Attorney General Bill Barr did not improperly pressure prosecutors to reduce sentencing recommendations for political activist Roger Stone, according to a new government watchdog report. The exoneration of Barr came more than four years after a deluge of media reports alleging wrongdoing.
However, J.P. Cooney, a Justice Department official now serving as Special Counsel Jack Smith’s top deputy, cultivated a politically toxic environment, disseminated baseless conspiracy theories about Trump and his political appointees, and engaged in unprofessional conduct as he oversaw the team making sentencing recommendations, according to the same report.
Cooney is mentioned (as the “Fraud and Public Corruption Section Chief”) a whopping 394 times in the 85-page report released from the Justice Department’s inspector general on July 24. Cooney supervised a team of four attorneys who prosecuted Stone for what the government successfully argued in front of a Washington, D.C., jury were lies and obstruction during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump campaign officials. Mueller’s two-year, $32 million investigation was itself spun up by anti-Trump officials in the Justice Department after the Democrat National Committee and Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton bought and paid for an information operation falsely alleging the Trump campaign was in cahoots with Russia to steal the 2016 election. Two members of Cooney’s team also worked on the Mueller investigation.
The Fraud and Public Corruption (FPC) team sought an unprecedented sentence of seven to nine years in prison for Stone, dramatically beyond what others convicted of similar crimes faced. When developing that sentencing goal, the team by its own admission thought the “closest analogue” to the Stone conviction was that of Scooter Libby, a target of a previous special counsel in a highly controversial prosecution. Libby’s proposed sentencing range was 30-37 months and he was sentenced to 30 months, which was derided as “excessive” by former President George W. Bush.
Yet the Cooney team larded up the Stone sentencing memo with every escalatory adjustment it could find, however disputable, to achieve a much harsher sentence and treat Stone differently than the Justice Department treats other defendants.
As soon as Cooney’s supervisors saw what he and his team had planned, “they all agreed that the sentencing recommendation was too high” and expressed grave concern about the situation. Interim U.S. Attorney Timothy Shea, who had started on the job just that week, said he “had never seen [perjury] cases produce a sentence that high, and that he was aware of many violent crimes that did not result in sentences ‘anywhere near’ the sentence the team was recommending for Stone,” according to the report. He noted that the escalatory adjustments were arguably made in error, in at least one case, and that the guidance was completely “out of whack” relative to other cases. Further, Stone was a “first-time offender, older than most offenders, and convicted of a nonviolent crime,” and “comparable cases” were sentenced around two to three years.
Cooney responded to the criticism of his extreme sentencing proposal by spreading an elaborate conspiracy theory with no supporting evidence that Trump, Barr, and Shea were being improperly political. Cooney admitted to investigators that “he had no information suggesting that anyone from Main Justice (i.e., DOJ leadership offices) was involved in the Stone sentencing at this time and no evidence pointing to improper motivations influencing these discussions” when he spread the conspiracy theory with his underlings.
In phone calls and other conversations with his prosecution team, Cooney spread his evidence-free conspiracy theory that “Shea was acting out of fear of then President Trump and, more particularly, fear of the consequences of not seeking a lower sentence for an influential friend of then President Trump.” He continued his conspiracy theories in other conversations. “Prosecutor 1 said that when he asked [Cooney] what was going on, [Cooney] replied that ‘this is coming from Main Justice. Tim Shea is getting pressure from Main Justice about the Stone sentencing recommendation, and Tim Shea is terrified of the President,’” according to the report. Cooney acknowledged he had no evidence to support these statements.
Another prosecutor said Cooney told him that “Shea did not care about Stone or the Stone case, but that Shea was ‘afraid of the President’ and that this fear was driving Shea’s actions,” according to the report. That same prosecutor said Cooney said multiple times that “Shea was afraid of the President and said it ‘with substantial conviction.’” Cooney later acknowledged he had no evidence to support his false claim.
At the same time, reporters began calling the Department of Justice to ask about the sentencing guideline dispute. That meant that at least one person within the department was getting information to reporters at left-wing media outlets to bully Trump appointees to acquiesce to their demands. Partisan bureaucrats had commonly used that tactic throughout the Trump presidency. While strict guidelines opposed unauthorized disclosures to the press, DOJ and FBI officials rarely bothered to investigate such leaks, much less hold employees accountable for them. In many cases, they were the worst offenders. For example, former FBI Director James Comey leaked to the media by disclosing information to an attorney who then passed the information on to The New York Times. The investigative report on the sentencing memos discusses how various DOJ employees denied leaking to the media while also noting they spoke about the sentencing controversy with other attorneys.
Unsurprisingly, the sentencing dispute became a major news story, with the perspective of Cooney’s team adopted by the recipients of the leaks. After the Justice Department issued a second sentencing guideline memo, the four prosecutors all removed themselves from the case and were lavished with praise by left-wing media outlets. Prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky went on to testify in front of Congress about the situation. His claims that the sentencing dispute was guided by politics were untrue, but investigators blamed Cooney for spreading the falsehoods.
The second sentencing memo did not call for a specific jail time but left it to the judge’s discretion. Judge Amy Berman Jackson agreed with the second sentencing memo and ordered Stone to serve 40 months in prison, many years fewer than Cooney’s team had aimed for. Trump commuted Stone’s sentence before he was taken into custody.
In its report, the Justice Department IG said that Cooney’s “speculative comments in meetings with the trial team about the political motivations” of Trump officials “in connection with their handling of the Stone sentencing contributed to an atmosphere of mistrust” that “unnecessarily further complicated an important decision in the case.” It further determined that his baseless comments to the trial team formed a substantial basis for Zelinsky’s explosive but wrong testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on June 24, 2020.
Cooney’s Checkered DOJ Record
Cooney’s track record at DOJ includes many other controversial political actions.
For example, one of the primary instigators of the Russia-collusion hoax was FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, now a CNN contributor. In April 2018, federal investigators issued a criminal referral for just some of the criminal leaks and lies he had engaged in while at the FBI. After sitting on a criminal referral for nearly two years, Cooney announced on Feb. 14, days after the Stone sentencing memo situation, that he had decided to let McCabe get away with the lies and the leaks.
Those who aren’t political allies of Cooney’s receive different treatment. Cooney prosecuted Steve Bannon in 2022 for a contempt of Congress charge related to him not complying with a subpoena from the controversial Jan. 6 Committee comprised exclusively of members hand-selected by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Bannon, who hosts the popular alternate media program “War Room,” is currently serving his four-month prison sentence. Civil libertarians are concerned about the Biden administration’s imprisonment of powerful media voices during the election season.
Incidentally, Attorney General Merrick Garland was found in contempt of Congress earlier this year for failing to comply with a subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee, which unlike the Jan. 6 Committee is a real committee with members appointed by both Republicans and Democrats, but the Department of Justice has not charged him.
Thwarting Election Integrity
After the extremely controversial 2020 election, Attorney General Barr issued a memorandum allowing the Department of Justice to investigate election irregularities if they were serious and substantiated. “While it is imperative that credible allegations be addressed in a timely and effective manner, it is equally imperative that Department personnel exercise appropriate caution and maintain the Department’s absolute commitment to fairness, neutrality and non-partisanship,” Barr wrote.
While many Americans would hope the Justice Department would investigate election irregularities in a timely fashion, particularly in an election as unprecedented as 2020, Democrat activists were livid. In response, Cooney cooked up a letter of outrage that quickly leaked to the media and helped shut down any meaningful investigations into the election. When The New York Times wrote about the letter, it was clear that Trump officials had already figured out Cooney’s mode of operating.
“On Thursday, [Cooney] said in an email sent to Mr. Barr via Richard P. Donoghue, an official in the deputy attorney general’s office, that the memo should be rescinded because it went against longstanding practices, according to two people with knowledge of the email,” The New York Times wrote. “In response, Mr. Donoghue told Mr. Cooney that he would pass on his complaint but that if it leaked to reporters, he would note that as well. Given that the email was born out of a concern for integrity, Mr. Donoghue said in his reply that he would assure officials ‘that I have a high degree of confidence that it will not be improperly leaked to the media.’”
Somehow the letter simultaneously made it to Cooney’s political allies at left-wing media outlets.
Rabid Pursuit of Trump
Weeks after President Joe Biden was inaugurated, Cooney was still stinging over not being able to put Stone in prison for nearly 10 years. He cooked up a plan, which appeared in The Washington Post and New York Times, to once again go after Roger Stone and other Trump associates in a new Jan. 6-related investigation.
His supervisors noted, “Cooney did not provide evidence that Stone had likely committed a crime — the standard they considered appropriate for looking at a political figure.” Further, his investigative plans were “treading on First Amendment-protected activities.” Nevertheless, he continued pursuing various plans to target Trump affiliates, and the U.S. attorney’s office began pursuing investigations along the lines of what Cooney had proposed, according to reporting.
President Biden and corporate media continued to pressure the Department of Justice and Garland to go after former President Donald Trump, who was widely expected to become Biden’s 2024 opponent. The famously conflict-averse Garland finally relented and put together a special counsel team heavily focused on Cooney and his extreme theories.
Democrat activists have cheered the special counsel for its aggressive actions against Trump, including a shocking raid on his Mar-a-Lago home, exhaustive investigations into communications and finances of Trump and many of his associates, and relentless pushes for courts to rush judgments ahead of the November elections.
Cooney and Smith’s approach has been less successful outside Democrat conversations. “It’s almost hard to believe how comprehensively the hubris and zealotry of anti-Donald Trump lawfare have blown up in their practitioners’ faces,” wrote The Washington Post’s Jason Willick after one major defeat. “Not only did the Supreme Court’s Monday ruling in Trump v. United States create new and enduring presidential immunities against criminal prosecution, but it also eviscerated the fiction of an ‘independent’ Justice Department and even inadvertently threw the validity of Trump’s New York hush money conviction into question.”
Left-wing media outlets such as Talking Points Memo have praised Cooney, noting that he was a partisan activist in college. Cooney, who was president of the College Democrats at Notre Dame University, wrote a column in the school newspaper that regularly praised President Bill Clinton and criticized Independent Counsel Ken Starr and his investigation of Clinton. Cooney once wrote of Starr as a “partisan political hit-man” for investigating Clinton and complained about the $30 million price tag of the investigation. He lamented the country’s “insatiable craving for controversy and scandal” regarding Clinton and worried it would destroy the country.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito suggested Thursday during oral arguments regarding presidential immunity that criminalizing individuals just because they question government-run elections would destabilize true democracy.
Special counsel Jack Smith indicted former President Donald Trump for questioning the administration of the 2020 election. The high court is now hearing challenges as to whether presidents have immunity from criminal prosecutions for actions taken while in office that fall within the scope of their presidential duties.
“Let me end with just a question about, what is required for the functioning of a stable democratic society, which is something that we all want?” Alito began. “I’m sure you would agree with me that a stable, democratic society requires that a candidate who loses an election, even a close one, even a hotly contested one, leave office peacefully if that candidate is the incumbent?”
Justice Alito hypothesizes what could happen if presidents don’t have criminal immunity:
“If an incumbent…knows…that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country?” pic.twitter.com/zXSJEGMNOo
“Now, if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off in a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?” Alito asked. “And we can look around the world and find countries where we have seen this process where the loser gets thrown in jail.”
“So, I think it’s exactly the opposite, Justice Alito,” Dreeben said. “There are lawful mechanisms to contest the results in an election and outside the record, but I think of public knowledge, petitioner and his allies filed dozens of electoral challenges and my understanding is lost all but one that was not outcome determinative in any respect. There were judges that said in order to sustain substantial claims of fraud that would overturn an election results that’s certified by a state, you need evidence, you need proof and none of those things were manifested. So there’s an appropriate way to challenge things through the courts with evidence, if you lose, you accept the results, that has been the nation’s experience.”
“Thank you,” Alito interjected.
Alito appears to warn Democrats that should the high court rule that certain presidential acts are not covered by presidential immunity and Smith’s lawfare case against the former president may continue — true democratic norms would be decimated as partisan politicians could weaponize the justice system to target their opponents.
Smith indicted Trump on charges of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and an attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights. In simpler terms, Smith alleges that Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen were false and that Trump knew they were false.
To support his claims, Smith alleges that since federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — which meddled in the 2020 election — told Trump the election wasn’t stolen, and he should have taken that at face value, as pointed out by Federalist Senior Editor John Daniel Davidson.
But objecting to elections is a tale as old as time. Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton still claims the 2016 election was stolen while Democratic Reps. Jim McGovern, Pramila Jayapal, Raul Grijalva, Sheila Jackson Lee, Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters — who also called the 2000 election “fraudulent” — and Jamie Raskin all objected to Congress’ certification of electoral votes in 2017 that formally declared Trump the winner, my colleague Tristan Justice details.
The 2004 election was also considered “stolen” by New York Rep. Jerry Nadler who went so far as to declare voting machines need to be investigated.
And even after the Supreme Court ended Al Gore’s attempt to overturn the outcome of the election, there were no steps taken to throw Gore in jail for challenging the contest.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
Former Rep. Liz Cheney’s January 6 Committee suppressed evidence that President Donald Trump pushed for 10,000 National Guard troops to protect the nation’s capital, a previously hidden transcript obtained by The Federalist shows.
Cheney and her committee falsely claimed they had “no evidence” to support Trump officials’ claims the White House had communicated its desire for 10,000 National Guard troops. In fact, an early transcribed interview conducted by the committee included precisely that evidence from a key source. The interview, which Cheney attended and personally participated in, was suppressed from public release until now.
Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato’s first transcribed interview with the committee was conducted on January 28, 2022. In it, he told Cheney and her investigators that he overheard White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows push Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to request as many National Guard troops as she needed to protect the city.
He also testified President Trump had suggested 10,000 would be needed to keep the peace at the public rallies and protests scheduled for January 6, 2021. Ornato also described White House frustration with Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller’s slow deployment of assistance on the afternoon of January 6, 2021.
Not only did the committee not accurately characterize the interview, they suppressed the transcript from public review. On top of that, committee allies began publishing critical stories and even conspiracy theories about Ornato ahead of follow-up interviews with him. Ornato was a career Secret Service official who had been detailed to the security position in the White House.
Cheney frequently points skeptics of her investigation to the Government Publishing Office website that posted, she said, “transcripts, documents, exhibits & our meticulously sourced 800+ page final report.” That website provides “supporting documents” to the claims made by Cheney and fellow anti-Trump enthusiasts.
However, transcripts of fewer than half of the 1,000 interviews the committee claims it conducted are posted on that site. It is unclear how many of the hidden transcripts include exonerating information suppressed by the committee.
Those documents support the committee’s narrative rather than the truth of the events leading up to January 6, 2021, said Rep. Barry Loudermilk, chairman of the House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight.
“The former J6 Select Committee apparently withheld Mr. Ornato’s critical witness testimony from the American people because it contradicted their pre-determined narrative. Mr. Ornato’s testimony proves what Mr. Meadows has said all along: President Trump did in fact offer 10,000 National Guard troops to secure the U.S. Capitol, which was turned down,” said the Georgia Republican.
His subcommittee is reviewing the work of the January 6 committee, which has been accused of other unethical behavior at the expense of accuracy, as well as collusion with other Democrat efforts to prosecute political opponents.
“This is just one example of important information the former Select Committee hid from the public because it contradicted what they wanted the American people to believe,” Loudermilk said. “And this is exactly why my investigation is committed to uncovering all the facts, no matter the outcome.”
Early Corroboration For Contested Claim
A January 6 committee staffer asked Ornato, “When it comes to the National Guard statement about having 10,000 troops or any other number of troops, do you recall any discussion prior to the 6th about whether and how many National Guard troops to deploy on January 6th?” Ornato surprised the committee by noting he did recall a conversation between Meadows and Bowser: “He was on the phone with her and wanted to make sure she had everything that she needed,” Ornato told investigators.
Ornato said White House concerns about January 6 were related to fears that left-wing groups would clash with Trump protesters and that no one in the White House anticipated a riot at the Capitol. Antifa and other left-wing groups were planning protests for the same day. Left-wing groups had been involved in violent assaults on Trump supporters following public protests.
Meadows “wanted to know if she need any more guardsmen,” Ornato testified. “And I remember the number 10,000 coming up of, you know, ‘The president wants to make sure that you have enough.’ You know, ‘He is willing to ask for 10,000.’ I remember that number. Now that you said it, it reminded me of it. And that she was all set. She had, I think it was like 350 or so for intersection control, and those types of things not in the law enforcement capacity at the time.”
“No DCNG personnel shall be armed during this mission, and at no time, will DCNG personnel or assets be engaged in domestic surveillance, searches, or seizures of US persons,” Bowser wrote in her letter requesting the D.C. National Guard. Bowser had been a strenuous critic of Republican efforts to limit rioting from leftwing political activists in U.S. cities during 2020’s summer of violence.
Bowser’s decision to decline help from the White House did not end the Trump team’s efforts to secure troops ahead of the protest. When the D.C. mayor declined Trump’s offer of 10,000 troops, Ornato said the White House requested a “quick reaction force” out of the Defense Department in case it was needed.
“The only thing I remember with DOD and the National Guard was even though the mayor didn’t want any more National Guard in D.C., that a request was made to have kind of a, lack of better term, a quick reaction force out at Joint Base Andrews being that it was a military installation,” Ornato told investigators in the previously concealed interview. “I remember Chief Meadows talking to DOD about that, I believe. I remember Chief Meadows letting me know that, ‘Hey, there was going to be National Guard that’s going to be at Joint Base Andrews in case they’re going to need some more, we’re going to — the Mayor would need any, we’re going to make sure they’re out there.’”
Meadows was concerned that D.C. would be unprepared for the size of the crowd coming to protest the controversial 2020 election in which hundreds of laws and processes were changed to enable tens of millions of unsupervised mail-in ballots to flood the country. The January 6 Committee prevented an investigation into Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s preparation — or lack thereof — for Capitol security ahead of the event, so it is unclear if she was as concerned about keeping the peace as Meadows and the Trump White House were.
“And, again, the crowd sizes were, you know, the organizers were saying, you know, there may be 50,000 here. So that’s where it started, I think, to scare the chief a little bit of how many people were coming in for this event, and wanted to make sure that they would be able to bring in National Guard if needed for this size of this many people inside D.C.,” Ornato said.
Once the Capitol was breached, the Trump White House pushed for immediate help from Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller and grew frustrated at the slow deployment of that help, according to the testimony.
“So, then I remember the chief saying, ‘Hey, I’m calling secretary of defense to get that [quick reaction force] in here,” Ornato said. Later he said, “And then I remember the chief telling Miller, ‘Get them in here, get them in here to secure the Capitol now.’”
Still later, he said, “[T]he constant was, you know, where is the National Guard? Why isn’t — you know, we’ve got to get control of this.” And again, “But, you know, [Meadows] understood the urgency, that’s for sure. And he kept, you know, getting Miller on the phone, wanting to know where they were, why aren’t they there yet.”
Days prior, Cheney had “secretly orchestrated” a pressure campaign to prevent the Defense Department from deploying resources on January 6, 2021. She organized an op-ed for the Washington Post from her father and other former secretaries of defense specifically to discourage Miller from taking action.
Ornato described Meadows’ strenuous efforts to quicken the Defense Department’s deployment of the National Guard: “Every time [Meadows] would ask, ‘What’s taking so long?’ It would be, like, you know, ‘This isn’t just start the car and we’re there. We have to muster them up, we have to’ — so it was constant excuses coming of — not excuses, but what they were actually doing to get them there. So, you know, ‘We only have so many here right now. They’re given an hour to get ready.’ So, there’s, like, all these timelines that was being explained to the chief. And he relayed that, like, you know — he’s like, ‘I don’t care, just get them here,’ you know, and ‘Get them to the Capitol, not to the White House.’”
Cheney hid this testimony and instead asserted in her report that President Trump “never gave any order to deploy the National Guard on January 6th or on any other day. Nor did he instruct any Federal law enforcement agency to assist.”
Her report noted that the secretary of defense “ultimately did deploy the Guard. Although evidence identifies a likely miscommunication between members of the civilian leadership in the Department of Defense impacting the timing of deployment, the Committee has found no evidence that the Department of Defense intentionally delayed deployment of the National Guard. The Select Committee recognizes that some at the Department had genuine concerns, counseling caution, that President Trump might give an illegal order to use the military in support of his efforts to overturn the election.”
Cheney has never addressed the effects of her secretly orchestrated campaign to prevent Miller from acting ahead of the January 6, 2021 protest. A new book confirms prior reporting that Cheney secretly conspired with District Attorney Fani Willis in Fulton County’s prosecution of Republicans and that she viewed it as a “platform for her to resuscitate her political career” and would “provide a springboard for a Cheney presidential run.”
Ornato’s description of events also matched testimony offered by Kash Patel, the former chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, in the Colorado Supreme Court hearing about Democrat efforts to limit the ability of Americans to vote for the candidate of their choice. The Colorado court, whose efforts to remove Trump from the ballot were so extreme they were overturned this week by a unanimous Supreme Court, claimed Patel’s “testimony regarding Trump authorizing” at least 10,000 National Guardsmen was “illogical” and “completely devoid of any evidence in the record.” Because Ornato’s corroborating information had been suppressed from the public record by the January 6 committee, the Colorado Supreme Court improperly dismissed evidence.
‘I Never Heard Anything Like That’
Cheney and her committee did devote 2,000 words in their final report to an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that President Trump had physically overcome a Secret Service agent in his zeal to join protesters at the Capitol. That story had been told by Cassidy Hutchinson, Cheney’s friend and star witness, along with other stories that eyewitnesses disputed. (Disclosure: Hutchinson falsely claimed this reporter received classified information from a Secret Service handler in a clandestine Georgetown meeting. She has thus far refused formal requests to correct her theatrical claim.) While the story of Trump overcoming a Secret Service agent would not be told for months, Ornato pre-rebutted it in his testimony.
Asked if he ever heard anything about Trump deciding to go to the Capitol that day, Ornato said he hadn’t. Ornato said Trump had driven by a previous rally, had flown over another, and that handlers had previously decided against him joining the day’s events.
“No. I did not know that. I mean, I don’t think — that couldn’t have happened. Nobody had — nobody would be prepared for that. There would be no security to do that. There would be no — I mean, that was like I said, talked about a couple of days, whenever it was prior, and it was scoffed at and moved on, and I never heard about it again,” Ornato said, adding that he never heard anything about Trump wanting to go to the Capitol that day. “Usually somebody would, you know, report it up or report over, like, ‘Hey, this is what I overheard’ or something, but I never heard anything like that.”
Later, Hutchinson would claim Ornato had been the source of her dramatic tale that Trump had commandeered the presidential vehicle and demanded to be taken to the Capitol. Other Secret Service sources also strongly repudiated the outlandish claim.
Democrats’ targeting of political opponents entered its next phase Friday, when the FBI arrested Blaze Media investigative reporter Steve Baker over covering the Jan. 6, 2021, demonstrations at the U.S. Capitol.
“This is the most humiliated I’ve ever been in my life,” Baker told independent reporter Breanna Morello following his release. My arrest “is for things I said. … That’s what they’re after; they’re [trying] to suppress our speech.”
Just caught up with journalist Steve Baker just moments after being released from federal custody.@TPC4USA details what he’s had to endure at the hands of the corrupt DOJ.
As The Federalist reported, federal authorities informed Baker and his legal team on Tuesday of a signed warrant for his arrest and instructed him to self-surrender for “alleged J6 crimes” in Dallas, Texas, on Friday morning. Baker has been at the forefront of reporting on the more questionable aspects of the Jan. 6 demonstrations.
While told he was being charged with “non-violent misdemeanors,” federal authorities declined to disclose to Baker or his lawyers what specific crimes underlie the arrest. According to Blaze News, the feds refused to reveal the charges ahead of Friday’s arrest because “they believe[d] Baker [would] post them on social media.” The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees individuals accused of a crime a right to “be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation.”
After being transported to the courthouse on Friday morning in shackles, Baker was charged on four counts related to reporting on the Jan. 6 demonstrations: Knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority; Disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds; Disorderly conduct in a capitol building; and Parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a capitol building.
Blaze Media Investigative Journalist @TPC4USA has now been taken into FBI custody for his J6 reporting
While egregious, Baker’s arrest is sadly unsurprising. The Marxists running Biden’s Democrat administration have gone to extreme lengths to weaponize the powers of government to target and prosecute their political opponents.
Former President Donald Trump is facing 91 indictments from Democrat prosecutors across four different venues, two of which involve charges from the Biden DOJ. These efforts coincide with Democrat attempts to kick Trump — Biden’s primary political opponent — off the ballot ahead of the 2024 election.
The Biden regime has also targeted faithful Christians. Not only have federal authorities infiltrated Catholic churches to surveil Christians attending Latin Mass, they’ve also imprisoned pro-life Christians who peacefully protested outside of an abortion clinic.
Don’t forget the federal government’s censorship-industrial complex. This heavily funded system is strategically designed to censor and silence dissenting voices online — even if the information these users share is true.
.@TPC4USA's first interview since being taken in by federal authorities with @SteveDeaceShow: "All of this is about the suppression of speech and teaching those of us on the Right side of the political spectrum what we can and cannot say and what is allowed." pic.twitter.com/kl12Ol7zPN
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served 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
In response to reports that Putin critic Alexei Navalny has died in a Russian prison, your rulers in Washington want you to be angry.
Your corrupt government, which is at this very moment working to put your Christian neighbors in prison for protesting abortion, wants you to be very angry at a foreign leader nearly 6,000 miles away so you won’t pay attention to what your leaders are doing to you in your own backyard.
Your government, which wants to disarm you and prevent you from defending yourself, wants you angry at a leader who has no power over you whatsoever. The government that censors you and lies to you about viruses it helped create wants your focus elsewhere. The government that sold your economy off to China and then destroyed the value of your currency wants you mad at someone else.
The government that banned you from going to church and then tried to fire you for not taking its worthless “vaccine” wants to whip you into a frenzy over literally anything else other than what it’s doing to you right now.
The government that opened your borders to invasion and looked the other way as violent crime enveloped your cities wants you to believe that crime on another continent is the only crime you should care about. And that the borders of a country half a world away are the only borders worth protecting.
America’s government would never treat its citizens like foreign tyrants do, you’re supposed to keep comfortably believing. It would never imprison an individual whose life and knowledge suddenly became a huge liability to the regime. And it would definitely never kill him in prison, wipe the video cameras that recorded his death, then claim he committed suicide.
And the American government would certainly never try to ban its chief political opponent from the ballot, try to bankrupt him with frivolous lawsuits, or attempt to imprison him to prevent him from winning an election. The American government would never tap attorneys appointed by the president’s hand-picked lawyers to absolve the president of a whole host of crimes committed by the president and his family.
On top of that, the American government would never imprison thousands of political dissidents for protesting against the regime’s history of rigging elections or refer to them as a bunch of filthy kulak wrecker insurrectionists. And you better believe the American government would never ally with corrupt oligarchs who owe their fortunes to monopolies protected by the government to censor the government’s political opponents to prevent them from talking about the corruption of the family running the government.
They’re manipulating you, gaslighting you, and trying to emotionally blackmail you into going along with their nonsense because those things are only supposed to happen in other countries. Stop letting them get away with it.
Sean Davis is CEO and co-founder of The Federalist. He previously worked as an economic policy adviser to Gov. Rick Perry, as CFO of Daily Caller, and as chief investigator for Sen. Tom Coburn. He was named by The Hill as one of the top congressional staffers under the age of 35 for his role in spearheading the enactment of the law that created USASpending.gov. Sean received a BBA in finance from Texas Tech University and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurial management from the Wharton School. He can be reached via e-mail at sean@thefederalist.com.
In an NBC interview Sunday, Rep. Elise Stefanik deftly demonstrated how to handle Democrats’ false claims about a Jan. 6, 2021 “insurrection” to justify criminalizing the speech of the half of the country that opposes their policies.
At the beginning of “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker’s interview with Stefanik, Welker played a deceptively edited clip from Jan. 6, 2021. On the House floor, Stefanik characterized the events from earlier that day as “tragic” and stated that violent individuals should be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Had NBC honestly portrayed the clip, it would have included the main point of Stefanik’s speech. That was to call out Democrats for dismantling election integrity laws ahead of the 2020 election in key swing states. Watch Stefanik’s remarks in full here.
Welker asked the dark-horse potential for Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick whether she still believes “that day was tragic, and that those who were responsible should be held responsible to the fullest extent of the law.” This was an attempt to entrap Stefanik into accepting the Democrat lie that Jan. 6 amounted to an “insurrection” that justifies the Biden Department of Justice’s continued investigation and prosecution of nonviolent attendees at the protest.
Stefanik refused to take the bait, responding, “Well, first of all, Kristen, as typical for NBC and the biased media, you played one excerpt of my speech… If you go back and play the full speech I gave on the House floor, I condemned the violence just like I condemn the violence of the BLM [Black Lives Matter] riots. But I also importantly stood for election integrity and security of our elections. If we don’t have that, we do not have a democracy.”
Stefanik also expressed “concerns about the treatment of January 6 hostages,” and the “weaponization of the federal government against not just President Trump, but [all] conservatives.”
Indeed, countless peaceful protesters who demonstrated at the capitol three years ago have been slandered by the media and House Democrats’ J6 Committee, harassed by Biden’s Department of Justice, and held for months in solitary confinement awaiting trial. Traditional Catholics, pro-lifers, parents who oppose critical race theory at school board meetings, and Trump supporters have also found themselves targets of the Biden DOJ for exercising their First Amendment right to free speech and assembly.
“And that’s one of the reasons why I’m so proud to serve on the Select Committee on the Weaponization of the [Federal] Government,” said Stefanik. “Because the American people want answers. They want transparency, and they understand that as you look across this country, there seem to be two sets of rules. If your last name is Clinton, or it’s Biden, you get to live by a different set of rules than if you’re an everyday patriotic American.”
“So the real threat to our democracy is these baseless witch hunt investigations and lawsuits against President Trump,” Stefanik added. “[It] is undemocratic and it’s shredding our Constitution, and you know who agrees with me, Kristen? The American people. That’s why President Trump is winning in poll after poll against Joe Biden.”
Welker also asked Stefanik if she would “vote to certify the results of the ’24 election no matter what they show?” Again, refusing to fall into Welker’s trap, Stefanik replied matter of factly, “We will see if this is a legal and valid election.”
This answer has been seized on by the corporate media to somehow insinuate that Stefanik is anti-democratic. Apparently, Welker and the rest of her media peers do not comprehend the point of certifying the presidential election, which is to validate the integrity of the electoral process. In other words, no representative should be committed to certifying or not certifying the election until after it has taken place and been verifiably conducted lawfully.
Importantly, Stefanik pointed out the key fact that Democrats are already interfering in the 2024 election through multiple means. “What we’re seeing so far is that Democrats are so desperate they’re trying to remove President Trump from the ballot,” Stefanik continued. “That is a suppression of the American people.”
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
Last week, the Supreme Court rejected Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request that the high court fast-track an appeal by former President Donald Trump claiming immunity from the charges related to the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. While the immunity questions will likely return to the Supreme Court after the D.C. Circuit weighs in on the issues, before then the justices will consider the validity of two of the four charges levied against the former president — and it is likely a majority of the Supreme Court will rule that the “crimes” the special counsel charged are not crimes at all. Here’s your laws plainer.
Smith charged Trump in a four-count indictment in a federal court in D.C., seeking to hold the former president and 2024 GOP front-runner criminally responsible for the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Specifically, the indictment charged Trump with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy against rights, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, and obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding.
While all four theories of criminal liability are weak, the Supreme Court will soon decide whether the events of Jan. 6 qualify as criminal obstruction of an official proceeding under Section 1512 of the federal criminal code in United States v. Fischer.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Joseph Fischer’s appeal that presents the question of whether 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c) criminalizes acts unrelated to investigations and evidence that obstructs an “official proceeding.” Fischer, like Trump, was charged with violating § 1512(c) by engaging in conduct on Jan. 6 that obstructed the certification of the electoral vote.
The question for the Supreme Court in the Fischer case is one of statutory interpretation. Thus, to understand the issue requires a detailed study of the specific language of § 1512(c). That section, titled “Witness, Victim, or Informant Tampering,” provides:
(c) Whoever corruptly —
(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or
(2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so,
shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
Fischer and Trump, as well as scores of other Jan. 6 defendants, were charged with violating subsection 2 of § 1512(c) by “otherwise” obstructing or impeding the certification of the electoral vote. In Fischer’s case, he asked the trial court to dismiss the § 1512(c) charge, arguing the statute only criminalized conduct that rendered evidence unavailable to an “official proceeding.” The district court agreed and dismissed the § 1512(c) count against Fischer. The government appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which in a 2-1 decision reversed the lower court, with the two-judge majority holding that § 1512(c) criminalized any conduct that obstructed or impeded an official proceeding, whether that conduct impaired the availability of evidence or not, leading the Supreme Court to grant certiorari.
While forecasting the outcome of an appeal from the Supreme Court always leaves room for error, for several reasons the high court seems likely to hold that § 1512(c) does not reach the conduct of Fischer, Trump, or other Jan. 6 defendants. Most predictive is the Supreme Court’s earlier decision in the case Begay v. United States, which interpreted another statute that, like § 1512(c), used an “otherwise” catchall clause.
In Begay, the question before the court was the meaning of a section of the Armed Career Criminal Act that imposed a heightened punishment for individuals with three or more prior convictions for violent felonies or serious drug offenses. The act defined a “violent felony” as “any crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year” that “has as an element the use, attempted use, or threatened use of physical force against the person of another,” or “is burglary, arson, or extortion, involves use of explosives, or otherwise involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another” (emphasis added).
The majority in Begay held the defendant’s prior felony DUI conviction did not constitute a “violent felony” under the “otherwise” language of the statute because “the provision’s listed examples — burglary, arson, extortion, or crimes involving the use of explosives — illustrate the kinds of crimes that fall within the statute’s scope,” and “their presence indicates that the statute covers only similar crimes, rather than every crime that ‘presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another.’”
In reaching this conclusion, the Begay court stressed that in interpreting statutes, courts must seek “to give effect … to every clause and word” of the statute. The majority further reasoned that if the “otherwise” language meant to cover all crimes that present a “serious potential risk of physical injury,” there would have been no reason for Congress to have included the examples.
The holding and reasoning underlying the Begay decision should compel a similar conclusion in the Fischer case, namely that subsection 2 of § 1512(c) only criminalizes conduct that “otherwise” obstructs an “official proceeding” if the conduct charged is similar to the conduct covered by subsection 1. After all, if Congress sought to criminalize any conduct impairing an official proceeding, why then would subsection 1 be needed?
The conduct prohibited by subsection 1 of § 1512(c) all concerns the impairment of evidence for an official proceeding, by criminalizing the alteration, destruction, mutilation, or concealment of “a record, document, or other object…” Thus, under Begay’s reasoning, to constitute a crime under subsection 2 of § 1512(c), the indictment must charge that Fischer (or the other defendants) “otherwise” impaired evidence for use in an official proceeding.
Nowhere in the indictment returned against Fischer is there an allegation that he somehow impaired evidence relevant to an official proceeding. So, if the Supreme Court follows the reasoning of Begay, as a matter of law, then Fischer did not violate § 1512(c), and that charge against him should be dismissed. Likewise, the § 1512(c) charge against Trump, which also did not allege an impairment of evidence, would fail, as would the second count alleging Trump conspired to violate that statute.
With the Supreme Court deciding the Fischer appeal this term, the reasonable response would be for Smith to put the brakes on the criminal trial against Trump to await a ruling from the high court. The special counsel and the district court, however, have both proven themselves anything but reasonable and have revealed their real goal is to obtain a conviction against Trump before the 2024 election, which is now less than one year away.
But as the Fischer case may soon prove, the convictions Smith seeks may be for crimes that don’t exist. Sadly, half the country doesn’t seem to care.
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—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. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
If it wasn’t obvious before now that the left will do anything to stop Donald Trump from winning a second term in the White House, the events of the last few days should leave no doubt in any American’s mind. Democrats, including President Biden, are prepared not only to rig the 2024 election in broad daylight but also to twist the U.S. Constitution and undermine the republic so they can hold on to power.
As most everyone knows by now, an infamous 4-3 majority of the Colorado Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that voters in their state will not be allowed to cast a ballot for Trump in next year’s presidential election. The court’s outlandish claim is that Trump is ineligible to appear on the ballot because Section 3 of the 14th Amendment says candidates who have “engaged in insurrection” are prohibited from holding public office.
According to the court, which is dominated by left-wing ideologues appointed by Democrat governors (all the judges on the Colorado Supreme Court are Democrats, some are just more radical than others), Trump meets this definition because he “incited” a riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Never mind that Trump has yet to be convicted of a crime associated with Jan. 6 (or any crime for that matter) or that the 14th Amendment doesn’t include the president or vice president in a list of offices to which its Section 3 provision applies. For the leftists on the Colorado Supreme Court, it’s enough to declare Trump an insurrectionist and viola! He’s off the ballot — all in the name of “defending democracy.”
David French called it a “bold, courageous decision,” but setting aside the constitutional/legal debate, consider what it means practically. About 1.4 million Coloradans voted for Trump in 2020. All those voters, if they want to vote for Trump again this time, have been disenfranchised by the court. That’s bad enough, but the left’s strategy here is larger than just one state. Before the ink was dry on the Colorado ruling, California Democrats leapt into action. The lieutenant governor, Eleni Kounalakis, sent a letter to Secretary of State Shirley Weber asking her to “explore every legal option to remove former President Donald Trump from California’s 2024 presidential primary ballot.”
Meanwhile, Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is prosecuting Trump for his alleged role in the Jan. 6 riot, this week asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and rule on the case before the lower court issues a ruling. As Byron York noted, Smith’s frantic brief doesn’t state the obvious: “He’s rushing to try Trump so Trump can be convicted and jailed before the election.”
Plenty of smart people have pointed out the glaring problems with the Colorado Supreme Court’s interpretation of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Namely, it stipulates Congress must establish a procedure for barring someone from office for engaging in insurrection, which Congress did, twice, first in 1870 and again in 1948. In the latter instance, Congress created a criminal insurrection law, 18 U.S.C. § 2383, which is the enforcement mechanism for Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. The key point here is that Trump has not been charged or convicted under that statute, which means the U.S. Supreme Court will almost certainly overturn the Colorado Supreme Court’s garbage ruling.
But set aside the legal fight because it doesn’t matter to the left. For Biden and the Democrats, this isn’t really a question of what the Constitution does or doesn’t say. This is a question of power and how far they will go to keep it. From the politicized court ruling in Colorado to the four criminal indictments against Trump amounting to 91 felony charges to Biden’s statement last November that he’ll use the Constitution to ensure that Trump “will not take power” and will not “become the next president,” what we have amounts to an open conspiracy to rig the 2024 election by preventing voters from casting a ballot for the likely GOP nominee.
It’s not too much to call this a coup or a color revolution. If Democrats get away with this, we won’t be able to say we have a republic anymore for the simple reason that we won’t have anything like free and fair elections. Democracy in America will be reduced to something like Democracy in Iran or Russia, where only regime-approved candidates are allowed to appear on the ballot.
And don’t think this will end if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the Colorado decision. The Democrats will see it as a mere setback, not a defeat — and certainly not a deterrent. When they say, as they have been quite often lately, that Trump will never leave office if he wins next November, or that 2024 will be our last election ever if Trump prevails, they’re really talking about themselves. What they say Trump will do if he becomes president again is what they’re doing right now, before a watching world.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
For Democrats to succeed with their 2024 presidential campaign strategy of imprisoning the current front-runner in the race, they need a massive assist from key judges.
District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan has done everything in her power to speed up the process for one of the complicated cases Democrats have filed against former President Donald Trump. Whereas the standard federal fraud and conspiracy case takes about two years to get to trial, controversial Special Counsel Jack Smith and Chutkan have worked in concert to get the trial started in March, a breathtaking seven months after Trump’s indictment.
Likewise, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Florence Pan is doing her part to assist the effort to give Trump far less time than other defendants to prepare for a trial against him. Last week, she led a panel to fast-track an appeal in order to facilitate Smith’s goal of securing a quick conviction before one of Washington, D.C.’s notoriously partisan juries.
“Any fair-minded observer has to agree” that Smith and Chutkan are acting based on the election schedule, conceded former federal prosecutor and left-wing pundit Elie Honig. “Just look at Jack Smith’s conduct in this case. The motivating principle behind every procedural request he’s made has been speed, has been getting this trial in before the election.”
Election interference isn’t incidental to this prosecution, then, it’s the entire point.
While hundreds of defendants in the relatively simple Jan. 6 cases brought by the Department of Justice have had a few years to prepare for trial, Trump and his attorneys have to prepare for one of the most complicated and unprecedented cases in American history in just a matter of months. “Donald Trump is being given far less time to prepare than other defendants,” Honig said.
In September, Trump’s legal team asked Chutkan to recuse herself due to her personal bias against the former president and his supporters. Chutkan, the foreign-born “scion of Marxist revolutionaries,” has received attention for her partisan and incendiary commentary against Trump and his supporters. She denied the request. In October, Trump’s attorneys asked for the suit to be dismissed on multiple grounds, including presidential immunity, violation of the freedom of speech clause, violation of the double jeopardy clause and due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, and several other issues. By Dec. 1, Chutkan ruled against Trump in each case.
A week later, Trump announced his plan to appeal Chutkan’s ruling. The next court to hear the case would be the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
On Dec. 11, Smith did two things. He asked the D.C. Circuit to expedite Trump’s appeal, and he asked the Supreme Court to expedite an appeal as well. He explained to the lower court that while the Supreme Court is considering the petition, the D.C. Circuit has jurisdiction. The singular goal of rushing the process is to make sure that one way or another, Democrats can ram through the trial and conviction of their main political opponent to control the outcome of the election.
In the D.C. Circuit Court, Smith asked that Trump’s attorneys be forced to prepare and file their opening brief within 10 days, that the government get an additional week to respond, and that Trump’s attorneys have three days to respond to that government brief.
Trump’s team was given two days to prepare an argument against Smith’s request for this shockingly abbreviated schedule. In its 16-page response, Trump’s legal team noted that the case was among the most complex and unprecedented in history, that it presented serious constitutional questions, and that rushing the process would violate Trump’s due process and Sixth Amendment rights. Trump’s lawyers also noted how the issues in this trial would affect every president, not just the one Democrats are consumed with hatred toward.
“Could President George W. Bush face criminal charges of defrauding the United States and obstructing official proceedings for allegedly giving Congress false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to induce war on false premises? Could President Obama be charged with murder for allegedly authorizing the drone strike that killed Anwar Al-Awlaki and his sixteen-year-old son, both U.S. citizens?” Trump’s attorneys asked.
The team noted how rarely the circuit court expedites such legal procedures, and never in cases even close to the sensitivity of this one. Trump’s attorneys said Chutkan’s speed contributed to her making sloppy mistakes and failing to give thoughtful consideration to arguments.
Citing the court’s own “handbook of practice and internal procedures,” Trump’s attorneys said the court should set a reasonable schedule of providing Trump 40 days to serve and file his initial brief, 21 days to file a reply brief, and 45 days to prepare for oral argument.
“Anything less would result in a heedless rush to judgment on some of the most sensitive and important issues that this Court may ever decide,” Trump’s attorneys wrote.
Instead, the three judges on the D.C. Circuit did precisely what Smith asked them to. They gave Trump until Saturday, Dec. 23 to file his initial brief.
Liberal Panel Lassos the Case for Itself
Each month, the D.C. Circuit has a panel of three judges who consider motions that come before the court. The panel changes each month. While many of the motions that come before the court are simple and administrative, others relate to complicated cases that will require hearings and other court actions. The panel of judges that begins hearing appeals usually keeps the case as it progresses.
This is important because the December panel is particularly left-wing, even for the left-leaning D.C. Circuit. Karen Henderson, the 79-year-old appointee of George H.W. Bush, is on the panel. More importantly, two relatively young Biden appointees named J. Michelle Childs and Florence Pan are also on the panel.
Panels in the coming months will reportedly not be as left-wing as the December panel. The scheduling question, then, becomes one of how hostile the panel of judges will be to Trump’s appeal. By setting an aggressive schedule, the December panel can keep with the case and help ensure Democrats can get their conviction in time for it to affect the election.
Judge Florence Pan has shown a particular interest in lassoing the case for herself. Appointed in 2022, Pan is the wife of Max Stier, a longtime associate of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Stier is also known for being one of the Democrats eager to join the smear campaign against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Stier and Kavanaugh had been on opposite sides of the Whitewater investigation in the late 1990s. When Democrats ran their unseemly attack on Kavanaugh, Stier told the FBI and two anti-Kavanaugh reporters at The New York Times a weird story about how freshmen at Yale might have done something to an inebriated Kavanaugh and a young woman that was inappropriate. The woman, for her part, told friends she has no recollection of what Stier claimed.
“Stier has always held himself out as a consummate civil servant and above politics, but he provided information wildly irrelevant but calculated to inflame the situation. He’s a malign actor,” said one attorney about the stunt.
Pan is also the judge who wrote the D.C. Circuit’s opinion upholding the reinterpretation of an obscure financial crimes statute to imprison Republican protesters for years. The Supreme Court announced it would be hearing an appeal of her decision in the current term. Many constitutional scholars agree with the dissent, which stated the government’s use of the statute to go after protesters is “implausibly broad and unconstitutional.”
On December 18, the D.C. Circuit announced it was scheduling oral argument for January 9, another example of the way Democrats are rushing to give Trump less time to prepare for argument than other defendants receive. Judge Henderson, the lone Republican appointee on the panel, took the rare step of publicly noting she disagrees with the extreme path chosen by her Democrat-appointed colleagues on the panel.
“Judge Henderson would stay any further action by this court until the United States Supreme Court has taken final action on the Government’s Petition for Certiorari before Judgment now pending before it in this case,” noted the Court order.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Wednesday to decide whether a man involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol assault can be charged with obstructing an official proceeding, a case with potential implications for the prosecution of Donald Trump.
The man is one of at least 325 people facing that charge for their alleged roles in the attack, which has also been brought against the Republican former president in the federal case charging him with trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat by Democrat President Joe Biden.
The justices said nothing about the Trump prosecution in agreeing to take up the case, but legal experts said Trump’s lawyers could argue that the court’s move should delay the start of his Washington trial on election subversion charges, currently due to begin in March.
Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination to challenge Biden, is facing four concurrent criminal prosecutions. But the Washington case brought by U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith is scheduled to begin first and is seen as the likeliest to be resolved before the Nov. 5 election.
The case taken up Wednesday by the justices involves defendant Joseph Fischer, who was indicted on seven charges following the Jan. 6 riot. Among his charges is one count under a provision of federal criminal law for anyone who “corruptly … obstructs, influences and impedes any official proceeding.”
The Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments in the case in the coming months and issue a ruling by the end of June.
It was not immediately clear how the Supreme Court’s action on Wednesday might affect Trump’s case. His lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Typically, the Supreme Court agreeing to review an issue in one case would not be a basis for pausing a separate case that raises the same issue, said Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan and former top federal prosecutor appointed by then-President Barack Obama. Still, McQuade said she expects Trump’s legal team to make the argument because delay “has been his strategy throughout all of these cases.”
LIMITED FOCUS FOR CHARGE?
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, granted Fischer’s pretrial motion to dismiss his obstruction charges, ruling that the statute applied only in cases in which a defendant had taken “some action with respect to a document, record or other object.”
Federal prosecutors appealed that ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. A divided three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit in April reversed Nichols’ ruling, saying the statute was not limited to documents and records, but instead “applies to all forms of corrupt obstruction of an official proceeding.”
The charge carries a maximum sentence of up to 20 years in prison with a conviction.
Fischer is awaiting trial on his other criminal charges, including one count of assaulting, resisting or impeding officers and one count of civil disorder, among other charges.
After the election, Trump and his allies made claims that it had been stolen from him through widespread voting fraud. On Jan. 6, 2021, when Congress met to certify Biden’s victory, protesters stormed the Capitol, broke through barricades, attacked police officers, and vandalized the building, prompting lawmakers and others to flee for safety.
In federal charges brought by Special Counsel Smith, Trump faces four counts related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results: conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; conspiracy to defraud the United States; and conspiracy to deprive citizens of their voting rights.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to his election-related charges, as well as charges stemming from three other ongoing state or federal criminal prosecutions.
Special Counsel Jack Smith hunted information on X users who liked or retweeted posts published by former President Donald Trump, according to redacted search warrants and other documents released Monday.
According to the heavily redacted document issued to then-Twitter in January, the court ordered the social media giant to forfeit a bevy of information regarding Trump’s account, including “advertising information, including advertising IDs, ad activity, and ad topic preferences,” as well as IP addresses “used to create, login, and use the account” and privacy and account settings.
The warrant also demanded information such as Trump’s search history, direct messages, and “content of all tweets created, drafted, favorited/liked, or retweeted” by his account from October 2020 to January 2021.
Though the warrant was first covered in August, it was again released as part of a court order after numerous media organizations filed to obtain the document to shed light on the Smith-led special counsel’s “investigation into Trump’s actions leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol,” according to the New York Post. Smith previously indicted Trump in August on several bogus charges related to the former president’s challenging of the 2020 election results in the lead-up to Jan. 6, 2021.
But it wasn’t just Trump’s Twitter account that Smith and his cronies were targeting. The special counsel’s warrant also sought data on Twitter users who interacted with the former president’s account. Among the information Smith sought was a list of every user Trump “followed, unfollowed, muted, unmuted, blocked, or unblocked” during the aforementioned timeframe. Smith similarly demanded that Twitter, which has since rebranded as X, fork over a list of users who took any of the same actions with Trump’s account.
Smith and his team went even further, seeking to acquire data on Twitter users who engaged with Trump’s tweets in the months leading up to Jan. 6, 2021. This included “all lists of Twitter users who have favorited or retweeted tweets posted by [Trump], as well as all tweets that include the username associated with [Trump’s account] (i.e. ‘mentions’ or ‘replies’).”
According to the Post, Smith’s warrant was issued to then-Twitter “along with a nondisclosure order, instructing the company not to notify Trump about the search.” Twitter initially bucked Smith’s demand, arguing that to forfeit such information to the government constituted a violation of the First Amendment. The social media giant ultimately complied with the warrant but was fined $350,000 for failing to meet the special counsel’s demands by deadline.
In the heavily redacted court filing opposing Twitter’s legal attempts to notify Trump of the search, Smith baselessly claimed that telling the former president about the unprecedented seizure “would result in a statutorily cognizable harm,” as Trump is “a sophisticated actor with an expansive platform.”
“The [Non-Disclosure Order] was granted based on facts showing that notifying the former president would result in destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses, or other serious jeopardy to an investigation or delaying of trial,” said the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Nearly every other word listed under “The Non-Disclosure Order” section of the filing is redacted.
Smith’s seizure of Trump’s personal social media information and those who engaged with the then-president’s posts isn’t all that surprising given the special counsel’s weaponization of the government against Trump thus far. In addition to indicting Trump, Smith filed a motion in September to institute a gag order on the 45th president, effectively stifling his First Amendment right to criticize the very government attempting to silence him. That gag order was ultimately approved by D.C. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, a left-wing Obama appointee with a track record of highly partisan court rulings.
Trump’s legal team has since appealed the order to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and has threatened to take the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court given the “unconstitutional” nature of the mandate.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served 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
More footage from the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, further contradicts the left-wing narrative that the day’s events constituted a “violent insurrection” wherein democracy itself was placed in jeopardy at the hands of virulent demonstrators.
Last week, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana began releasing tapes containing more than 40,000 hours of footage from the Capitol, which were buried for three years while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and lawmakers on the partisan Jan. 6 Committee worked to dramatize the riot with prime-time show trials.
“When I ran for Speaker, I promised to make accessible to the American people the 44,000 hours of video from Capitol Hill security taken on January 6, 2021. Truth and transparency are critical,” Johnson said in a statement. “This decision will provide millions of Americans, criminal defendants, public interest organizations and the media an ability to see for themselves what happened that day, rather than having to rely upon the interpretation of a small group of government officials.”
With a bulk of the footage made available by Friday, the rest of the tapes will be made public on a rolling basis. Cameras captured demonstrators peacefully marching through the halls of the Capitol while police officers stood by.
Jan 6 defendants have long argued that the initial entrants were peaceably escorted into the building by Capitol Police, and therefore had no reasonable expectation that their conduct was unlawful
In another clip, a Capitol police officer is seen removing restraints on one demonstrator after walking him down a hallway out of sight from the crowd — before another officer bizarrely congratulates him with a fist bump.
I don’t think Capitol Police would take restraints off of a protester, FIST BUMP him, and then let him go if this were an actual “insurrection”
The footage corroborates what was shared by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in March before his abrupt exit from the network. Johnson’s Republican predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, gave Carlson’s producers access to the footage that had been kept under seal by the Democrat majority.
“That video,” Carlson said, “tells a very different story about what happened on Jan. 6.”
The tapes aired by Carlson showed Jacob Chansley, the infamous “QAnon Shaman,” being escorted by police around the complex; revealed deceased Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick “healthy and vigorous” after allegedly being hit in the head with a fire extinguisher; and unearthed new contradictions in Ray Epps’ testimony. The tapes also exposed outright fabrications by the House Select Committee on Jan. 6, which was established by House Speaker Pelosi ostensibly to probe the Capitol turmoil while concealing her own failures.
Democrat Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chaired the partisan Select Committee, bizarrely conceded that over the course of the panel’s two-year investigation, lawmakers never reviewed the blockbuster footage that was later published by Fox News.
“I’m not actually aware of any member of the committee who had access,” Thompson said. “We had a team of employees who kind of went through the video.”
Former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, meanwhile, who was vice chair of the Select Committee before an overwhelming primary defeat by Rep. Harriet Hageman, tried to downplay Friday’s release by resharing some of the panel’s carefully selected footage of the mob.
“Here’s some January 6th video for you,” she wrote on X, previously known as Twitter.
Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, whom Cheney’s Soviet-style committee sought to frame as a collaborator in an apparent insurrection, pushed back on Cheney’s narrative.
“Liz, we’ve seen footage like that a million times. You made sure we saw that — and nothing else,” Lee wrote on X. “It’s the other stuff — what you deliberately hid from us — that we find so upsetting.”
Liz, we’ve seen footage like that a million times.
You made sure we saw that—and nothing else.
It’s the other stuff—what you deliberately hid from us—that we find so upsetting.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
The National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP) is helping tech developers build artificial intelligence programs that suppress digital speech by starving online companies of ad revenue and isolating them from the financial system.
As part of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program’s second phase, the Massachusetts-based Automated Controversy Detection, Inc. (AuCoDe) received just over $940,000 for a project titled “A Controversy Detection Signal for Finance.” The company received $225,000 during the first phase of the program for the same project, for a total just under $1.2 million. AuCoDe received this money over a span of four years, from 2018 to 2022.
According to LinkedIn, AuCoDe is an “NSF backed company that aims to make online communication more productive and less dangerous.” Its now-defunct website states that AuCoDe “use[d] state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms to stop the spread of misinformation online.”
Let’s all say it together. “Who is responsible to determining what is, and is not, misinformation, or disinformation?” The wrong answer is Socialism.
The company developed artificial intelligence programs to identify “opposing sentiment,” “misinformation and disinformation,” “fairness and bias issues,” and “bot activity and its correlation with disinformation campaigns.” It used similar methods to “gain insight into sentiment and beliefs.”
Along these lines, the NSF-funded project’s goal was to develop technology that can “automatically detect controversy and disinformation, providing a means for financial institutions to reduce risk exposure” amid the increase of “public attention and political concern” being paid to disinformation.
Second phase SBIR grant money funded the “development of novel algorithms that automatically detect controversy in social media, news, and other outlets.” AuCoDe’s used this money to attempt the creation of “artificial intelligence and machine learning” programs that combat “the growing noise of controversy, mis- and dis-information, and toxic speech.”
According to the grant’s project outcomes report, AuCoDe developed several such “technologies.” The company created the “Squint,” controversy detection dashboard, and “Squabble, a proprietary controversy detection model.”
Squint and Squabble, “enable users to learn the controversy and toxicity levels of social media content, together with the stance score of an individual or company.” AuCoDe also created a free Chrome extension called “DETOXIFY” that enables users to blacklist and blur topics from their social media feeds.
Squint and Squabble are unavailable for public use.
AuCoDe also used this grant money to launch a YouTube channel where company members discuss “current controversies.” The channel boasts three total subscribers, and the most recent of its nine videos was uploaded eight months ago.
A paper, co-authored by AuCoDe staff members Shiri Dori-Hacohen, Keen Sung, Jengyu Chou, and Julian Lustig-Gonzalez, produced as a result of this grant detailed how “detecting information disorders and deploying novel, real-world content moderation tools is crucial in promoting empathy in social networks” like Parler and Reddit.
A supplemental video provided by the authors discussed the “cost of disinformation” both before and after Covid — partially AI-generated results “conservatively” estimated to be upward of $230 billion — and relied upon a report from the Global Disinformation Index to substantiate that brands like Amazon, Petco, and UPS “inadvertently funded disinformation stories leading up to the 2020 election.”
Below is a teacher (yes, a schoolteacher, teaching children as we speak). It is safe to assume that a person this him would be used to determine what is, and is not, misinformation, disinformation, et., al.
Ontario parents, this man says you’re a snowflake if you don’t want him teaching Marxism, queer theory, intersectionality, anti-racism, etc.
He says it’s all curriculum-related and he can teach whatever he wants.
The Global Disinformation Index, of course, is a formerly State Department-backed British organization that provided advertising companies with blacklists to starve companies accused that were accused spreading disinformation of revenue. AuCoDe’s research was aimed at helping the federal government further this goal through the algorithmic curation of digital speech.
In January 2021, using research gathered from these grants, the company published a piece titled “Misinformation drives calls for action on Parler: preliminary insights into 672k comments from 291k Parler users.” The company said it was “investigating the nature of accounts on alt-tech networks, with an eye toward who is spreading misinformation” and suggested that the platform’s very nature enabled users to circulate and engage with “mis- and dis-information.”
“In conclusion, our first look at our collection of Parler data finds a plethora of misinformation driving a desire for action,” the company wrote. “We also discovered that in addition to highly permissive content moderation, there is a lack of moderation around bots, leaving enormous potential for disinformation campaigns to be carried out on these networks — something we will be keenly exploring in the coming weeks.”
The reality is that AuCoDe interfered with Americans’ right to free speech because it didn’t align with the left-wing consensus and used federal tax dollars to run cover for Big Tech oligarchs. If the company was actually dogmatically concerned with “misinformation,” it would have gone after Facebook, which played a much larger role in hosting Jan. 6 discourse.
A source close to the company told The Federalist that AuCoDe closed in May 2023. More than $1 million in taxpayer money went to a government-backed start-up specifically focused on attacking the First Amendment rights of Americans and sabotaging businesses that deviate from left-wing orthodoxy.
Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @smlenett.
The attempts to blame former President Donald Trump for the Jan. 6 protest is a function of “corrupt DOJ talking points” and “neuro linguistic programming” for “critical factor bypass” by anti-Trump “mockingbird media,” the infamous Jan. 6 “Shaman” Jacob Chansley told Newsmax in an exclusive interview Monday.
“No, I do not” blame Trump, Chansley told “National Report.” “And I think that any attempt to try to paint anything that happened on that day onto the president or try to paint him with that broad brush is just mockingbird media and corrupt DOJ talking points, because the fact of the matter is the man said peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Chansley was giving his first national TV interview since his imprisonment for having taken part in the Capitol protest that had him convicted for the obstruction of an official congressional proceeding. He spent the time researching, studying, and even teaching inmates as he prepares for a 2024 libertarian campaign in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District.
“What we’re talking about here is optics, and based on the mockingbird media and neuro linguistic programming, based on critical factor bypass, and all that kind of psychological warfare, basically, you can paint anybody to be anything,” Chansley said.
“So you could choose to look at me as a felon. I’ve heard people call me a traitor that’s a threat to democracy. Or you could choose to look at me as I am a person that was maligned and skewered by a corrupt system — as so many hundreds of thousands of people have been in the United States, as so many Jan. 6ers have been in the United States, and as Donald Trump has been in the United States of America.”
Chansley turned his attention back to the question on Trump, convinced Trump bears no responsibility for the Jan. 6 protest.
“I don’t see the former president as responsible at all,” Chansley said. “Nobody can make me do anything, and that’s why I should go to D.C., because I’m not going to be beholden to the NGOs [non-governmental organizations]. I’m not going to be beholden to lobbyists. I’m not going to be beholden to the deep-state puppet strings.
“I will represent the American people the way they deserve to be represented.”
Chansley says he won’t accept campaign donations, because it would be hypocritical to be against the establishment in politics and then participate in it.
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By way of introduction, my name is Adam Johnson — but most people know me as “the Lectern Guy.” On Jan. 6, 2021, I kind of broke the internet after I was photographed smiling and waving as I was carrying then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s podium through the Capitol rotunda. Suffice it to say, the authorities did not look kindly on what I did, and I was later arrested.
Eventually, I was transferred to a courtroom after four days in isolation to be met by Assistant United States Attorney Patrick Scruggs for my arraignment in Tampa. I had the opportunity to brush my teeth and shower for the first time in days that morning and was hoping to make a good impression. His freshly pressed suit and American flag pin fixed to his lapel evoked a sense of due respect. I was the criminal here today.
The magistrate read the complaint, while I sat contrite. Scruggs was adamant in his insistence that “Everyone should be held accountable for their crimes.” It seemed reasonable enough to me. I had made the inexcusable decision to enter a building through open doors and carefully move furniture without permission. For these transgressions, Scruggs implored the magistrate to set conditions of my release to match my supposed crimes.
My firearms and passport were confiscated, I received a nightly curfew, and I was ordered to wear an ankle monitor, be drug tested at random, and not travel beyond a few select counties in my state.
At the time I was unsure if it was excessive. I was just happy to be back home with my family. I might have even been thankful. This man, Patrick Scruggs, had deemed me worthy to reside with my family and be among the public.
He must be one of the good ones, I thought.
But on Sept. 26, 2023, Patrick Scruggs was arrested and charged for brutally attacking a motorist with a deadly weapon during a road rage incident. He allegedly stabbed another motorist with a pocket knife. Within 24 hours, Scruggs posted bail with no conditions set for his release.
These days, I can’t help but think about Rome a lot. For instance, the personification of justice has historical roots reaching back to Emperor Augustus in 27 BC. It was manifested in sculpture.
She is our Lady Justice, the Roman goddess Justitia, blindfolded to bias, scales in balance to establish a constancy to her obligation, and a double-edged sword to carry out swift justice.
Her effigy is displayed internationally, but her real significance is the universal truth of what she represents; there is a moral contract with which we hold each other accountable. The details of the contract have long been debated, and multiple revisions have been reworked, replaced, and repealed. And while most provisions for change within the contract simply come from progress, there are moments in history that alter justice suddenly and irrevocably.
These events seem to emerge spontaneously, but the succinct response by the captors of Justitia paints a different story.
Most of us are likely familiar with the phrase “never forget,” probably in the context of 9/11. But I’ve always interpreted it to mean that if we want to preserve the idea of America, lines may need to be redrawn. Specifically, the lines where our rights and our security meet.
It seemed like a fair trade; my civil liberties and assurances would be restored once we got the bad guys. We were all in this together, after all.
The line between citizen and terrorist had been blurred and those lamenting from soapboxes not fortunate enough to have the talking stick were ridiculed for their lack of patriotism and adorned with foil crowns.
The canary in the coal mine fell on deaf ears, and justice became malleable in the name of national security. Some rebuked the invasion, most didn’t care, and the rest flagrantly celebrated it. The social credit score of knowing you are morally superior has its perks — for a time.
We were the good guys. We had our time in the sun, resigning with men acting as gods, forever in their favor. Call it naiveite if you want, but we were never meant to dine on Mount Olympus. “Never forget: The Sequel” would be released less than 20 years later.
But on Jan. 6, 2021, a group of unarmed “terrorists” managed to shut down an entire nation by walking through hallways, praying in gathering spaces, and moving furniture.
These new bad guys didn’t hide in caves or plant explosives in public spaces, with the exception of one shadowy figure who would adopt a legacy akin to the Sasquatch. Terrorism had a new face, and this time he wore Cabela’s and questioned a school board’s decisions to include pornography in libraries meant for children. An inquisition would ensue, and the ivory tower that once stood as a beacon of light for all nations would turn its gaze upon the very citizens that reinforced the bricks of its foundation.
More than 1,000 individuals have been charged as a result of the events on Jan. 6. Their homes were raided, their livelihoods destroyed, and their reputations dragged out like the entrails of field-dressed prey. Bail was denied, they endured months of isolation, and the Geneva Conventions was violated.
The inquisitors were hailed as heroes of democracy, despite the fact that most of the crimes committed were nonviolent misdemeanors that had historically resulted in fines and probation, when they were prosecuted at all.
Protesting in D.C. was not a novel occurrence. In fact, it not only has a lengthy history, it has a contemporary one as well. Storm a building during a Supreme Court justice confirmation hearing? Not a problem. Set fire to a church, injure Secret Service members, and cause the sitting president to be ushered to a bunker for safety? Why that’s just democracy in action.
Move a lectern 20 yards for a photo opportunity, however — well, that’s now “terrorism.”
Multi-decade sentences were recommended and administered to some of the participants that day. Moving a fence became tantamount to insurrection, resulting in a 17-year sentence, while Rene Boucher, who broke several of Sen. Rand Paul’s ribs during a lawn dispute, received a mere nine months! Not even the powerful were immune from this new breed of power!
As complex and nuanced as the justice system promotes itself to be, it is rudimentary at its core: You are either a facilitator of it or a victim of it.
Three years ago, I didn’t want to believe this. My worldview was anything but nihilistic, and I believed that once I had a chance to be seen and heard, the misunderstanding would be laughed off.
But the plot thins. The veil slips. The shroud is lifted. We have seen the man behind the curtain, and we are at an impasse.
If we have learned anything over the past two decades, it is this: Any power we are willing to give away so our enemies might be smitten will inevitably be used against us as well given a long enough timeline.
To restore our Lady Justice, we must honor the principles she once stood for. Scruggs will have his day in court, but no single case will restore equilibrium.
As I said earlier, I think about Rome a lot. The fall of an empire can’t be attributed to a singular event, much less a singular person. Nero was blamed for starting the fire that reduced more than half of Rome to ashes, but the citizens were content with bread and circuses.
The mob cheered as their neighbors were persecuted and slaughtered by Nero. Justice had become bloody retribution to entertain the masses. Sound familiar?
Our rulers and persecutors may be acting like Nero, but it doesn’t mean we have to be their mob; we cannot meet injustice with more injustice.
Justice is not demanding we prosecute vindictively. She is blindfolded to narratives, balanced without bias, and consistent in punishment. If the least of us agree to this moral contract and if we choose to believe in equal justice under the law, we can begin to restore our nation.
Adam Johnson is 38-year-old father of five. He spends his time training jiu-jitsu and is currently writing his first book while pursuing higher education. You can follow him @lecternleader on X.
Few incidents in recent history are as poorly understood as the riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Ever since it happened, the Biden administration and the corporate media have pushed the narrative that this was an insurrection by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election and destroy American democracy. They have compared this event to 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and even the Civil War. Accordingly, the Department of Justice has spared no expense to bring in each and every offender (there are now more than a thousand of them awaiting trial) and indict and convict their ringleader Trump.
However, several cracks in this story have started to appear. In last week’s hearing with the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Merrick Garland admitted his ignorance on whether there were federal agents in the crowds on Jan. 6. In a closed-door session with the same committee, Steven D’Antuono, former assistant director-in-charge of the FBI’s Washington field office, allegedly conceded that he lost count of the number of confidential human sources who joined the protest.
One of those informants was almost certainly Ray Epps, a man who was caught on camera urging other protesters to storm the Capitol. While Garland and D’Antuono played dumb in their testimony, Epps was finally charged with a mere misdemeanor despite his prominent role in provoking the riot. This stood in stark contrast to Enrique Torrio, someone who wasn’t even in Washington, D.C., that day who was sentenced to 22 years in prison just a few weeks earlier, or the hundreds of other protesters with similar sentences.
The implications of these reports are massive. Altogether, they strongly suggest that the federal government deliberately egged on a riot to silence any discussions about the 2020 election, crush Trump’s populist movement, and cast Trump as a dangerous tyrant. Along with the police, at least “a handful,” but probably more like dozens of (or possibly many more) informants and undercover agents from various government agencies were in the crowd goading otherwise innocent Americans to become violent and breach the Capitol. And now, these protesters are being denied due process rights and sentenced by psychopath judges to ridiculously long prison sentences in kangaroo courts.
In other words, much like the plan to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has been labeled a “Fednapping plot” since the whole scheme was directed by FBI agents entrapping unsuspecting civilians, the Jan. 6 Capitol attack can fairly be considered a “Fedsurrection” for the same reason. How would events have unfolded if government agencies had not inserted themselves in the protest? Or if certain high-level politicians like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi actually allowed extra security instead of denying it multiple times?
It’s not hard to see why journalists and writers avoid entertaining this possibility. Beyond exposing the unfathomable depths of government corruption, the story itself is so vast and hopelessly complicated that no one can find an end to it. Julie Kelly, the premier expert of the Jan. 6 riot, has devoted a whole book and hundreds of articles (and now a Substack) to the event and is still going strong detailing the innumerable injustices being inflicted on the protesters. Although a few other journalists have joined in the effort to investigate Jan. 6, almost everyone else has understandably distanced themselves from the story — it’s just too much.
Added to this is the preference of many Americans, both on the left and right, to believe a narrative that reinforces a certain classist prejudice. Somehow, it makes perfect sense to them that a raucous crowd of uneducated rednecks would storm the Capitol in the hopes of making their cult-leader Donald Trump a supreme dictator of the country. Sure, these same people were unarmed and the great majority of them had no criminal record. And true, it’s unclear how walking around a building and waving flags would overturn the election, let alone impose an antidemocratic Trumpocracy. One might even say this story makes about as much sense as Trump being a Russian agent who stole the election with some Facebook ads. Then again, many people continue to believe this hoax despite all evidence to the contrary.
However one feels about it, the Jan. 6 riot happened and the prosecutions continue to happen. For any American who still believes in the system it is well past time to come to terms with this reality for a few reasons. First, there are hundreds of innocent Americans wasting away in prison (also known as the “DC Gulag”) who are subjected to terrible living conditions, all because they dared to speak against the regime.
Second, the federal agencies and departments responsible for putting those people there have faced no scrutiny or any check on their power — on the contrary, most politicians seem happy giving them more money.
Beyond this, all Americans should worry about the tyranny at work and what this means for the country. If the government can stoke a riot to target dissidents and fabricate a bogeyman (e.g., MAGA Republicans, white supremacists, Christian nationalists, etc.) to distract the population, then no American citizen is truly free. They have no choice except to parrot the party line, submit to an oppressive government, and desperately hope that the leviathan takes care of them.
In some ways, this outcome has already materialized, putting the country in a precarious position. It will only become worse until Americans of all political stripes (not just conservatives) speak up for the Jan. 6 protesters. What’s happening to them is not just wrong, but egregious. Whatever one thinks about what they were protesting, it cannot be denied that they have given up everything for their cause. The least we can do is give them our sympathy and uncover the truth about what happened.
Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an MA in humanities and an MEd in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for The Federalist, The American Conservative, and The Imaginative Conservative, as well as the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter.
Perhaps you saw the news last week that two women in their 70s, Jean Marshall and Joan Bell, are each facing up to 11 years in federal prison for blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic in 2020. Federal prosecutors charged the pair for violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which Biden’s Justice Department has been aggressively enforcing against pro-life activists, convicting 26 people last year alone.
You might have also seen, a few weeks earlier, that a 42-year-old North Dakota man who ran over and killed an 18-year-old kid for being a Republican was sentenced to just five years in prison on a manslaughter charge, and with credit for time already served on house arrest, will spend only about four years behind bars.
Seeing these two things, maybe you wondered how it could be that two grandmothers might well spend twice as many years in prison for the nonviolent offence of sitting in front of an abortion clinic as a man who intentionally killed another man for his political beliefs. Maybe you thought, as @politicalmath put it on X (formerly Twitter), that the left needs “to start looking at this situation and admitting that this is not justice. They need to shake themselves awake and realize that their team is utilizing the justice system for political punishment and that this is destabilizing our entire culture.”
You might have thought the same thing recently about the Trump indictments. The hypocrisy is after all outrageous. Questioning an election is okay if Hillary Clinton and Democrats do it (as they did in 2016, 2004, and 2000) but it’s a “criminal conspiracy” if Trump and Republicans do it.
Or consider the draconian prison sentences for Jan. 6 rioters (22 years in one case) compared to the leniency shown to Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters, one of whom was sentenced to just 10 years despite setting a deadly fire in a Minneapolis pawn shop during the 2020 George Floyd riots — and this only after federal prosecutors invoked Martin Luther King Jr. and asked the judge to show leniency.
Or again consider the role of Biden’s Justice Department and FBI in protecting Hunter Biden and the president from congressional investigations that are, as of this writing, still uncovering damning evidence of corruption connected to Hunter’s overseas business schemes. Just this week we learned that two payments totaling more than a quarter-million dollars were wired to Hunter Biden from China, and the beneficiary address listed on the wires was Joe Biden’s home address in Delaware. (At the time the wires were sent, Hunter was living in California.)
Surely, you might be thinking, not even the most rabid partisans on the left can think that this is justice, or that this will end well for the country. Surely they see the danger of supporting a politicized federal law enforcement bureaucracy that criminalizes the opposition and uses the justice system as a weapon. Even if they don’t denounce it publicly, certainly they’re talking amongst themselves about how terrible this is and how to stop it. Right?
Wrong. To think this way is to misunderstand Democrats and the left completely. No, they’re not worried about any of this. No, they don’t want it to stop, they want it to continue and intensify. They don’t want justice, they want power.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Increasingly, Democrats will readily admit as much. For example, nearly half of them don’t believe in freedom of speech. A recent RealClear Opinion Research poll found that while solid majorities of Republicans (74 percent) and Independents (61 percent) believe speech should be legal “under any circumstances,” only 55 percent of Democrats agreed.
The same survey found that a third of Democrats think Americans “have too much freedom,” and a majority of them “approve of the government censoring social media content under the rubric of protecting national security.” Worse, about three-quarters of surveyed Democrats think the government has a responsibility to limit “hateful” posts on social media, and they are far more likely than Republicans or Independents to support censorship of political views.
That’s just one survey of course, but it captures a growing trend of authoritarianism on the left. We see it in polls, on college campuses and corporate boardrooms, on social media, and in how the left wields the power of the institutions it has captured, like the FBI and DOJ.
When you see these glaring disparities in how opponents of the Biden regime are treated by the Justice Department and the courts, when you see how corporate media cover the Trump indictments versus how they refuse to cover the Biden corruption scandal, when you see them calling for government censorship of “misinformation” on social media, understand that they are never going to take a step back and consider whether all of this is justice or injustice.
Despite the outdated moniker of “social justice warrior,” leftist Democrats aren’t interested in real justice. They’re interested in gaining and using power. Once they have it, they’ll use it against their enemies. Appealing to their desire for civil comity is futile. They have no use for comity so long as they have power.
This is to say, they won’t stop this until what they are doing to their enemies is in turn done to them. You don’t like left-wing district attorneys indicting the Republican frontrunner ahead of election season? Better find some GOP state attorneys general to indict Hunter and Joe Biden.
You don’t like Attorney General Merrick Garland using the Justice Department to protect a corrupt Biden administration? Better impeach him along with Biden. Don’t like a woke U.S. military funding abortions and gender surgeries on the defense secretary’s say-so? Better do as Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama has done and use all available leverage to stop them.
Power is the only language the left understands. So, if Americans on the right want to be anything more than a managed opposition — and let’s be honest, plenty of elected Republicans are happy to be exactly that — they had better figure out how to wield the limited power they do have. And they had better hurry.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
News broke Monday that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, the judge overseeing the Jan. 6-related case against Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., set a March 4, 2024, trial date for the former president.
It just so happens that March 4 is the day before Super Tuesday, when more than a dozen states, from California to Texas to Virginia, will hold Republican primary elections. What a coincidence! What this means is that Trump, the Republican front-runner by a wide margin, will not be able to campaign ahead of the most important date on the GOP primary calendar. It also means he’ll likely be tied up in court a week later on March 12, when four more states hold primary elections.
But this isn’t merely election “interference,” it’s a naked attempt to rig the 2024 election. The timing here is important, because not only will Trump be pulled off the campaign trail at a crucial time, he will almost certainly be convicted over the summer. After all, the jury in this case will be drawn from a pool that voted 92 percent for Joe Biden. No matter how outlandish and unconstitutional the charges are, no matter how utterly politicized the process is, a D.C. jury is going to convict Trump.
A summer 2024 conviction sets up the real play here, which is for blue states and counties to remove Trump from the ballot, citing a faulty and blatantly lawless reading of the 14th Amendment. Assuming Trump wins the GOP primary, this will leave Republicans with no candidate on the ballot across vast swaths of the country heading into the fall. Even if the Supreme Court steps in, if Democrats time it just right it will be too late to send out corrected, lawful ballots in time for Election Day.
Whatever one thinks of Trump’s post-2020 election challenges — whether they were legitimate, delusional, or downright treasonous — they were nothing compared to what Democrats are trying to pull here. Consider the timeline alone. How on earth could a case involving millions of documents and hundreds of witnesses be ready for trial by March? And how does Trump already have a trial date set in his Jan. 6-related case when dozens of other Jan. 6 defendants have been rotting away in federal prison for years now?
One lawyer for Jan. 6 defendants explained on Twitter that he had a “relatively simple” Jan. 6 case that was indicted in late March in D.C., and at a recent status hearing dates were discussed for a trial in March or April 2024: “So I get a year between indictment and trial in a one-defendant relatively straight-forward J6 case. And Trump gets 8 months in a case with 12 million pages of discovery and well over 100 witnesses.”
The whole thing is a naked abuse of power — a violation of Trump’s Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel, to say nothing of his free speech rights, which DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith is trying to criminalize.
The Obama-appointed Judge Chutkan, who has a penchant for handing down harsher sentences for Jan. 6 cases than what federal prosecutors recommended, has already betrayed her politically motivated bias in this case. Her claim that Trump would get “no more or less deference than any other defendant” is contradicted by her observation that because Trump has “considerable resources” he is “not entitled to unlimited preparation time.”
In other words, because Trump is wealthy, and because the political calendar dictates that Democrats move their election-rigging scheme along quickly, Trump’s trial is getting fast-tracked. There’s no other explanation for why this trial date is being set so soon after the indictment, and why March 4 was chosen as the specific date.
As John Hasson noted on Twitter, two separate courts have now attempted to set March 4 as Trump’s trial date. In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis tried to set Trump’s trial date for March 4, but Republican Gov. Brian Kemp shut it down. Now Judge Chutkan has done the same. There’s a reason it keeps coming up, and it has nothing to do with justice or a fair trial.
Dems tried to set a March 4th date for Trump's GA trial, but Brian Kemp shut that down
So now they're setting a March 4th date for Trump's **DC** case
What we’re seeing here is the machinery of the Biden regime’s show trials at work. Remember, the point of a show trial is not to deliver justice, it’s to display power.
Everything about this process — the farcical indictments, the release of the mugshot, the timing of the trial — is designed to convey to ordinary Americans that one side, the left, has consolidated control over the most powerful institutions in our country, and resistance to their rule will be met with overwhelming force.
Democrats are not trying to hide any of this from you. They want you to see this display of power and understand what it means, which is this: You will not under any circumstances be allowed to vote for Donald Trump in 2024. So don’t even think about it — and don’t complain about it either, or you might end up just like him.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
Four indictments of Donald Trump have so far done no more to stop him than two earlier impeachments did. He remains easily the front-runner in the Republican primaries, and in some polls is running equal with President Biden. But now a theory defended by able legal scholars has emerged, arguing that Trump is constitutionally disqualified from serving as president.
Even if Trump secures enough electoral votes to win the presidency next year, legal Professors Michael Paulsen and Will Baude argue, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution would disqualify him from federal office. Former Judge Michael Luttig and Professor Laurence Tribe have enthusiastically seconded the theory. While their theory about the continuing relevance of the Constitution’s insurrection clause strikes us as correct, they err in believing that anyone, down to the lowest county election worker, has the right to strike Trump from the ballot.
Ratified in 1868, the 14th Amendment is a load-bearing constitutional pillar erected during the Reconstruction period. Section 3 deals with the treatment of former state and federal officials, and their allies, who had taken sides with the Confederacy in the Civil War:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Although Section 3 unquestionably applied to Confederates, its text contains nothing limiting it to the Civil War. Rather, it has continuing relevance to any future “insurrection or rebellion.” Although it does not explicitly refer to presidents or presidential candidates, comparison with other constitutional texts referring to “officer[s]” supports the interpretation that it applies to the presidency too.
Section 3 distinguishes between “rebellion” and “insurrection,” and we have a contemporary guide to the meaning of that distinction. In the Prize Cases (1863), the Supreme Court declared that “[i]nsurrection against a government may or may not culminate in an organized rebellion, but a civil war always begins by insurrection against the lawful authority of the Government.” “Insurrection” therefore refers to political violence at a level lower or less organized than an “organized rebellion,” though it may develop into that. Trump may have been an “insurrectionist” but not a “rebel.”
But was he even an “insurrectionist”? In their Atlantic piece, Luttig and Tribe find the answer obvious: “We believe that any disinterested observer who witnessed that bloody assault on the temple of our democracy, and anyone who learns about the many failed schemes to bloodlessly overturn the election before that, would have to come to the same conclusion.”
But that view is not universally shared. Finding “disinterested observers” in a country marked by passionate disagreements over Donald Trump is no easy task. Despite the scenes of the attack on the Capitol and extensive investigations, the American people do not seem to agree that Trump took part in an insurrection or rebellion. Almost half the respondents in a 2022 CBS poll rejected the claim that the events of Jan. 6 were an actual “insurrection” (with the divide tracking partisan lines), and 76 percent viewed it as a “protest gone too far.”
Other considerations also call into question the claim that Trump instigated an “insurrection” in the constitutional sense. If it were clear that Trump engaged in insurrection, the Justice Department should have acted on the Jan. 6 Committee’s referral for prosecution on that charge. Special Counsel Jack Smith should have indicted him for insurrection or seditious conspiracy, which remain federal crimes. If it were obvious that Trump had committed insurrection, Congress should have convicted him in the two weeks between Jan. 6 and Inauguration Day. Instead, the House impeached Trump for indictment to insurrection but the Senate acquitted him.
The Senate’s acquittal is the only official finding by a federal or state institution on the question of whether Trump committed insurrection. The failure of the special counsel to charge insurrection and the Senate to convict in the second impeachment highlights a serious flaw in the academic theory of disqualification.
According to Luttig and Tribe, it appears self-evident that Trump committed insurrection. They assume Trump violated the law without any definitive finding by any federal authority. According to their view, he must carry the burden of proof to show he is not guilty of insurrection or rebellion — a process that achieves the very opposite of our Constitution’s guarantee of due process, which, it so happens, is not just provided for by the Fifth Amendment, but reaffirmed in the same 14th Amendment that contains the disqualification clause. It would be like requiring Barak Obama to prove he was native-born (a constitutional prerequisite for being president) if state election officials disqualified him for being foreign-born.
The Electoral College Chooses Presidents, Not State Officials
If this academic view were correct, it would throw our electoral system into chaos. One of the chief virtues of the Electoral College system is that it decentralizes the selection of the president: State legislatures decide the manner for choosing electors, with each state receiving votes equal to its representation in the House and Senate. States run the elections, which means that hundreds, if not thousands, of city, county, and state officials could execute this unilateral finding of insurrection. A county state election official, for example, could choose to remove Trump’s name from printed ballots or refuse to count any votes in his favor. A state court could order Trump barred from the election. A state governor could refuse to certify any electoral votes in his favor. The decentralization of our electoral system could allow a single official, especially from a battleground state, to sway the outcome of a close race in the 2024 presidential election.
Allowing a single state to wield this much power over the federal government runs counter to broader federalism principles articulated by the Supreme Court. In our nation’s most important decision on the balance of power between the national government and the states, McCullough v. Maryland, Chief Justice John Marshall held that a single state could not impose a tax on the Bank of the United States. Marshall famously observed that “the power to tax is the power to destroy.”
Marshall may well have frowned upon single state officials deciding to eliminate candidates for federal office on their own initiative. The Supreme Court lent further support for this idea in United States Term Limits v. Thornton (1995), which held that states could not effectively add new qualifications for congressional candidates by barring long-time incumbents from appearing on the ballot. Writing for the majority, Justice Stevens argued that allowing states to add term limits as a qualification for their congressional elections conflicted with “the uniformity and national character [of Congress] that the framers sought to ensure.” Allowing state election officials to decide for themselves whether someone has incited or committed insurrection, without any meaningful trial or equivalent proceeding, would give states the ability to achieve what term limits forbid.
Congress Has Other Means of Enforcement
We are not arguing that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment lacks the means of enforcement (though not every official who has sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution has such enforcement power). Each branch of the federal government can honor Section 3 in the course of executing its unique constitutional functions. Article I of the Constitution allows Congress to sentence an impeached president not just to removal from office, but also disqualification from office in the future. Congress could pass a statute disqualifying named insurrectionists from office — we think this would not qualify as an unconstitutional bill of attainder — or set out criteria for judicial determination.
Using its enforcement power under Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, Congress could conceivably establish a specialized tribunal for the handling of insurrectionists. The president could detain suspected insurrectionists, subject ultimately to judicial review under a writ of habeas corpus, or prosecute them under the federal law of insurrection and seditious conspiracy. Federal courts will have the ultimate say, except in cases of unilateral congressional action, such as lifting a disqualification by supermajority votes, because they will make the final judgment on any prosecutions and executive detentions.
We are not apologists for Trump’s spreading of baseless claims of electoral fraud or his efforts to stop the electoral count on Jan. 6. But as with the weak charges brought by the special counsel, the effort to hold Trump accountable for his actions should not depend on a warping of our constitutional system. Prosecutors should charge him with insurrection if they can prove it and have that conviction sustained on appeal. Congress should disqualify Trump if it can agree he committed the crime. Ultimately, the American people will decide Trump’s responsibility for the events of Jan. 6, but at the ballot box in 2024’s nominating and general elections for president.
John Yoo is the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law, Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, Nonresident Senior Fellow at The American Enterprise Institute, and a Visiting Fellow at The Hoover Institution. Robert Delahunty is a Fellow of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life in Washington, DC.
The latest indictment of former President Donald Trump is even more outlandish than Jack Smith’s blatant attempt to criminalize free speech. The indictment Monday out of Fulton County, Georgia, criminalizes mundane activities like asking for a phone number, texting, encouraging people to watch a televised hearing, and reserving a room at the Georgia capitol.
These activities, according to Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis, run afoul of the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute. As far as Willis is concerned, Trump’s legal efforts to challenge the election results in Georgia amounted to a criminal conspiracy, with Trump as the criminal mastermind. What that means, outlandishly, is that every phone call or tweet related to those legal efforts, every step Trump and his team took to press their legal case, counts as “an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.”
This is of course crazy. As more than a few people have noted since the charges dropped, according to Willis’ standard every major Democrat should be in prison on racketeering charges — including Hillary Clinton but especially Stacey Abrams, who has made a career out of denying that she lost the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election.
Here’s five minutes of Stacey Abrams denying she lost the 2018 election. When will she be arrested? pic.twitter.com/x9WaAdiKhd
So yes, the hypocrisy is stupendous and blatant. But let me suggest that decrying the hypocrisy here is a loser’s game. What you see in these anti-Trump indictments is not hypocrisy, it’s hierarchy. We all became familiar with this concept during the Covid pandemic. Gathering for church, even outside, was against the law, but mass rioting in the streets was OK — so long as you were rioting for racial justice. Ordinary people had to let their elderly loved ones die alone and were not even allowed to bury them, yet thousands attended the funeral and memorial services for secular saint George Floyd.
Perhaps nothing better captured the hierarchy-not-hypocrisy concept than a photo of Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the annual Met Gala in September 2021 wearing a white gown with “tax the rich” scrawled on its backside. Set aside the idiocy of the stunt itself. In the photo, AOC isn’t wearing a face mask, but the woman helping her with her gown is. What AOC was displaying for the public was hierarchy.
As my colleague Eddie Scarry wrote at the time, “This is simply another example of those in power, those running our most influential cultural and political institutions, sending a message: There’s a new social hierarchy in America. And this one isn’t about what you can afford to do, it’s about what you’re allowed to do.”
The same analysis applies to the raft of indictments against Trump, whose post-2020 denunciations of the election are no different than those of Clinton in 2016 or most Democrats in 2000 and 2004. Democrats are allowed to question the results of an election, Republicans are not. That’s not hypocrisy, it’s hierarchy.
Once you understand this, you begin to recognize it everywhere. Antifa thugs and BLM rioters were allowed to trash entire city blocks, torch police stations, take over neighborhoods, besiege federal courthouses — and do so with the blessing and encouragement, at times even with the complicity, of elected Democrat Party leaders. But every granny that set foot within a mile of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 had better brace for a federal indictment if they haven’t already been charged.
The same goes for teachers who push transgender ideology and critical race theory on students versus the parents who object to these things being taught behind their backs. The former are courageous leaders, the latter are potential domestic terrorists, at least according to the Biden Justice Department. Ditto for the media’s treatment of the Trump family business versus the Biden family business. None of this is hypocrisy, it’s hierarchy. The left is trying to tell you something, which is that they have all the power and you have none.
The essayist N.S. Lyons (a pseudonym) put it well in a piece last August, describing the futile efforts of Team B to call out the hypocrisy of Team A:
You see, it’s possible you are under the misapprehension that you are not supposed to notice what you described as the “double-standard” in acceptable behavior between Team A and Team B. And that you think if you point out this double-standard, you are foiling the other team’s plot and holding them accountable. This might be because, in your mind, you are still in high school debate club, where if you finger your opponent for having violated the evenly-applied rules a neutral arbiter of acceptable behavior will recognize this unfairness and penalize them with demerits.
Except in reality you are not holding Team A accountable, and in fact are notably never able to hold them accountable for anything at all. Even though Team A gets to hold you accountable for everything and anything whenever they want. This is because unfortunately there is no neutral arbiter listening to your whining. In fact, currently the only arbiter is Team A, because Team A has consolidated all the power to decide the rules, and to enforce or not enforce those rules as they see fit.
With each new Trump indictment, the left’s strategy becomes increasingly clear. It isn’t to bring real criminal charges based on actual violations of the law, or to see justice applied equally and fairly even to a powerful person like Trump. The strategy is to demonstrate power and thereby humiliate and discourage Trump supporters by showing them how powerless they are.
Another aspect of this strategy, as James Lindsay explained in a Twitter thread Tuesday, is to provoke the right into reacting. This is what Lindsay calls “leftist dialectical political warfare,” or, in Trump’s case, “Operation Poke the Bear.” The purpose of such warfare, says Lindsay, is to provoke a reaction that would justify the further consolidation of power on the left.
So expect to see more “hypocrisy” — even lazy and objectively embarrassing hypocrisy of the kind we saw this week in the Georgia indictment. It doesn’t matter how laughable or outlandish the charges against Trump are, because prosecuting actual crimes and upholding the law have nothing to do with any of this.
This is about power — who has it, and who doesn’t. The people at the top are trying to tell you, the masses under them, that they can do whatever they want to you, at any time, and there’s nothing you can do to fight back. Just look what they’re doing to Trump, a former president. If they can do that to him, imagine what they can do to you.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
Ex-Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund is determined to set the record straight on what happened at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot more than two years ago.
After writing a book that challenged the groupthink of corporate media and the partisan Jan. 6 Committee, Sund sat down for an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. According to Carlson, the interview with Sund was scheduled to air on the network April 24, the same day Fox News announced the anchor’s termination. (Another already-taped interview, with a Federalist senior contributor, was also stifled). Fox News refused to release the footage of Sund’s conversation with Carlson, so the pair recorded another sit-down published on Twitter Thursday.
“[Sund] knew more about what happened than virtually anyone else in the United States,” Carlson said. “Yet congressional investigators weren’t interested in talking to him. The media, not interested in talking to him. But we were.”
Ep. 15 Former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund reveals what really happened on January 6th. Our Fox News interview with him never aired, so we invited him back. pic.twitter.com/opDlu4QGlp
Sund went on to make explosive allegations of federal misconduct related to the Capitol chaos that raised more questions than answers about how and why the complex was left vulnerable. The Capitol Police, Sund said, were left in the dark about a cascade of intelligence gathered by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security that warned about the rally turning violent.
The intelligence that Capitol Police gathered, Sund said, indicated a level of political activity similar to previous rallies that featured “limited skirmishes” with counter-protesters.
“Coming into it,” Sund said, Capitol Police received “absolutely zero” of the “intelligence that we know now existed talking about attacking the Capitol, killing my police officers, attacking members of Congress, and killing members of Congress.”
“None of that was included in the intelligence coming up,” Sund said. “We now know FBI, DHS was swimming in that intelligence. We also know now that the military seemed to have some very concerning intelligence as well. “
“None of the intelligence,” Sund said, was shared with the Capitol Police chief.
“I’ve done many national security events and this was handled differently,” Sund added. “No intelligence, no [Joint Intelligence Bulletin], no coordination, no discussion in advance.”
2. Milley Wanted to Shut Down D.C. Ahead Of Jan. 6
Military officials were so concerned about the intelligence that warned of an explosive riot that the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Mark Milley, considered preemptively shutting down the city.
“Acting Secretary of Defense [Christopher] Miller and General Milley had both discussed locking down the city of Washington D.C. because they were so worried about violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6,” Sund said.
According to Sund, the two Pentagon leaders discussed even revoking permits on Capitol Hill out of concern for violence.
“You know who issues the permits on Capitol Hill for demonstrations?” Sund said. “I do. You know who wasn’t told? Me.”
On Jan. 4, however, Miller signed a memo “restricting the National Guard from carrying the various weapons, any weapons, any civil disobedience equipment that would be utilized for the very demonstrations or violence he sees coming.”
3. Congressional Leadership Denied National Guard Requests Before and During Riot
Despite federal intelligence warning of mass upheaval amid the joint session of Congress, Sund explained how he was denied preemptive deployment of the National Guard twice in the days leading up to the riot. On Jan. 3, 2021, Sund sought approval from congressional leadership for guard deployment as was still required by law.
“I was denied twice because of optics and because the intelligence didn’t support us,” Sund said. “I was denied by Paul Irving, House sergeant-at-arms, and also Mike Stenger, Senate sergeant-at-arms.”
Irving served under the direction of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Stenger reported to GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
The former Capitol Police chief said he was forced to beg for National Guard assistance as the turmoil escalated. While the riot grew, Sund said he called House Sergeant-at-Arms Irving to demand reinforcements from the nearby Guard troops.
“I’m told by Paul Irving, ‘I’m gonna run it up the chain, I’ll get back to you,’” Sund said. “His chain would be up to Nancy Pelosi. He didn’t have to do that but he wouldn’t give me authorization.”
Irving was allowed to authorize the deployment without Pelosi’s approval in the event of an emergency, Sund said. The former speaker’s office confirmed to The New York Times that Pelosi herself was asked to dispatch the National Guard.
Sund said Stenger was called next, who in turn said, “Let’s wait to hear what we hear from Paul [Irving].”
“For the next 71 minutes I make 32 calls,” Sund said, with no help from congressional leadership.
4. Secret Service Turned Over One Text to J6 Committee
While Sund made dozens of calls from the Capitol command center, the first agency to come to the police chief’s assistance was the Secret Service.
“One of the first people to offer assistance was United States Secret Service,” Sund said. “By law, I shouldn’t have requested their assistance … until I had approval. But I’m looking at my men and women having their asses handed to them and my first thought was ‘f-ck it, I will take whatever discipline there is. Send me whatever you got.’”
“That was the one text Secret Service turned over,” Sund added.
The agency had apparently deleted text messages from Jan. 5-6, 2021, that were subpoenaed by the House select committee probing the riot last summer. The only message turned over was Sund’s out-of-order request for support.
5. New Jersey State Police Arrived to Help Before National Guard
While Sund was begging congressional leaders to greenlight assistance from the National Guard, New Jersey State Police were on their way to reinforce Capitol Police.
The 150 to 180 National Guard troops who were “within eyesight” of the Capitol, Sund told Carlson, were put in vehicles and driven around the complex back to the D.C. Armory. Instead, Sund received the evening troops, who didn’t arrive on the scene until 6 p.m. By that point, according to Sund, the Capitol was under control.
“While I’m begging for assistance,” Sund said, “the Pentagon sent in resources to generals’ houses to protect their homes but not me.”
By the time the National Guard finally showed up, Sund noted, “New Jersey State Police [had] beat them to the Capitol.”
National Guardsmen were then positioned in front of the Capitol to take “pictures for military magazines” as “heroes” of Jan. 6.
6. Sund Wasn’t Told About Federal Informants Present at the Capitol
In the fall of 2021, The New York Times confirmed the presence of at least one federal informant at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot after the paper dismissed such claims as a conspiracy theory. The former Capitol police chief, however, was kept in the dark on undercover operations with “no idea” how many were in the crowd. The Justice Department had even deployed special commandos with “shoot to kill authority” at the Capitol, according to Newsweek.
“Not to share that in the intelligence,” Sund said, “that’s concerning.”
7. Lawmakers Didn’t Want Sund to Testify
In the aftermath of the Capitol riot, lawmakers began to schedule hearings on the security failures while the fever grew to launch a snap impeachment of the outgoing president.
“I fought to testify,” Sund said, but “they didn’t want me to testify in the Senate hearing.”
The hearing in the upper chamber was initially limited to current Capitol employees. Sund was excluded from the lineup because he was immediately dismissed from his job as chief of police after the riot. Irving and Stenger would have also initially been excluded. The trio of security officers eventually testified in the upper chamber after Trump’s acquittal in February 2021, with Sund the only one to appear in person.
Meanwhile Pelosi, who was in charge of the Capitol as speaker of the House, was “off limits” to investigation — leaving open questions such as whether the speaker was briefed on the potential for violence from other agencies. The House speaker even blocked Republican access to relevant documents ignored by the Democrats’ Jan. 6 Committee.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
While the Biden administration faces escalating calls for impeachment, either of the homeland security secretary, the attorney general, or even the president himself as evidence mounts over myriad scandals, Republicans’ top Senate lawmaker is distracted.
Instead of directing his ire at President Joe Biden for his influence-peddling schemes with corrupt overseas actors, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell piled onto the media onslaught against a freshman representative from Wisconsin who cussed out some teenagers at the Capitol. GOP Rep. Derrick Van Orden stirred up controversy last week when he went on a tirade against some interns with the Senate page program who were lying in the Capitol rotunda, which the congressman says he considered disrespectful.
“Wake the fuck up you little sh-ts. … What the f-ck are you all doing? Get the f-ck out of here,” Van Orden said, telling the group they were “defiling the space,” according to one page’s recollection of the incident. The Wisconsin lawmaker was defiant, explaining on a local radio show, “The people who have brought this up are not serious people.”
Nor are the Republicans who have remained silent on the administration’s series of scandals but have been quick to get behind the Democrats’ latest outrage circus.
The Van Orden outburst drew swift condemnation from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York. “I was shocked when I heard about it, and I am further shocked at his refusal to apologize to these young people,” Schumer said.
McConnell didn’t hesitate to make the outrage bipartisan. According to Politico, McConnell was clear to “associate myself with the remarks of the majority leader.”
“Everybody on this side of the aisle feels exactly the same way,” McConnell added.
If only Republicans had a leader in the upper chamber who dared stand up for Republicans. The problem is not that Van Orden’s eruption at a couple of teenagers is excusable. The problem is McConnell’s regular participation in Democrats’ smear campaigns against other Republicans while the GOP Senate leader remains silent on the administration’s corruption scandals. Last week, McConnell declined to comment at all on House Republicans’ impeachment push.
It’s far from the first time the Republican Senate leader has peddled the Democrats’ latest political narratives. In March, McConnell condemned Fox News for the network airing the Jan. 6 tapes presented by Tucker Carlson. The tapes undermined the Democrats’ narratives of a “deadly insurrection,” the basis for their snap impeachment of outgoing President Donald Trump.
“With regard to the presentation on Fox News last night, I want to associate myself entirely with the opinion of the chief of the Capitol Police about what happened on Jan. 6,” McConnell told reporters on Capitol Hill following Carlson’s first installment of the J6 tapes. Hours earlier, Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger had sent a memo to his department that called Carlson’s coverage “filled with offensive and misleading conclusions.”
The comments led even Elon Musk to begin to question whether McConnell was actually a Republican. “I keep forgetting which party he belongs to,” Musk wrote on Twitter.
After the FBI raid of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence at Mar-a-Lago, McConnell didn’t condemn the weaponization of federal law enforcement. Instead, the Republican Senate leader endorsed more funding for the federal bureau. This followed the octogenarian lawmaker sabotaging Republicans’ midterm efforts to reclaim the Senate. McConnell was more interested in maintaining an establishment minority he could control than in achieving a GOP majority that aligned more with Trump’s vision for the party.
Republicans have a right to expect far better from their No. 1 leader in the Senate. Considering McConnell’s recent health problems, new leadership could come sooner rather than later. His successor would be wise to adopt a new approach that puts voters first.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
An independent nonprofit government watchdog that specializes in whistleblower protection sent letters to Congress and the Department of Justice (DOJ) this week with more evidence of misconduct by FBI leadership.
On Thursday, Empower Oversight submitted an affidavit of a new FBI whistleblower who came forward with allegations of improper intimidation by FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate. The whistleblower claimed that shortly after Abbate’s appointment in February 2021, Abbate threatened agency employees concerned about the bureau’s overblown response to the Jan. 6 Capitol demonstrations that same year. During a secure video conference, said the unnamed employee, Abbate called on agency staff with concerns about the bureau’s approach to the Jan. 6 riot to meet with the deputy director personally so he could, in the whistleblower’s words, “set them straight.”
“I have witnessed hundreds of Director [Secure Video Teleconference]s and have never seen a direct threat like that any other time,” the whistleblower said in the affidavit. “It was chilling and personal, communicating clearly that there would be consequences for anyone that questioned his direction.”
In May, House lawmakers on the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government heard from several other FBI whistleblowers who made similar claims about the conduct of agency leadership. Former FBI Special Agent Steve Friend, who filed for whistleblower protection in August, told the committee he raised concerns over the FBI’s reaction to the Capitol riot, which he thought “could have undermined potentially righteous prosecutions and may have been part of an effort to inflate the FBI’s statistics on domestic extremism.”
“I also voiced concerns that the FBI’s use of SWAT and large-scale arrest operations to apprehend suspects who were accused of nonviolent crimes and misdemeanors, represented by counsel, and who pledged to cooperate with the federal authorities in the event of criminal charges created an unnecessary risk to FBI personnel and public safety,” Friend said. “At each level of my chain of command, leadership cautioned that despite my exemplary work performance, whistleblowing placed my otherwise bright future with the FBI at risk.”
Garret O’Boyle, another former FBI special agent who filed for whistleblower protection, told lawmakers how he moved his family “halfway across the country” before the FBI suspended him for speaking out.
“They allowed us to sell my family’s home. They ordered me to report to the new unit when our youngest daughter was only two weeks old. Then, on my first day on the new assignment, they suspended me; rendering my family homeless and refused to release our household goods, including our clothes, for weeks,” O’Boyle said.
House Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, led by Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, have sought testimony from at least 16 FBI employees to probe agency misconduct related to whistleblower retaliation.
Empower Oversight made clear in a Thursday press release that “while the affiant doesn’t know and isn’t associated with Empower Oversight’s other FBI clients, the affidavit is relevant to FBI whistleblower cases that are currently under inspector general review.” According to the affidavit, Abbate’s threat goes against the bureau’s training for new employees who are taken for a tour of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to learn about the lessons for law enforcement.
“The message was this: when orders or policies are wrong, when we are told to do things that violate core values and principles, we must have the courage to ask difficult questions and raise objections. We should be able to do that without fear of being crushed,” the whistleblower said. “The Deputy Director’s threats sent the opposite message: Dissent will not be tolerated. If you question my response to January 6, I don’t want you in my FBI.”
“Abbate’s threat to employees was witnessed by numerous other FBI employees and constitutes evidence of intent to retaliate against any dissent,” said Empower Oversight President Tristan Leavitt. “This evidence can be independently corroborated by dozens, if not hundreds, of other FBI employees if congressional committees and the Justice Department Inspector General would investigate and document the results.”
The FBI has spent years stonewalling congressional oversight into agency conduct surrounding the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. In May, Jordan re-upped demands for an FBI briefing over the two pipe bombs planted at the RNC and DNC. The FBI, according to former FBI Agent Kyle Seraphin in an interview with The Washington Times, knows what car the suspect used but hasn’t pursued the individual in question.
The pipe bombs, Seraphin added, were found inoperable.
The FBI has also refused to answer Republican lawmakers’ questions about the extent of the agency’s involvement at the Capitol on the day of the riot. Three months after The New York Times ran the headline, “No, there is no evidence that the F.B.I. organized the Jan. 6 Capitol riot,” the paper followed up with another in September 2021: “Among Those Who Marched Into the Capitol on Jan. 6: An F.B.I. Informant.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Special Counsel John Durham breached neither ethics nor etiquette when he highlighted the difficulty of obtaining a conviction in a politically charged case when the jury holds opposing partisan views. He merely stated the reality on the ground in D.C.-area federal courts. And by his own actions prosecuting the J6 defendants solely in the nation’s capital, Attorney General Merrick Garland has confirmed that assessment by proving the corollary: Criminal cases against individuals viewed by the local populace as political pariahs make for easy convictions.
“Did the Durham Report’s Criticism of Juries Go Too Far?” The Washington Post’s headline from last week asked rhetorically. It was quite an ironic concern coming from the legacy outlet serially guilty of publishing fake news to propagate the Russia-collusion hoax. A better question for the “democracy dies in darkness” rag would be: Did Clinton and Democrats’ Dirty Politics Go Too Far?
But no, instead of focusing on the substantive content contained in the 300-plus pages of Durham’s report detailing malfeasance by the Department of Justice and FBI and the Clinton campaign’s responsibility for the scandal, The Washington Post focused on Durham’s introductory remarks explaining the “special care” the special counsel’s office used in making criminal charging decisions — decisions Durham stressed were “based solely on the facts and evidence developed in the investigation and without fear of, or favor to, any person.”
After noting the high burden the Constitution places on the government in criminal cases, Durham explained why, in numerous instances, he did not seek criminal charges even though the conduct deserved “censure or disciplinary action.”
“In examining politically-charged and high-profile issues such as these, the Office must exercise — and has exercised — special care,” Durham explained. “First, juries can bring strongly held views to the courtroom in criminal trials involving political subject matters,” Durham continued, “and those views can, in turn, affect the likelihood of obtaining a conviction, separate and apart from the strength of the actual evidence and despite a court’s best efforts to empanel a fair and impartial jury.”
Those taking umbrage at Durham’s remarks, claiming they erode faith in our justice system, seem to have missed that the Justice Department’s manual, “The Principles of Federal Prosecution,” quoted in the special counsel report, makes the same point. Sometimes while “the law and the facts create a sound, prosecutable case,” the manual explained, there is still “the likelihood of an acquittal due to unpopularity of some aspect of the prosecution or because of the overwhelming popularity of the defendant or his/her cause…” It continues:
For example, in a civil rights case or a case involving an extremely popular political figure, it might be clear that the evidence of guilt viewed objectively by an unbiased factfinder would be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction, yet the prosecutor might reasonably doubt, based on the circumstances, that the jury would convict.
Prosecutors in such cases, the manual explained, might assess a guilty verdict unlikely “based on factors extraneous to an objective view of the law and the facts.”
In other words, biased juries and politics, rather than an “objective view of the law and the facts,” may dictate whether a defendant is convicted or acquitted. These are not merely the sentiments of Durham or Republicans, but the Department of Justice. So it isn’t Durham’s words that erode trust in the legal system, but rather insular juries.
It also isn’t merely the unsuccessful cases Durham brought against Michael Sussmann in the D.C. federal court and Igor Danchenko in the nearby federal court in Virginia that foster Americans’ distrust of the justice system. It is also the DOJ’s insistence that the scores of J6 prosecutions remain in the nation’s capital.
D.C. Jury Pool Is Biased
Following the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol, the Department of Justice has charged hundreds with federal crimes. Because the alleged offenses occurred in D.C., federal law provides that “venue,” meaning the physical location for the criminal proceedings, is proper in the federal D.C. district court.
Congress, however, has provided two bases to change venue. First, a federal court must transfer the criminal proceedings if the defendant requests a change of venue and “so great a prejudice against the defendant exists … that the defendant cannot obtain a fair and impartial trial there.”
While many J6 defendants have moved for a change of venue based on such prejudice, the DOJ has uniformly opposed the transfers. And because the “so great prejudice” standard is nearly insurmountable, the federal D.C. district court has denied the change of venue requests, even against evidence that 90 percent of D.C. voters cast their ballots against Trump in both 2016 and 2020. Furthermore, while almost everyone in D.C. knows about the indictments, polls show more than 70 percent of them — which is 15 percent higher than the national average — have formed an opinion about guilt or innocence.
Nor have the D.C. federal courts granted a change of venue “for convenience” — a second statutory basis Congress provided — which would allow the J6 defendants to be tried in their home states for their convenience, the convenience of witnesses, and “in the interest of justice.” Given that the DOJ farmed out the J6 cases to field offices throughout the United States, tasking local agents with surveilling and arresting the defendants, and that there are U.S. attorney offices in every state, trying the defendants across the country is also no inconvenience to the federal government.
So even if the prejudice is not “so great” that it is mandatory to change the venue of the case, why does the DOJ oppose the discretionary transfer for convenience?
Because Garland — like Durham — knows D.C. juries “bring strongly held views to the courtroom in criminal trials involving political subject matters and those views can, in turn, affect the likelihood of obtaining a conviction.” In fact, so great is the concern of a pro-DOJ bias that several defendants have made the nearly unheard-of decision in a criminal case to waive their right to a jury trial and have the judge decide their fate.
Americans likewise recognize the effect biased juries have on case outcomes. The attorney general ignoring the public perception of Lady Justice peaking from behind her blindfold will further erode respect for the judicial system and likely prompt future jurors to convert the trial process to a payback system — convicting the innocent or acquitting the guilty in a misguided attempt to right the scales of justice.
What Courts and Congress Should Do
The courts and Congress can and should respond. When faced with discretionary venue changes for “convenience,” courts should weigh more the “convenience” of the defendants and “the interest of justice.” When a question of mandatory transfers based on “great prejudice” arises, the courts should stop pretending our partisan divide is passable based on jurors’ promises.
Congress has several options too. While it has authorized the Supreme Court to promulgate rules governing federal criminal procedures, it retains the power to enact its own rules. At a minimum, in high-profile criminal cases, Congress should grant both the prosecution and the defense more “peremptory challenges” — challenges to members of the jury pool that can be used for any reason (except invidious discrimination). This will eliminate some of the most concerning situations.
For instance, in Durham’s trial against Hillary Clinton’s former lawyer, Sussmann, the federal judge rejected several of Durham’s “for-cause” challenges against jurors who had contributed to the Clinton campaign. When for-cause challenges fail, attorneys must rely on a limited number of peremptory challenges, six for the special counsel’s legal team and 10 for Sussmann. Expanding the number of peremptory challenges would allow for the removal of more potentially prejudiced jurors, and without a venue change, this represents the best mechanism for ensuring an unbiased jury.
More significantly, though, Congress should amend the venue rules to give defendants a better opportunity to relocate highly politicized cases to less partisan locales. While the courts already have that power, they have proved themselves too parsimonious to date.
But what about when partisanship prejudices the prosecution? Here, the Sixth Amendment places limits on venue, providing that in “all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law…”
In other words, while a defendant may consent to a change of venue, he can also demand a trial in “the State and district wherein the crime” was committed.
However, the Constitution also gives Congress the authority to “ascertain” the districts. To counter the overwhelmingly parochial D.C. populace, redrawing the borders of the district to limit venue there to the physical Capitol buildings, and then have the rest of D.C. subsumed by the surrounding districts in Virginia and Maryland, would ensure a broader jury pool.
Only so much can be done, however, to ensure juries don’t supplant the rule of law with their political passions, acquitting the guilty because they prefer the defendant’s politics to the prosecutor’s. But that’s the reality that comes from a constitutional system that protects individual rights against government abuse and believes “that it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”
That’s a good thing, especially as the current DOJ frames pro-lifers and parents as domestic terrorists. But that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing to remind Americans that juries may not convict because of strongly held political passions rather than actual innocence. Nor is it a bad thing to push Congress to ensure the venue statutes counter bias to the largest extent possible.
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.
Any candidate who is playing footsie with the propaganda press, in an incomprehensible ploy to curry favor with them, disqualifies himself from contention.
On Saturday night, former Vice President Mike Pence addressed the annual Gridiron Club dinner, a white-tie gathering of Beltway media and political insiders. He took the opportunity to praise the D.C. media, attack Tucker Carlson, and condemn Donald Trump.
“History will hold Donald Trump accountable for Jan. 6,” Pence said. “Make no mistake about it: What happened that day was a disgrace, and it mocks decency to portray it in any other way,” Pence said of Tucker Carlson’s journalism, which is at odds with the official narrative.
Pence praised the corporate media as well, saying, “We were able to stay at our post in part because you stayed at your post. The American people know what happened that day because you never stopped reporting.”
As if Pence’s views on the virtues of the propaganda press weren’t disappointing enough, his handlers bragged to the same media that he had lavished them with praise and attacked Trump and Carlson as part of his long-shot campaign to win the Republican nomination for president.
Really. According to a new Politico article, the Pence team intentionally crafted their remarks because they “believed it would help Pence win over his most skeptical audience these days: Washington insiders and journalists.”
No offense, but how are these people political professionals? How many decades of political history have taught everyone with a pulse that Republican pandering to the media is a fool’s errand? In what world does this strategy make sense?
The strategy has never worked and will never work.
Consider the media’s most beloved Republican presidential contender, 2008 nominee Sen. John McCain. The Arizona senator was treated so well by the media for his self-styled “straight-talk” and attacks on fellow Republicans that he used to refer to them jokingly as his “base.” It’s true that their support of him did help him obtain the nomination. But the moment he posed even a tiny threat to Sen. Barack Obama, the true object of their devotion and affection, they turned on him in a heartbeat. He might as well have been Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, or Mitt Romney.
Nothing about Pence suggests he would receive even a short honeymoon of the type McCain benefited from. He should have learned this lesson when, as governor of Indiana, he caved to media demands that he decrease religious freedom in his state. His cowardice did not result in favorable media coverage then or while he was vice president. They loathe every single thing about him. They even mock him for how he and his wife protect their marriage!
It’s true that attacking fellow conservatives or Republicans will always generate some favorable media coverage. It’s the only way a non-leftist can be published in The New York Times, for instance. It’s the primary way to get airtime on NBC or CNN. It’s self-abasing and a dereliction of duty to your voters, but, hey, a fleeting moment of non-hostility from the corporate press is worth it, right?
Contrast Pence’s effort with how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis handles corporate media. He treats them as if he understands they are Republicans’ most steadfast political opponents. In press conferences, he points out the flaws in their assumptions and lies in their questions. He does not give them breaking news in the futile hope that they will be nicer to him later. He treats non-leftist press the same as or better than he treats the corrupt propaganda press. His communications team publicly posts the ridiculous questions they’re asked, and how they answer those questions. He refuses to treat requests as legitimate if they come from media who have lied about him.
The only thing worse than a Republican who impotently complains about “media bias” instead of understanding that the country is in the midst of an all-out information war is a Republican who actually praises the press for its war on Republican voters.
Substantively Wrong
The other main problem with Pence’s pandering to the corporate press is that it was substantively in error. It rewrites his own history in the chaos and drama of the 2020 election. Here is Mike Pence in December of 2020, for example:
And as our election contest continues, I’ll make you a promise: We are going to keep fighting until every legal vote is counted. We are going to keep fighting until every illegal vote is thrown out! We are going to win Georgia, we are going to save America, and we will never stop fighting to Make America Great Again!
And here is Mike Pence on Jan. 4, 2021, just two days prior to the big rally and subsequent riot at the Capitol:
I share the concerns of millions of Americans about voting irregularities. I promise you, come this Wednesday, we’ll have our day in Congress. We’ll hear the objections, we’ll hear the evidence!
Moments before that “day in Congress” began, Pence issued his letter to Congress saying he believed his role that day would be only ceremonial. However justified, it was something of a shock to the voters who had supported him and the president in their battle over election irregularities. If he wants to blame third parties for riling up the masses, he may want to consider his own role.
Pence is also wrong to attack Carlson for showing video footage of the riot at odds with the official narrative put forth by Nancy Pelosi and her cronies in the press. Tucker’s footage did not deny the violence that Pelosi and her fellow Democrats showed day after day for years for partisan gain. But it did show that Jacob Chansley was given something of a tour of the Capitol that day and was not viewed as violent by any of the many police officers he encountered. It showed that mysterious witness Ray Epps gave testimony about his whereabouts that contrasted with video evidence. And it showed that the Jan. 6 Committee’s show-trial had lied by omission when it falsely conveyed Sen. Josh Hawley’s behavior as the riot unfolded.
Calling these journalistic revelations a “disgrace” to reporters who lack Carlson’s independence and courage is shameful and reprehensible.
Finally, Pence was wrong to effusively praise the corporate press for its behavior in the aftermath of Jan. 6. The media never “reported” or covered the event or its circumstances so much as it exploited them for political purposes. The very same media that excused and vociferously defended the violent and deadly Black Lives Matter riots that besieged the White House, a federal courthouse, and police precincts, turned on a dime to treat the Jan. 6 riot as a literal insurrection, an absolutely absurd claim. The same media that reacted with abject horror and hysteria to the suggestion that order should be restored in cities across America as violent rioters terrified the citizens suddenly decided in the case of Trump supporters that First Amendment protections of speech, press, and assembly were negotiable, constitutional rights to a defense were unimportant, and certain citizens didn’t deserve speedy trials or due process.
No American should praise such behavior from the propaganda press. And no man seeking the votes of Republicans should pander to the propaganda press for political reasons, even if it weren’t delusional to think it would work.
The country is in the midst of an information war. The corporate media are a more formidable political opponent of Republicans than any Democrat running for office. Any candidate for the Republican nomination had better have a plan to protect and defend Republican voters and their goals. And any candidate who is playing footsie with these political opponents, in an incomprehensible ploy to curry favor with them, disqualifies himself from contention.
After Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired Capitol surveillance footage this week exposing yet more falsehood from the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 and leaving Democrats and their media allies irate, the committee chair on Wednesday said the panel never actually analyzed the crucial footage.
On Monday’s edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News aired the footage of the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, undermining the select committee’s narrative of a “deadly insurrection.” Given access to the video by Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Carlson’s team reviewed over 40,000 hours of footage, which offered proof the committee manipulated audio and video to dramatize the riot for its made-for-TV hearings in an election year.
But in a Wednesday night statement to CNN, select committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., claimed the panel never analyzed the blockbuster footage Fox News aired this week.
“I’m not actually aware of any member of the committee who had access,” Thompson said. “We had a team of employees who kind of went through the video.”
Hiring investigators who “kind of went through the video” doesn’t sound like a very thorough investigation.
However, Thompson’s admission that his committee lacked due diligence makes no sense. Since when do lawmakers have no access to the same material as their own staffers? Did none of the nine panel members view the footage that was played for the cameras? Does Thompson not know who had access to the tapes? Was it just the former television executives they hired to produce their show trials? Either Thompson is lying and knows exactly who had access, or he handed the key to Vice Chair Liz Cheney and had nothing to do with it while the committee leaked exclusives to CNN.
Thompson’s office did not immediately respond to The Federalist’s inquiries.
The committee clearly had access to the footage Carlson aired this week that contradicted the panel’s key narratives. After all, members of the committee endlessly bragged about how many documents, more than 35,000, investigators reviewed. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who used the committee to dodge responsibility for her own failure to secure the Capitol, just refused to make the tapes public — and after Carlson’s revelations, it’s clear why.
Carlson’s program showed that the man who became the face of the “insurrection,” known as the “QAnon Shaman,” was given VIP treatment by police. The tapes showed since-deceased Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick walking around “vigorously” after altercations with protesters who had allegedly murdered him. The footage also showed that mysterious rioter Ray Epps lied to congressional investigators about his whereabouts the day of the riot, yet the committee protected the “insurrectionist.”
On Monday, Carlson announced his team discovered proof that Democrats on Pelosi’s probe came across the same footage Fox made public.
“We can be sure because the footage contains an electronic bookmark that is still archived in the Capitol’s computer system,” said Carlson. “That means that investigators working for the Democratic Party saw this tape. They saw it, but they refused to release the tape to the public.”
Committee staffers even used some of the footage to show Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., allegedly fleeing the Capitol. All Carlson did was extend the footage a few seconds longer than what was televised in the committee’s show-trial hearings, and it became clear Hawley departed the Capitol along with other members of Congress. The clip published by the committee was always demonstrably dishonest.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
The FBI’s D.C. field office directed the Boston office to open investigations into more than 100 Americans who had attended the Jan. 6 rally despite having no evidence those individuals had committed any crime, according to whistleblower testimony reviewed by The Federalist. This represents the second attempt by the D.C. field office to sic the FBI on innocent Americans — in this case, people who were exercising their First Amendment right to free speech.
The D.C. field office pressured Boston’s FBI office to open criminal investigations into some 140 people who took buses from Massachusetts to D.C. on Jan. 6, according to testimony from George Hill, a whistleblower and recently retired FBI supervisory intelligence analyst, reviewed by The Federalist. The D.C. field office applied this pressure, Hill said, even though it had no evidence that any of those travelers had entered restricted areas of the Capitol.
Hill, a military veteran and former longtime FBI and NSA analyst, had previously identified himself as one of several whistleblowers cooperating with House Judiciary Committee investigators when he spoke with Just the News’ John Solomon last month. The Federalist’s review of Hill’s testimony confirmed the details he told Solomon and exposed more troubling information.
According to Hill’s testimony, after rioters entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the D.C. field office, which was leading the investigation, presented the Boston office “definitive evidence” that two individuals within its jurisdiction had entered restricted areas of the Capitol. Boston opened investigations into those two individuals.
In his deposition testimony to congressional investigators, Hill explained that because those two people had arranged for buses to take rally-goers to Washington, the D.C. field office told the Boston office to open investigations into all 140 of the passengers.
According to the whistleblower, a Boston supervisory special agent, or SSA, told the D.C. field office, “Happy to do it. Show us where they were inside the Capitol, and we’ll look into it.”
But the D.C. field office said it couldn’t do that unless it knew the exact time and location in the Capitol where the individuals were located, according to Hill’s testimony. Then when Boston asked for access to the 11,000 hours of video to allow its own agents to review the footage themselves to assess whether to launch an investigation into any of the rally-goers, the D.C. field office refused to share the video, Hill’s testimony revealed. The bureau claimed the footage might reveal undercover agents or confidential human sources, according to the whistleblower.
Yet the D.C. field office persisted in its demand for Boston to open investigations into everyone on the bus, threatening to call the special agent in charge of the field office if the lower-level agent refused. The supervisory special agent remained firm, however. As Hill explained, the SSA told the D.C. field office that those 140 people “were going to a political rally, which is First Amendment protected activity.”
This move by the bureau represents its second such attempt — just from Hill’s testimony — to target innocent Americans. As The Federalist reported on Monday, Hill also told the House Judiciary Committee that the D.C. field office pressured local FBI field offices to open investigations on innocent, gun-owning Americans based on data mining that Bank of America voluntarily provided to the bureau.
According to The Federalist’s review of the testimony, Hill said the Bank of America list included people who used its credit or debit cards in D.C., or the surrounding Maryland and Virginia areas, on Jan. 5, 6, or 7, 2021. Furthermore, people who had ever (through Jan. 6, 2021) used a Bank of America product to purchase a firearm were elevated to the top of the list.
In both instances, Boston’s special agent in charge, Joseph Bonavolonta, withstood the outside pressure — something Hill commended in his testimony.
While Bonavolonta and the Boston office refused to investigate Americans based solely on their First Amendment activities or credit card receipts placing them in the greater-D.C. area, it is unclear whether other field offices launched investigations based on the D.C. office’s pressure. A source familiar with Hill’s testimony confirmed that Hill did not know the answer to that question either.
Open-source reporting, however, reveals that in at least one instance, the FBI questioned an individual who organized buses for rally-goers — apparently without any evidence of potentially illegal conduct. In January of 2021, FBI agents appeared at Jim Worthington’s suburban Philadelphia home to quiz him about the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Worthington was not home at the time but later spoke with investigators over the course of two hours, confirming he had been in D.C. for the rally and had “helped bring busloads of people to the event,” but had “never went to the Capitol.”
Given that Worthington, who also led the People4Trump PAC, never entered the Capitol, one must wonder what legitimate basis the FBI claimed it had to target him.
Or had the D.C. field office pressured the Philadelphia field office to open an investigation into Worthington? And what about the some-200 people who traveled to D.C. on the buses Worthington arranged? Did the local field office open investigations into those people? And what about the other 50-plus field offices? Did they also target individuals based on their First Amendment-protected activities? With stories of buses from acrossAmericatraveling to D.C. for the Jan. 6 rally, it is a definite possibility.
While it’s long been known that the House’s Jan. 6 Committee and the legacy media pushed a narrative that conflated the rally-goers and the rioters, the whistleblower’s allegations now suggest the FBI’s D.C. field office also treated Americans exercising their right to free speech as suspected criminals, without any evidentiary basis to do so.
Mollie Hemingway contributed to this report.
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.
An FBI whistleblower told congressional investigators that the D.C. field office pushed local offices to open criminal investigations into Americans based solely on financial transactions Bank of America tracked and voluntarily provided to the bureau, according to testimony reviewed by The Federalist.
“Bank of America, with no directive from the FBI, datamined its customer base,” whistleblower and recently retired FBI supervisory intelligence analyst George Hill told investigators for the House Judiciary Committee, according to Hill’s testimony.
Hill had identified himself last month as one of the whistleblowers cooperating with congressional investigators when speaking with Just the News’ John Solomon about the disclosures he made to the House Judiciary Committee during a transcribed deposition. A review of Hill’s testimony confirms the details the military veteran and former longtime FBI and NSA analyst told Solomon. It also reveals more troubling details.
According to the material reviewed, Hill testified that on either Jan. 7 or 8, 2021, Bank of America provided the FBI’s D.C. field office a “huge list” of individuals who used Bank of America credit or debit cards in D.C., or the surrounding Maryland and Virginia areas, on Jan. 5, 6, or 7, 2021. Bank of America then elevated to the top of the list anyone who had ever (through Jan. 6, 2021) used a Bank of America product to purchase a firearm.
There was no geographic or date-range limit to the search for firearm purchases, Hill stressed, meaning the individual would be flagged at the top of the list had he “purchased a shotgun in 1999” in Iowa, and used a Bank of America credit card to check out of a hotel on Jan. 5, 2021, in the Northern Virginia area, following a trip that could be completely unrelated to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6.
The D.C. field office, which oversaw the Jan. 6 investigation, distributed the Bank of America list internally to field offices throughout the country, Hill testified in his deposition. Hill further explained that his supervisor at the Boston field office refused to open an investigation on the individuals flagged on the list because there was “no predication.” “There’s no crime that was committed by using a [Bank of America] product in the District or around the District,” Hill testified, explaining his supervisor’s reasoning for why no “further action” was required.
But the D.C. field office pushed back, according to Hill. The D.C. field office told Boston’s supervisory special agent, or SSA, he needed to open up the cases. When the local office’s SSA refused, the D.C. field office threatened to call the assistant special agent in charge, or ASAC, of the local office, Hill told the congressional committee. The SSA stood firm in his refusal, as did the local ASAC, Hill said, even though the D.C. field office then threatened the ASAC that it would escalate the matter to the office’s special agent in charge, or SAC.
The D.C. field office then pushed the office’s SAC to open investigations into the targeted Americans. But to the SAC’s credit, he refused, Hill noted, saying the Boston SAC countered, “No, we’re not going to open up cases based on credit card or debit card activity that took place.”
While Boston’s FBI office refused to open the requested cases, Hill stressed that “what I don’t know and could not give accurate testimony to,” was whether the D.C. field office “took it upon themselves to open cases.”
Hill’s deposition testimony raises another troubling possibility: that one or more of the other 54 local FBI field offices either complied with the D.C. field office’s initial request to open investigations into innocent Americans, or later capitulated when the D.C. office escalated the request up the chain of command to the ASAC and then the SAC.
The only reason the Boston FBI office did not launch investigations into the Bank of America customers flagged by the D.C. field office is that the Boston office’s leadership stood firm against the pressure. And the only reason we know about the D.C. field office’s attempt to target innocent Americans based on Bank of America’s data mining gun owners who happened to be in the greater D.C. area on Jan. 5, 6, or 7, 2021, is that a whistleblower came forward.
What the FBI’s other 54 field offices did in response to the D.C. field office’s pressure is unknown. According to a person familiar with Hill’s testimony, Hill had no information on that question either. Also unknown is whether any other private businesses mined the financial information of their customers, as Bank of America had, and then handed that private information over to the feds.
Congressional investigations and more whistleblowers will be needed to uncover the extent of the FBI’s political targeting of innocent Americans.
Bank of America did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.
Mollie Hemingway contributed to this report.
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.
1st Amendment Praetorian, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting free speech rights, filed a defamation lawsuit on Wednesday against a former staffer for the Jan. 6 Committee and publishers of his insider story of the investigation that labeled the group of former veterans as “domestic violent extremists” and a “militant group,” and portrayed the nonprofit as responsible for the violence that erupted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
News broke last month that a former senior adviser to the Jan. 6 Committee, Denver Riggleman, had penned a behind-the-scenes book purportedly detailing the inner workings of the Jan. 6 Committee. Riggleman’s book, “The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation Into January 6,” was released last month, with Esquire publishing an edited excerpt of it.
The book and the Esquire excerpt both spoke of “the militant groups that took part in the attack, namely the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and 1st Amendment Praetorian,” adding that the committee was looking at the storming of the building as a military operation. “The targets of our investigation were divided up into five major categories,” Riggleman wrote, with one group consisting of “domestic violent extremists,” which the former Jan. 6 staffer claimed, “included militant groups like Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and 1st Amendment Praetorian.”
Those statements were false and defamatory, according to the lawsuit filed by 1AP in a federal court in Virginia on Wednesday that named as defendants Riggleman; Hearst, which publishes Esquire; and the publishers of “The Breach,” the Holt and MacMillan publishing companies.
“Mr. Riggleman’s book pushes the Democrat talking point that military veterans who defend the First Amendment are violent extremists. We are not. We love America and it is our mission to guard its cherished values,” a representative of the 1AP told The Federalist. “Riggleman’s arrogance and reckless disregard of basic facts is not surprising. This book is low on intelligence and full on propaganda,” 1AP’s representative added.
Riggleman and the other defendants are not the first to falsely portray 1AP as “violent extremists” and “militant groups.” In July, The Federalist reported that in the days before the long Independence Day weekend, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told The New York Times that when the Jan. 6 Committee reconvenes public hearings in July, “he intends to lead a presentation that will focus on the roles far-right groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and 1st Amendment Praetorian played in the Capitol attack.” According to the Times, “Mr. Raskin has also promised to explore the connections between those groups and the people in Mr. Trump’s orbit.”
Raskin’s comments followed a year of the Jan. 6 Committee falsely portraying 1AP as “right-wing, paramilitary, or even a militia.” Lawyer Seth Abramson went further, claiming 1AP and its members were involved in the Capitol riot and are “insurrectionists” or “seditionists,” resulting in the group filing suit in a federal court in New Hampshire against Abramson for defamation.
Following Raskin’s comments, Leslie McAdoo Gordon, a lawyer representing 1AP in connection with the Jan. 6 Committee, corrected the record, telling The Federalist, “No matter what you think of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, 1st Amendment Praetorian in no way resembles those groups.” Rather, 1AP “provides pro bono security services at events to ensure a heckler’s veto does not interfere with the speakers’ constitutional right to express their viewpoint,” McAdoo Gordon explained.
McAdoo Gordon stressed these points in a letter to the Jan. 6 Committee in response to subpoenas issued to 1AP; its founder, Robert Lewis, a retired United States Army Green Beret and recipient of the Bronze Star; and 1AP member Philip Luelsdorff, who is a former U.S. Army Ranger. Among other things, the subpoenas demanded that 1AP provide “documents sufficient to identify all employees, officers, and board members” of the nonprofit, as well as “all agendas, minutes, notes, or other records related to meetings” of the nonprofit.
McAdoo Gordon rejected the committee’s demands, telling The Federalist that to use subpoenas “to demand financial and fundraising records (including bank account information) and ‘recruitment’ information from a nonprofit civic organization, especially a civil liberties group, is wholly unacceptable,” and “a gross affront to [the] First Amendment.” McAdoo Gordon stressed that her clients had nothing to do with the violence at the Capitol and were instead targeted because of the individuals with whom they associate.
The letter to the Jan. 6 Committee further detailed 1AP’s activities in D.C., noting that the group provided security for a rally held on Jan. 5, 2021, but the planned tasking to provide security in D.C. ended after that rally. While most members of 1AP left D.C. after the Jan. 5 rally, Lewis and Luelsdorff, who had remained, were asked to provide some additional protection services for the media outlets covering the protest at the Ellipse. They were later asked by the staff at the Willard Hotel to help “maintain order given the flood of people into the lobby and around the hotel after the Ellipse events ended.” They had nothing to do with what occurred at the Capitol.
Not only did the Jan. 6 Committee know these details in April, when McAdoo Gordon first responded to the committee’s subpoena, but by early July, the information was made public — well before the publication of Riggleman’s book and the Esquire excerpt. Nonetheless, the defendants called 1AP a “domestic violent extremist” and “militant” group.
In addition to the lawsuit against Riggleman and the publishers, an attorney for 1AP is calling for the Jan. 6 Committee to respond to the false claims pushed by their former adviser.
“If the J6 Committee had an ounce of integrity, it would denounce Riggleman’s lies and admit that there is no evidence that 1AP participated in a plot to attack the Capitol on January 6,” Virginia attorney Steven Biss told The Federalist.
With midterm elections less than a month away and the Jan. 6 Committee still pushing its partisan goals by subpoenaing former President Donald Trump, that outcome seems unlikely.
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.
On Thursday, Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder decided it was the time to bring the subtext of the Jan. 6 show trials and related domestic security state activities into the open.
“My guess is that by the end of this process, you’re going to see indictments involving high-level people in the White House, you’re going to see indictments against people outside the White House who were advising them with regard to the attempt to steal the election, and I think ultimately you’re probably going to see the president, former president of the United States indicted as well,” Holder told SiriusXM host Joe Madison.
Holder noted that the U.S. Department of Justice he formerly headed is working with the illegally constituted Jan. 6 Commission towards this goal. We know these entities are also working with the FBI, whose head bit his thumb at congressional oversight repeatedly in a public hearing last week.
Locking Up Opposition Politicians Is What Putin Does
An indictment of former President Donald Trump would be a breathtakingly authoritarian turn. It would amount to the U.S. security state refusing to accept “no” from America’s voters yet again. An indictment would be an unelected and unaccountable federal agency overruling voters’ two-time rejection of impeachment through their elected representatives.
This is the core danger of the administrative state: Its now open propensity to go rogue. It is apparently hellbent now on turning the United States into a banana republic.
Democrats called Donald Trump a fascist, authoritarian, and wannabe dictator for chants at his rallies of “Lock her up,” referring to his opponent Hillary Clinton. At the time, leftists pointed out that imprisoning, interrogating, investigating, and otherwise using government resources to harass and prosecute one’s political opponents was the mark of tyrannical regimes such as Vladimir Putin’s and Adolf Hitler. “Democracies don’t lock up political opponents,” the Washington Post editorial board told us in 2016.
That is still true when the ones pushing the interrogations, investigations, entrapments into committing felonies, show trials in unusual venues with no cross-examination or due process, early morning home raids, excessive detainment, and asymmetrical punishments are Democrats. Democrats are trashing republican institutions, expectations, and guarantees for political purposes, most visibly now in their Jan. 6 effort to destroy the lives of protestors largely charged with misdemeanors and to expand Spygate tactics more broadly.
Spygate Is Setting Up Field Offices In Swing States
It’s not just the de facto head of the opposition party whom powerful government agencies are putting in their sights, it’s down-ballot party leaders. The FBI has gone from using its spy resources to affect the results of presidential elections with Spygate and its Hunter Biden laptop disinformation to using its police powers to affect gubernatorial elections. And these are just the operations we know about.
In Michigan, the FBI openly meddled in the upcoming election by affecting the selection of candidates, arresting and charging the formerly leading Republican candidate for governor for misdemeanors. The FBI raided Ryan Kelley’s home while polls showed him leading the primaries. In the primary election last week, he came in fourth.
The Jan. 6 Committee is now demanding documents and interviews with Republican candidate for Pennsylvania governor Doug Mastriano, who attended the Jan. 6, 2021 rally. The sole allegation against him is that he walked past “police lines,” which could mean anything, as the scene was chaotic and police were woefully understaffed.
This means Mastriano is being targeted for peacefully exercising his rights to free speech and public assembly. The Jan. 6 Committee won’t allow him to record their planned interrogation, a basic feature of legal self-defense and impartial justice. In fact, selectively excerpted video clips and quotes from these secret interrogations have been a constant feature of the commission, further reinforcing its use as a political weapon against the right rather than a pursuit of justice.
Of the 120,000 people the FBI alleges were present on Jan. 6, 2021 — perhaps 1 percent of whom entered the Capitol building — the vast majority were garden-variety Trump supporters, which include numerous state and local officials. State and local lawmakers are a party’s farm team. Subjecting them to investigation for peacefully protesting is a way to kneecap their entire party.
Weeks before the 2020 election, the FBI announced it had foiled an alleged plot to kidnap the Michigan governor.
But now, in 2022, the story is VERY different. What happened, who authorized this operation, and is this typical of the DOJ's domestic terrorism unit?
Put all of this against the systematic refusal of Democrat DAs, judges, and juries to prosecute people who openly engage in political violence from the left. In 2020, leftist rioters who coordinated across state lines and in far greater numbers and criminal activity than Jan. 6 attendees firebombed federal buildings, murdered people, looted, burned down downtowns, and assaulted police officers. Of course, essentially nobody involved in perpetrating the Spygate setup of an American president has been brought to justice, most recently including Michael Sussmann.
This summer, a leftist group has allegedly attacked two dozen pro-life maternal care centers in multiple states and a congressional office and promises to continue, but Wray couldn’t provide almost any information on alleged FBI investigations into it. Despite an assassination attempt on one Supreme Court justice this summer, the DOJ has still not filed charges against the people harassing and threatening justices and their families at their homes. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland failed for weeks on end to enforce laws against such harassment of justices, creating the conditions for the aggression to intensify.
This is unacceptable, and Wray and Garland should be fired. They won’t be, though, and that’s the problem.
The @FBI is too busy hunting down every grandma and goofball who trespassed and took selfies on January 6th.
And too busy harassing Loudoun County parents who dared to speak up at public school board meetings.
Amplifying pre-existing double standards of justice is far beyond troubling, it’s a destruction of the justice system. A country that harshly prosecutes people or lets them off Scot-free based on their political affiliation is a banana republic.
A two-tier justice system is not a justice system. It is a totalitarian system. Its purpose is not justice but population control. The more people see that moving into place, the more likely it is that some guy gets raided by the FBI for political reasons one morning and — God forbid — goes postal because he has no hope for a fair trial after they take him in.
Certainly even more ordinary Americans are realizing through all of this that the entire federal deck is prejudiced against them. Desperation makes people do wild things. Whatever happens, Republicans can be sure it will be wrapped around their necks with ropes of lies to further subjugate them and everyone who votes for them with the further erasure of our constitutional rights and way of life.
Equality Under the Law Is the Nonviolent Way Out
Remember, 75 million people voted for Trump in 2020. This isn’t some fringe Davidian cult, it’s half of the nation’s voters. Democrats are scaring them, for good reason. And Republicans are doing jack nothing to calm things down.
We’re watching federal agencies use their powers not to catch criminals but to criminalize peaceful political views and actions. We’re witnessing a growing campaign to lock people up for their opposition to the ruling political party, which is not only profoundly un-American but profoundly dangerous societally. This is the prosecution of a political cold civil war that could very easily heat up again in another January 6-like outburst, or worse.
As Mike Anton writes, Democrats may want that. But do Republicans? Any who thinks he might after what we’ve been through in the past seven years is either fool or quisling.
If Republicans think this is all going to blow over just because they haul in the FBI director for another no-consequences hearing, or even if they promise yet another goes-nowhere, punishes-nobody investigation of agencies we know are meddling in elections, framing elected officials, and telling elected members of Congress what to do instead of the reverse, they’re idiots. Their only hope of averting even worse political circumstances is to make damned sure they kneecap these scary federal agencies as their top priority ASAP.
We aren’t in business-as-usual Kansas anymore, Toto. We’re in crisis times that call for serious leadership, not LARPing as leaders on screens.
Sending billions to Ukraine while China grows stronger and every domestic sector is on fire isn’t serious. Lambasting Joe Biden for inflation while not pledging to pass the policies that reverse it, starting with slashing the federal government’s spending, isn’t serious. Yelling at the FBI director Republicans helped confirm isn’t serious (get better vetting staff, folks). Confirming a Supreme Court justice who obviously hates the Constitution isn’t serious. Not going on a crusade to clean out the FBI and DOJ Agean-stables-style isn’t serious. And pretending the Jan. 6 commission is anything but a miscarriage of justice is disqualifying.
We need the GOP to provide serious leadership, because Democrats are a serious threat to equal justice for all, and that’s going to destroy the country for good if it’s not stopped post-haste. Americans desperately need swift and prudent action to avert even more unthinkably dangerous events. Those who refuse to plan and take that action despite accepting from voters the responsibility to do so will be infamous to history as cowards and traitors.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
The House Select Committee on Jan. 6 finally devoted a major portion of a hearing in its summer show trial series to the violence at the Capitol. After again re-establishing that members of the Trump White House were divided over the Republican president’s challenges to the 2020 election, lawmakers spent the second half of Tuesday’s hearing on the turmoil from more than 18 months ago.
“We settle our differences at the ballot box,” Committee Chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said during his opening of proceedings in which a fellow panel member, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-M.d., led the questioning of two repentant rioters who illegally entered the Capitol. Just five years ago, Raskin spearheaded efforts to overturn the 2016 election results as one of his first actions in Congress, objecting to the certification over made-up narratives of Trump-Russia collusion.
Over the course of Tuesday’s hearing, lawmakers sought to paint former President Donald Trump as guilty of coordinating an assault on the Capitol, which began well before he had finished his speech at the White House. At one point, the panel featured an unsent tweet from the president urging supporters to “March to the Capitol,” as incriminating evidence. The post loses its shock value, however, when one acknowledges that Trump said plainly to those gathered at the Ellipse to head toward the Capitol and protest “peacefully.” Quite the bombshell.
Jan. 6 cmte showing a drafted, unsent Trump tweet promoting his address at the Ellipse and a subsequent “March to the Capitol” pic.twitter.com/AOocxQc0hW
“I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,” Trump said.
For all its redundancy in its desperate attempt to smear political dissidents as violent “insurrectionists” ahead of the fall midterms, the Jan. 6 Committee’s latest hearing offered the most information yet about the telegraphing and public planning in the run-up to the Capitol riot. The proceedings, on the other hand, came complete not with testimony from senior officials in charge of Capitol security, but instead from an anonymous Twitter employee and former D.C. Chief of Homeland Security and Intelligence Donell Harvin.
In a pre-recorded clip played during the hearing, Harvin told lawmakers his division received information “suggesting that some very, very violent individuals were organizing to come to D.C. and not only were they organizing to come to D.C., but these groups, these nonaligned groups, were aligning. All the red flags went up at that point.”
“When you have armed militia collaborating with white supremacy groups collaborating with conspiracy theory groups online all towards a common goal, you start seeing what we call in terrorism, ‘a blended ideology,’” Harvin added. “And that’s a very, very bad sign.”
Harvin said groups went beyond casual chatter and began coordinating specifics.
The committee’s anonymous Twitter employee, meanwhile, testified that the company was concerned about the potential for violence on Jan. 6.
“I don’t know that I slept that night [Jan. 5, 2021] to be honest with you,” the employee said. “I was on pins and needles, because again, for months, I had been begging and anticipating and attempting to raise the reality that, if we made no intervention into what I saw occurring, people were going to die.”
Twitter fostered the same type of user riot planning that Silicon Valley tech giants cited to justify their collective purge of rival app Parler from their online services shortly after the riot.
Tuesday’s testimony raised more questions than answers and reinforced existing questions about the Capitol security failures under the leadership of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who six times turned down requests for the deployment of the National Guard, according to former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund.
Why didn’t Pelosi’s House Sergeant at Arms approve requests for National Guard assistance? According to The Washington Post, “Harvin’s team set up a call with analysts at the Capitol Police.” Why did the U.S. Capitol Police Intelligence Unit “not warn its officers or law enforcement partners of the gravity of the threat” as outlined by a Senate report last summer? Why didn’t the Jan. 6 Committee ask Harvin about the Capitol Police’s failure to heed his warnings? And why is the committee soliciting testimony from former D.C. government employees instead of the Capitol Police Intelligence Unit? We all know the answer to the last two.
Devoid of opposition, the committee is operating for the sole purpose of expunging its political enemies from public life, and that means doing everything in its power to present a curated narrative. Panel member Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., admitted that much on CNN on Sunday when she said on national television that the committee was uninterested in corroborating blockbuster claims left unverified at best.
“We never call in witnesses to corroborate other witnesses or to give their reaction to other witnesses,” Lofgren said.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
Implying guilt based on a witness asserting his rights ‘is a McCarthy-esque tactic that offends the Constitution and is unworthy of the United States Congress.’
The Jan. 6 Committee is abusing its power by asking inappropriate questions about their fellow Americans’ beliefs and associates, and publicly portraying witnesses who exercise their Fifth Amendment rights as guilty — all to put on a show trial.
Later on, Tuesday, the Jan. 6 Committee will hold yet another public hearing, this one purportedly to focus “on the role of extremists” in the attack on the Capitol. While the precise script for the afternoon’s proceedings remains unknown, last week Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin previewed the committee’s plans, telling The New York Times that when public hearings resumed in July, “he intends to lead a presentation that will focus on the roles far-right groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and 1st Amendment Praetorian played in the Capitol attack.” According to the Times, “Mr. Raskin has also promised to explore the connections between those groups and the people in Mr. Trump’s orbit.”
Recycling the Fifth Amendment Tactic
An attorney for 1st Amendment Praetorian, or 1AP, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting free speech, spoke exclusively with The Federalist about the committee’s questioning of 1AP, the group’s founder, and another member of the nonprofit, all of whom she represents. From the framing of the questions posed to her clients, Leslie McAdoo Gordon was left with the firm impression that the Jan. 6 Committee merely wanted video capturing her clients declining to answer the questions for the purpose of impugning their character during the televised hearings.
“The committee knew before the depositions that my clients would be asserting their First and Fifth Amendment rights, and also would not answer any questions because the depositions were being held in violation of the rules established by the House,” McAdoo Gordon told The Federalist. So, shortly after the hearing began and the 1AP witnesses made clear they would not answer any questions, the staffers moved to general topic areas and would ask a few prepared questions, then the committee representative would note that he had more questions on the topic and inquire whether if he asked those questions, the witnesses intended to assert the same objections.
“My clients would respond ‘yes’ to that question, so then the committee would move forward with the next topic,” McAdoo Gordon said. “But after covering various topics, the committee staffer at the end volleyed a litany of individual questions to my clients, forcing them to respond to each question with ‘Rules, First, and Fifth,’ the shorthand we had agreed to with the committee to convey their objections to questions posed.”
Given that the committee had broadcast video of Michael Flynn asserting his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in an earlier hearing, McAdoo Gordon said she wouldn’t be surprised if Tuesday’s hearings include clips of her clients refusing to answer the committee’s questions.
In fact, she said as much to the committee in a letter last week. After calling the lawmakers out for implying to the public that Flynn was guilty of some crime because he asserted his Fifth Amendment rights, McAdoo Gordon wrote that implying guilt based on a witness asserting his rights, “is a McCarthy-esque tactic that offends the Constitution and is unworthy of the United States Congress.” The attorney added that she is “forced to anticipate that the Committee will use the same totalitarian tactic to improperly smear 1AP.”
The irony is that McAdoo Gordon was working with the committee to arrange for her clients to testify voluntarily, within the bounds of the First Amendment, until the committee concocted what she has called a “cockamamie” criminal conspiracy theory. The committee argued in litigation with former Trump attorney John Eastman “that President Trump, Dr. Eastman, and others conspired to defraud the United States by disrupting the electoral count,” supposedly in violation of Section 371 of the federal criminal code, which makes it a crime to “conspire to defraud” the United States. The committee’s pushing of what she called a “preposterous” legal theory left McAdoo Gordon “with no option but to recommend that my clients assert their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.”
McAdoo Gordon told The Federalist that during her clients’ depositions, the committee asked a series of questions that she likely would have allowed her clients to answer if the meeting had been on a voluntary basis. Putting aside the question of whether the committee was properly constituted, the 1AP’s attorney noted Congress had a legitimate interest in investigating the riots and violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“What 1AP did, or more accurately put, didn’t do, on Jan. 6 was relevant to the committee’s investigation into the riot and the violence at the Capitol, and I was working to arrange for my clients to voluntarily provide the committee with that information,” McAdoo Gordon said. Likewise, the committee had questions about a couple tweets my clients sent on the sixth, and again, such questions were relevant to the Jan. 6 investigation. “
“But once the committee advanced the absurd Section 371 criminal conspiracy theory, I could no longer recommend my clients speak with the committee,” the attorney explained. McAdoo Gordon did respond to the committee on behalf of her clients, however, after Raskin “falsely described 1AP as a ‘far right’ group with a ‘role’ in the ‘Capitol attack’” in his interview with the Times. “All of those points are false and defamatory,” she told the committee. “1AP is a mainstream, non-partisan group with no role whatsoever in the attack on the Capitol.”
Violating the First Amendment
It isn’t just the Fifth Amendment the committee has been shredding, however. “Even if my clients did not assert the Fifth Amendment, I would have still objected to several questions on First Amendment grounds,” McAdoo Gordon added. While some questions related to Jan. 6 were relevant, the majority of the questions posed to 1AP representatives were none of Congress’s business, McAdoo Gordon stressed. And even the process reveals the warped authoritarianism of the committee, the attorney added.
“At the beginning of the depositions, the congressional staff sought confirmation that we were not recording the proceedings in any way, while they proceeded to video record the questioning,” McAdoo Gordon said. She then noted that while witnesses called before a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., can obtain a transcript of their testimony, the Jan. 6 Committee refuses to allow those they target to obtain transcripts of their subpoenaed testimony.
The committee’s hiding of the transcripts serves to cover their lies and to control the narrative of the show trial, but it also allows the Jan. 6 Committee to hide the wildly inappropriate questions it posed to the witnesses.
“Do you believe in QAnon?” “Do you believe that Joe Biden is the legitimately elected president of the United States?” “What’s your understanding of what happened on 1/6?”
“A Committee of the United States Congress actually asked my clients those questions,” McAdoo Gordon told The Federalist in an exclusive weekend interview.
“Before the deposition, I assured my clients that their political and personal beliefs would not be probed,” the D.C. attorney explained. “While I knew from the subpoenas the Jan. 6 Committee intended to seek constitutionally protected information concerning other 1AP members, my jaw just kept dropping further when they started to question my clients on what they thought and believed.”
The committee also asked Robert Lewis, who is a retired United States Army Green Beret and recipient of the Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, and Philip Luelsdorff, a former U.S. Army Ranger, to describe 1AP activities. For whom and for what purpose did they provide volunteer services? Did they provide security? Surveillance? Assistance with legal activities? What training did they provide? And how were they able to afford to provide the training and volunteer services? Where did the money come from? Who made donations? What bank accounts were used? Did the organization accept cryptocurrency?
Again, none of those questions concerned the events of Jan. 6. Rather, the committee focused on events long before the Jan. 6 events at the Capitol. For instance, it asked whether 1AP provided security for polling places. Other questions concerned 1AP’s security work at a Nov. 14 rally and a Dec. 12 rally.
In essence, the committee is seeking information about 1AP’s members, financial status, donors, and activities. None of that is relevant to the Jan. 6 riots, and all of it is off-limits to the government, the lawyer said. “The Committee had no business asking those questions, so my clients weren’t about to answer them in violation of their First Amendment rights.”
“The Committee had cited as ‘evidence’ against my clients that they obtained a permit for a demonstration the day before the riot. How is obtaining a permit to hold a peaceful protest evidence of a role in a riot the next day? It isn’t,” McAdoo Gordon said. The committee also sought to quiz Lewis and Luelsdorff on their relationship with the Trump family, the White House, the campaign, and numerous specific individuals such as Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn. The staff further asked whether they had been in contact with any of the defense attorneys representing any of the Jan. 6 defendants.
“The government should not be asking a civic organization, which is what 1AP is, about its relationships, in general, with other people, much less about the organization’s donors or lawyers with whom they spoke,” McAdoo Gordon stressed.
Assuming Guilt with Dishonest Framing
Beyond asking inappropriate questions that implicated 1AP’s First Amendment rights, the committee framed several questions in the “do you still beat your wife” format. Before the election, did they provide security “in order to overturn the election”? “Have you engaged in any activities to overturn the certified election results?” “Have you engaged in any activities to reinstall Donald Trump as president of the United States since Jan. 20, 2021?” These questions all presuppose that the “election results” were sought to be “overturned,” as opposed to challenged.
But of course, the Jan. 6 Committee’s focus on the few unfounded claims of election fraud, as opposed to the numerous violations of state election law and evidence of illegal voting — issues Trump and his legal team pursued — aids in the narrative that the protesters wanted to “install” Trump or overturn the election, as opposed to protest election irregularities. And by using a guilt-by-association strategy, the committee paints not just 1AP and its volunteers as complicit in the violence at the Capitol, but every American who attended the rallies and peacefully protested the disastrous 2020 election.
“The committee might be using nicer language, but its questioning is Stalinist in nature nonetheless,” McAdoo Gordon said.
The 1AP lawyer is correct. But because the corrupt media is effectively serving as a state-run press for its preferred politicians, most of America will be oblivious to that fact when the hearings resume later today.
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.
A group of far-left organizers sponsoring watch parties for Thursday’s show trial hearing by the House Jan. 6 Committee demanded soft treatment for a pair of attorneys sentenced last week in firebombing a New York City police car. Demand Progress, a project of the leftist Sixteen Thirty Fund, is named as a partner organization for January 6 Watch Events gearing up for Thursday’s prime time programming to “uncover the truth, demand accountability and ensure violence like this never happens again.”
“We need to make sure these hearings break through the busy news cycle and reach the American public,” the event website’s description reads. “We cannot allow Trump Republicans to successfully cover up one of the greatest attacks ever planned against American’s freedom to decide who governs in our name!”
The flagship watch party across from Capitol Hill Thursday night will even feature free Ben and Jerry’s ice cream while attendees watch what Democrats routinely characterize as the worst assault on American democracy on par with Pearl Harbor and 9/11. The committee recruited a former ABC News executive to up the drama for prime-time television.
While Demand Progress sponsors parties to raise the alarm over right-wing “insurrection,” the group demanded soft sentencing for two radical attorneys who torched a New York City police vehicle two years ago amid nationwide street violence over George Floyd’s murder.
On Thursday, attorneys Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman each pled guilty to conspiracy charges in a deal struck with federal prosecutors for tossing the Molotov cocktail at a Brooklyn riot on May 30, 2020. The pair had previously pled guilty to possession of a destructive device in October, but the threat of added years through a “terrorist enhancement” remained. In the plea deal landed last week, prosecutors dropped the enhancement and requested maximum prison time of two years as opposed to the decades they faced months ago. Mattis and Rahman officially pled guilty to conspiracy to commit arson and to make and possess an unregistered destructive device.
In a coalition letter with more than a dozen other leftist groups on June 22, 2020, Demand Progress condemned the prosecution as “excessive and politically-motivated charges.”
“The Trump Administration is wielding the punitive force of this system against Colin and Urooj, who are Black and South Asian, respectively, in order to chill popular protest against the unjust status quo,” the coalition wrote led by the Center for Constitutional Rights. “We call for the immediate release of Colin and Urooj on bail and for the federal government to drop these excessive charges.”
A day later, the Demand Progress shared the letter on Twitter demanding charges to be dropped.
Demand Progress’ about-face on criminal prosecution over civil unrest marks another episode of endless double standards for political violence. Democrats on Thursday will pursue wall-to-wall coverage of the events on Jan. 6, 2021 after spending the entire summer and fall preceding the Capitol riot normalizing violent uprisings when it served their cause.
“This is more proof that socialist Democrats don’t care about rioting,” Matt Schlapp, the president of the American Conservative Union, told The Federalist. “They want to put on a show to attempt to distract from their failures.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
While claiming its aggressive collection of confidential information on private citizens is “narrowly tailored” and without a nefarious purpose, Democrats on the Jan. 6 Committee selectively leaked communications of a private citizen to smear political opponents.
Last week, CNN and the Washington Post published text messages between Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Virginia, who goes by “Ginni,” and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows exchanged in the days leading up to and on the day of the Capitol riot.
“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” Ginni reportedly urged Meadows days after the 2020 contest when news organizations began to call the race for former Vice President Joe Biden. “You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
Out of the 29 of more than 2,300 text messages released from Meadows’ vast trove of data handed to the Select Committee, not one, the Washington Post conceded, included a direct reference to the sitting justice as the weaponized probe sought to dox a private citizen for petitioning her government.
“The messages, which do not directly reference Justice Thomas or the Supreme Court, show for the first time how Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election results,” the Post reported with the paper adopting Pelosi committee’s framing to indict private political views as a blockbuster scandal.
While the committee has made an open point to prosecute those who publicly sought to cast doubt on the fairness of the 2020 election results, the committee’s targeting of Ginni Thomas for privately petitioning government officials on her own marks further escalation of the probe’s assault on civil liberties, and makes Thomas case all the more unique.
CNN reported Monday the committee will now seek an interview with Ginni, who has become the latest to be dragged before lawmakers for exercising dissident views, even in private. But the probe’s latest request is just as much targeted at Ginni, a long-time conservative activist who has never concealed her activism, as it is her husband.
The left’s racist disdain for Justice Thomas has never been a well-kept secret by a virulent left frustrated by the mere existence of a black conservative, let alone one on the high bench. Attacks on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s record on lenient sentencing for child sex crimes are cruel and racist. Baseless criticism of Justice Thomas is warranted, however, for his political heresy, starting with his own confirmation process three decades ago.
Publication of the text messages provoked immediate calls for Justice Thomas to recuse himself from any cases related to the Jan. 6 investigation for the crime of his wife’s public political views raising concerns over an election with record mail-in voting and last-minute rule changes. New York Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez even demanded Justice Thomas resign or face impeachment.
As outlined Tuesday in The Federalist by former Thomas Law Clerk Wendy Long, however, judges are never asked to recuse themselves over political views, whether their own or their spouse’s.
“Leftists in Congress and the media hyperventilate over every tidbit showing that Justice Thomas’s wife, Ginni, is involved in national conservative politics – most recently, that she pushed for integrity in the 2020 election,” Long wrote. “This isn’t news, and it has nothing to do with Justice Thomas’s ability to be a fair and impartial jurist.”
Instead, Long explained judicial recusal is about “mainly financial, legal, personal, or professional interests of the Justice or a family member.” Not personal politics. The strategy of the modern left, however, has been to intimidate the courts into submission to extremist and anti-Constitution politics. Consider the last three nomination battles: Justice Brett Kavanaugh was slandered as a serial gang rapist, Amy Coney Barrett was depicted as a character in The Handmaid’s Tale, and Stephen Breyer was pressured to retire while Democrats were in power to replace him.
Not only are the attacks on Thomas purely political, they’re hypocritical. Will Democrats calling on Justice Thomas to refrain from his official duties as a jurist similarly demand a probe into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi leveraging her position in Congress to rake in millions? Will journalists married to people in power recuse themselves from coverage on any issues their spouses conduct even minor work on? Probably not. It’s all theater.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
The inspector general for the U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) has opened a formal investigation into whether the law enforcement agency tasked with securing the Capitol has been inappropriately surveilling elected members of Congress, their staff, and visitors to their offices, The Federalist has learned. The opening of the investigation follows news reports and accusations from lawmakers that USCP has overstepped its bounds as it tries to recover from the January 6 riots that tarnished both the Capitol and the reputation of the law enforcement agency that was supposed to keep it safe. USCP Chief J. Thomas Manger confirmed the opening of the inspector general investigation in his response to congressional inquiries about USCP police tactics, reported in a January 24 article published by Politico, including surveilling and compiling intelligence dossiers on members of Congress, their staff, and visitors.
“While I am confident in our methods, I am asking the USCP Office of the Inspector General to review the USCP’s programs related to these security assessments to assure both this Committee, the Congress as a whole, and the public that these processes are legal, necessary, and appropriate,” Manger wrote to seven Republican lawmakers.
According to the Politico article, USCP analysts had been directed by Julie Farnam, the acting director of USCP’s Intelligence and Interagency Coordination Division, to “run ‘background checks on people whom lawmakers planned to meet, including donors and associates.”
“When staff were listed as attending these meetings, Capitol Police intelligence analysts also got asked to check the social media accounts of the staffers,” the Politico article alleged.
In his letter to lawmakers, Manger denied the allegations detailed in the Politico article and claimed USCP’s activities were both appropriate and legal.
Suspicions that USCP may not be acting appropriately did not arise in a vacuum, however. In November 2021, a USCP officer entered the congressional office of Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Tex., and took a photo of a whiteboard in Nehls’ legislative office detailing various legislative plans being considered by Nehls and his staff. In a formal police report filed several days after the incident, the officer wrote that he had been conducting a routine security patrol on Saturday, November 21, and discovered that one of the doors to Nehls’ office was open. The report claimed that the officer entered Nehls’ office and found a whiteboard that contained “suspicious writings mentioning body armor[.]” The officer reportedly took a photo of the whiteboard, which was then passed around to analysts within USCP. The following Monday, USCP dispatched three plain-clothed intelligence officers to Nehls’ office and questioned a staffer who was there about the whiteboard and the legislative proposals it contained. Just days before the USCP officer entered Nehls’ office and took a picture of the whiteboard Nehls and his staff used to brainstorm and catalog legislative ideas, the Washington Post ran a story about a federal government contractor in rural Texas who defrauded the United States by supplying Chinese-made body armor instead of body armor manufactured in the United States.
“From his home in rural Texas, a would-be defense contractor spun a web of fake companies and testing reports to pass off Chinese-made body armor as American equipment that met rigorous standards for use by the State Department and U.S. law enforcement partners in Latin America,” the Washington Post wrote on November 16, 2021. “Tanner Jackson, 32, pleaded guilty Tuesday in Alexandria federal court to one count of wire fraud, a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.”
According to Nehls, who previously served as sheriff of Fort Bend County, Texas, his office whiteboard specifically called out faulty Chinese body armor. In fact, that Washington Post article was a key catalyst spurring Nehls to consider drafting legislation banning the procurement of Chinese body armor, a spokesman for Nehls told The Federalist. What the police report did not include was any reference to multiple items on Nehls’ whiteboard immediately following the words “body armor” referencing Export Administration Regulations dealing specifically with Chinese imports or U.S. Department of Justice standards for certifying body armor.
In correspondence on the matter with the House Administration Committee, USCP Chief Manger said the responding officer who investigated Nehls’ office was also concerned by “an outline of the Rayburn Building with an X marked at the C Street entrance” drawn on the whiteboard. A Nehls spokesman told The Federalist it was little more than a crude map to help an intern find an ice machine in the Rayburn House Office Building.
“If Capitol Police leadership had spent as much time preparing for January 6 as they spent investigating my white board, the January 6 riot never would have happened,” Nehls, a former law enforcement officer, told The Federalist. “When I was a patrol officer responding to a call, I didn’t have the time or authority to go rifling through someone’s personal papers. There are serious 4th Amendment, constitutional issues at play here.”
Although Manger claimed in one e-mail that USCP agents were concerned the whiteboard may have contained a “veiled threat” to Nehls’ life, USCP never personally contacted Nehls to warn him that he may have been in danger, Nehls told The Federalist.
The Capitol Police’s treatment of Nehls and his office only fueled the fire of suspicion between lawmakers and USCP leadership that had been smoldering following the January 6 riot. One Republican congressional aide told The Federalist that rather than addressing the massive security and intelligence failures by USCP that allowed the post-election protests to spiral into riots, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi instead doubled down on failure and used the uproar as a pretext for turning the Capitol Police into her own force of political mercenaries.
“Instead of fixing the obvious problems with Capitol security, Pelosi used January 6 as an excuse to create her own personal Praetorian Guard,” the aide said.
Comments and recommendations for mandatory background checks on staff by Pelosi’s hand-picked Capitol security adviser, retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, have also done little to quell suspicions that Pelosi is using the January 6 proceedings to justify increased surveillance of her political enemies in Congress.
“We made recommendations that everyone coming into the Capitol get background checks, the entire congressional staff,” Honore told CNN last April. “All of them need to get background checks is what we recommended.”
Those recommendations found their way into the formal report compiled by the January 6 response task force that Honore ran, leading several lawmakers to question the USCP denial that it is surveilling and profiling members, staff, and visitors.
“There are way too many unanswered questions,” Rep. Rodney Davis, R-Ill., the top Republican on the congressional committee with oversight over the Capitol Police, told The Federalist. “The Capitol Police have a lot of explaining to do.”
“My main concern is that the entire Capitol Police board structure is dependent on political leadership to make security decisions,” Davis said. “Security decisions are being made based on politics, not on real data.”
“I’m not convinced we’re in any better security position today than we were on January 6,” he added, blaming Pelosi’s control of the process for the lack of real progress or improvements.
Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., echoed Davis’s concerns about the Capitol’s security posture.
“The Capitol is no more prepared today than it was on January 6,” Banks, who is heading up an ad hoc committee of Republicans to make security improvement recommendations, told The Federalist. “There is a lot of work to do to restore trust in the leadership of the Capitol Police.”
“It’s painfully clear to all of us that the sham January 6 commission is not at all interested in making the Capitol safer or preventing something like January 6 from ever happening again,” Banks said. “It’s clear that the January 6 commission is just a witch hunt against the political enemies of Nancy Pelosi and Liz Cheney.”
In a statement provided to The Federalist, USCP categorically denied that it had surveilled lawmakers or their staff and claimed the January 24 Politico article was inaccurate.
“We do not conduct surveillance on Members, their staff, or their offices,” a spokesman for the Capitol Police told The Federalist. “The USCP does not conduct any ‘insider threats’ related surveillance of intelligence gathering on Members, staff, or visitors to the Capitol Complex.”
The spokesman said that Manger, the USCP chief, had specifically asked the inspector general to conduct a full review of the agency’s operations in light of the allegations of improper profiling and surveillance.
“The inspector general is independent, so we cannot comment on his behalf,” a USCP spokesman told The Federalist. “But the chief has requested such a review as he is confident the USCP security assessments are legal, appropriate, and strictly limited to gathering basic information about events to ensure the safety of members of Congress.”
The USCP inspector general’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Sean Davis is a co-founder of The Federalist. He previously worked as an economic policy adviser to Gov. Rick Perry, as CFO of Daily Caller, and as chief investigator for Sen. Tom Coburn. He was named by The Hill as one of the top congressional staffers under the age of 35 for his role in spearheading the enactment of the law that created USASpending.gov. Sean received a BBA in finance from Texas Tech University and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurial management from the Wharton School. He can be reached via e-mail at sean@thefederalist.com.
On Tuesday, Department of Justice representatives informed a Senate committee of plans to gather a group of select attorneys to form a “Domestic Terror Unit” in light of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack, noting that its number of investigations of alleged domestic terrorists have more than doubled since the spring of 2020. While admitting “there is no single federal crime labeled ‘domestic terrorism,’” a DOJ official promised to invoke a “criminal code” that allows enhanced sentences for certain crimes listed as “terror offenses.”
There are many reasons to doubt the authenticity of the federal government’s efforts against this “persistent and evolving” threat, including its conveniently blurred definitions.
The National Defense and Authorization Act’s definition of “domestic terrorism” distinctly refers to “unlawful use or threat of force of violence in furtherance of ideological agendas” in the context of political or anti-government extremism. Most other common-sense definitions clearly denote violence as an essential feature. However, federal agents have a poor track record in their use of the label, not only in the case of parents angry at school boards, but most recently in relation to Jan. 6, 2021.
In July 2021, after pleading guilty to “obstruction of an official proceeding,” non-violent Jan. 6 defendant Paul Hodgkins, who had no prior criminal record, was given a heavy eight-month sentence. Judge Randolph Moss described him as one of many “terrorists” that day, baselessly lumping him in with those who committed actual violence.
In all his insufferable rantings about an “assault on democracy” and the rebellious “symbolism” of Hodgkins raising a Trump flag, Moss could not explain how his particular crime of roaming the Senate floor for 22 minutes had enabled violence. In fact, he plainly admitted that the punishment wasn’t based entirely on individual guilt, but on a perverse idea of “balanced” justice:
The court here had to consider both what I think are the extremely damaging events that occurred that day but also who Mr. Hodgkins is as an individual. And as I think is reflected by the sentencing I imposed, I tried to strike that balance.
This implies one may be considered a terrorist by virtue of being within geographical distance of what terrorists are doing if one’s political leanings are on a similar spectrum. Despite the court’s claims, neither the prosecution nor the judge brought forth a sentencing enhancement based on the existing code of terror offenses mentioned Tuesday. Why? Because Hodgkins’ crime isn’t on it. It was terrorism because the court said it was, not by law.
More judicial malpractice occurred in the case of non-violent defendant Jacob Chansely, the infamous “Q shaman” who was held in solitary confinement for months while Judge Royce Lamberth repeatedly denied his release. In November, Chansely received an unbelievable 41-month sentence when he pleaded guilty to the same charge as Hodgkins.
While admitting Chansely committed no violent crime at the Capitol (in fact, he openly called for peace), the court cited a “need to deter others especially in cases of domestic terrorism.” By punishing a non-terrorist more harshly than necessary to “deter others,” our bloodthirsty DOJ showed a willingness to weaponize federal convictions that deplete a defendant’s civil rights just to make an example out of him.
In August, the government extended its wild accusations out of the courtrooms and into local police departments. Leading up to the anniversary of 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security issued an alert advising police and neighborhoods to be on the lookout for potential terror threats. Among them were “opposition to COVID measures,” or association with “conspiracy theories on perceived election fraud.”
Do you oppose certain COVID policies or hold a skeptical view of the 2020 election’s security but have no intent to respond violently or illegally? The DHS draws no line; to them, you may be a terrorist. Their language spreads beyond actions to include statements or beliefs that are inherently devoid of any call to action, violent or not. One could almost call it an indictment of “thought crime.”
Lastly, while the Jan. 6 Capitol attack obviously involved acts of political violence, it hasn’t been linked to any broader, organized threat to the country, raising more questions as to what exactly justifies a new Terror Unit in response. In August, after hundreds of arrests and investigations, the FBI admitted to finding no hard evidence of an elaborate political plot on Jan. 6, a confession no one in the government has retracted since. The most concerning evidence of a plot may be the FBI’s own use of provocateurs, but it’s looking doubtful the FBI or DOJ will investigate itself.
When asked by the Senate committee if any Jan. 6 defendants have been charged with “insurrection,” DOJ representatives said they were unaware of any. That’s because the answer is no. Regardless, the feds continue to ramp up their already fanatical response to a problem they haven’t clearly defined.
Our self-serving ruling class hasn’t conducted itself responsibly or transparently in the wake of the Capitol attack, and we can expect this new development to be no different. While the Biden administration would have us believe that the aimless actions of a few foolish troublemakers represent the greatest authoritarian threat to the United States, its systematic purge of political opponents indicates otherwise.
Hudson Crozier is a Texas student and contributor to Unwoke Narrative. As a news journalist, he specializes in national and international politics as well as media analysis. He also hosts the Hudson Crozier blog, which covers broad cultural issues. Follow him onInstagram @lone_star_trooper.
Sen. Ron Johnson is not planning his Senate retirement anytime soon. The Wisconsin lawmaker is running for reelection, he announced this week, at which the corrupt media predictably came out, guns blazing.
CNN’s Chris Cillizza, for instance, announced that the “Senate’s leading conspiracy theorist is running for another term,” and The Nation ran an article calling him an “off-the-deep-end” senator.
But while attention-seeking pundits attack Johnson for opinions that don’t conform to the left-wing narrative (opinions held among many Americans outside the Beltway, by the way), his opinions are often proved to be exactly right. There’s quite a long list of “Ron John” statements and actions that, after sending the media into a tizzy and Big Tech giants into a censorship spree, have held up quite well over time. Here are some of them.
Jan. 6
During a February 2021 hearing to examine the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Johnson condemned the violence then went on to read an eyewitness account of the day’s events. Originally published in The Federalist, it detailed the presence of provocateurs in the crowd and confusion among many of the pro-police “MAGA” protesters who didn’t attend the rally to perpetrate violence.
Yet the account Johnson read was entered into the record without objection from lawmakers of either party. And since then, instead of learning more information about Jan. 6 that refutes eyewitness accounts of “provocateurs,” Americans have been treated to political playacting (including literal musical theater) from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s sham commission, more hyperventilating from the media, and repeated stonewalling from the FBI on questions about potential provocateurs caught on video, such as Ray Epps.
Johnson was also ahead of the game on the Capitol Police component of Jan. 6, including pushing to correct the media and Capitol Police’s lies about what happened to the late Officer Brian Sicknick.
COVID Shots
Johnson has been a consistent voice for those who don’t feel they have one on Covid shots and the mandates that accompany them. He’s given Americans a forum to discuss their firsthand adverse shot reactions, for which he’s been smeared in the corrupt media as “fundamentally dangerous” and as a peddler of “misinformation.”
In November 2021, YouTube suspended Johnson’s channel for the fifth time for seven days for a video of a panel on vaccine-related injuries, labeling it “Covid misinformation.” Yet we know adverse reactions do occur.
In April 2021, when Johnson questioned forcing every American to get vaccinated and slammed the idea of pushing vaccine mandates on citizens, Anthony Fauci came after him on MSNBC — which other outlets amplified, calling the senator an “idiot anti-vaxxer.”
Fast-forward to 2022, and Johnson has been vindicated: Even with a federal vaccine mandate in place, case numbers are up higher than ever; and even the triple-vaccinated are still contracting and spreading the virus.
Early COVID Treatment
Big Tech has twice censored the sitting U.S. senator by nuking videos discussing early Covid treatments. In February 2021, YouTube removed videos of sworn testimony from Dr. Pierre Kory about early treatments. Then in June, YouTube suspended Johnson’s account for one week for remarks he made about early Covid treatments in Milwaukee.
Shutting down scientific inquiry and debate is inherently anti-science, however, as scientists who dissent from some of the questionable Covid conventional wisdom have pointed out.
“For science to work, you have to have an open exchange of ideas,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, has said of this type of censorship. “If you’re going to make an argument that something is misinformation, you should provide an actual argument. You can’t just take it down and say, ‘Oh, it’s misinformation’ without actually giving a reason. And saying, ‘Look it disagrees with the CDC’ is not enough of a reason. Let’s hear the argument, let’s see the evidence that YouTube used to decide it was misinformation. Let’s have a debate. Science works best when we have an open debate.”
We didn’t have to wait for ground-breaking scientific discovery on this one; we’ve known since the beginning of the pandemic that children are at almost zero risk of dying from coronavirus, and now we know that Covid shots don’t prevent people from contracting nor spreading the virus. Johnson was scientifically spot-on to oppose vaxx mandates for children, given children’s near-zero risk from a bout with Covid versus the potential risks of shot complications.
Hunter Biden
Corporate media ginned up all types of attacks when Johnson, as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, dug into the Biden family corruption linked to Hunter Biden.
The New York Times described it using the “Russian disinformation” moniker. Time Magazine smeared him as the Senate’s “one-man Biden prosecutor.” And the Washington Post described Johnson’s investigation as a nakedly partisan ploy to get Donald Trump re-elected.
This was all a distraction from the fact that Johnson and Sen. Chuck Grassley successfully revealed millions of dollars in questionable financial transactions between Hunter Biden and his associates and foreign individuals, including the wife of the former mayor of Moscow and people with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Johnson triggered the media in July when he mouthed to a Republican group that climate change is “bullsh-t.” The corporate media went berserk, with CNN and Chris Cuomo calling Johnson a climate change “denier.”
The senator has reinforced repeatedly that he doesn’t deny that the climate is changing, but rather that he isn’t an “alarmist” and doesn’t buy Democrats’ apocalyptic predictions.
Big surprise, plenty of data backs this up. The American Enterprise Institute has documented 50 years of failed doomsday predictions by so-called “experts” in the corrupt media and Democrat Party. For instance, ABC claimed in 2008 that Manhattan would be underwater by 2015. In 2011, The Washington Post claimed that cherry blossoms would bloom in winter.
Climate genius Al Gore also predicted in 2008 that five years later the North Pole would be free of ice. And in 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., predicted that Miami would be underwater in a few years. Yet in 2022, Miami is still very much above ground.
Mouthwash
Last month, Johnson noted a number of simple things Americans can do to keep themselves heathy, such as taking Vitamin D, Vitamin C, and zinc, and gargling mouthwash to reduce viral load if they get COVID.
Johnson’s mouthwash claim about viral load is supported by scientific research, however, such as this study. Additionally, Dr. Bruce Davidson, a faculty member of the Georgetown Department of Otolaryngology, conducted a study on the use of antiseptic mouthwash to control coronavirus, published in the American Journal of Medicine, and found that mouthwash can help protect people from Covid-19 pneumonia.
JUST NOW: Ron Johnson, on a Wisconsin tele-town hall, pushes mouthwash as a COVID treatment.
"By the way, standard gargle, mouthwash, has been proven to kill the coronavirus. If you get it, you may reduce viral replication. Why not try all these things?" pic.twitter.com/V0cdxPYc7K
Even FackCheck.org had to admit, “Johnson is right that mouthwashes ‘may’ reduce the virus’ ability to replicate in people.”
Natural Immunity
On July 14, Johnson claimed natural immunity is “as strong if not stronger than vaccinated immunity,” against which WaPo deployed its fake fact-checkers.
Johnson’s claims, however, come straight out of a pair of studies that confirmed natural immunity is stronger than COVID vaccine-acquired immunity. The pre-print Israeli study found that people with natural immunity could be 13 times less likely to contract the virus than those who were solely vaccinated, contradicting CDC findings.
Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and biostatistician who was a professor at Harvard Medical School for a decade, dissected and compared the CDC study and the Israeli pre-print and explained why the latter is more reliable.
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
Self-absorbed congressional Democrats held a group therapy session on Capitol Hill on Thursday as they work tirelessly to immortalize Jan. 6 as an annual day of doom, but the rest of us are old enough to remember a few more times when riots and protests overwhelmed government buildings with no such theatrical response.
More than a few times, actually. The 2020 summer of rage was more or less “incited” by these same top Democrats, who race-baited as if their lives depended on it, and even our vice president, who helped bail violent rioters out of jail. It featured a number of these attacks on the government (which strangely weren’t called attacks on democracy at the time).
Not all of these demonstrations were allegedly a response to the Minnesota death of George Floyd, however. Left-wing demonstrators have long made a habit of attacking, infiltrating, and occupying government buildings. It started long before Jan. 6, 2021, and continued long after.
Didn’t think so. One of them was compared to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 by our vice president. The other one barely made the news and was referred to as a mere “sit-in.” Both were attacks by political activists on government buildings.
On Oct. 14, 2021, climate activists breached the Interior Department, with demonstrators who were left outside struggling with law enforcement officers as they reportedly tried to force their way in, shouting “Go inside! Go inside!” Some activists vandalized a building, while others pinned police against a wall. The ordeal resulted in a number of injuries, according to multiple sources, with a police officer being transported to the hospital.
2. President Moved to Bunker After White House Fence Breach
In June 2020, then-President Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, and their son Barron were reportedly rushed to a secure bunker when a group of protesters breached temporary barricades that had been set up around the White House complex.
Secret Service reportedly arrested and charged at least four protesters with unlawful entry at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
3. Wisconsin Capitol Overwhelmed
In 2011, thousands of people opposed to Republican Gov. Scott Walker filled the Wisconsin state Capitol, screaming in opposition to the governor’s budget repair bill.
4. Portland Federal Courthouse Overtaken by Violence
The federal courthouse in Portland has been a repeated target of violent Antifa rioters. In July 2020, a mob began setting fires inside the fence protecting the courthouse, shaking the fence, launching projectiles over it, and even trying to take it down. Several people even breached it, with rioters launching projectiles and flashing lasers at the federal police officers who responded.
The next month, the courthouse was shut down completely over domestic terrorism threats that someone might drive a vehicle filled with explosives into the building.
Antifa had previously attempted to menace people inside the federal courthouse on the afternoon of March 11, yelling “come outside,” “you don’t scare me b-tch,” “death to America,” and “f-ck the United States” while hurling water and other liquids inside the glass doors, banging on them, and attempting to get inside.
5. Democracy Halted at the Texas Capitol
In July 2013, an unruly mob of pro-abortion demonstrators interfered with the democratic process when thousands of them occupied the Texas Capitol and screamed at the top of their lungs, “grinding the Senate to a halt” with the noise.
6. SCOTUS Police Lines Breached, Senate Overwhelmed by Anti-Kavanaugh Activists
During the dustup over now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination and confirmation to the Supreme Court, which was radically amplified thanks to the Christine Blasey Ford circus, demonstrators forced their way past law enforcement, breaching police lines at both the Senate and the Supreme Court, where they stormed the steps and beat on the doors.
After announcing that he planned to vote for Kavanaugh’s confirmation, then-Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., was accosted on an elevator by several women, who shouted in his face and wouldn’t let him move.
At the beginning of October, shortly before the Senate voted to confirm Kavanaugh, a mob of protesters took over a part of the Hart Senate Office Building, which is part of the Capitol complex.
Some even made their way into the gallery during the final vote.
7. Senate Bombed by Left-Wing Terrorists
Linda Evans and Susan Rosenberg, two left-wing extremists, along with five others planted a bomb outside the Senate chamber inside the U.S. Capitol, where it detonated and caused $1 million in damage in 1983.
On his last day as president, Jan. 20, 2001, Bill Clinton commuted the sentences of the violent pair, spurred on by his Democrat buddy Jerry Nadler. As Tristan Justice wrote:
According to the New York Post in 2001, New York Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler, who today serves as the House Judiciary Committee chairman, played a ‘crucial role’ in Clinton’s decision to commute Rosenberg’s sentence. Nadler’s rabbi, a Nadler spokesman at the time told the Post, gave ‘compelling information from [Rosenberg’s] parole hearing’ to the Manhattan congressman, who, in turn, passed on the material to the White House counsel’s office. That transfer, the Post reported, played a ‘key role’ in the president’s decision to include Rosenberg on his list of 140 last-minute pardons just moments before George W. Bush took the White House.
Each of the women served only 16 years of her long sentence. Rosenberg escaped 42 years of a 58-year sentence, and Evans trimmed 24 years off her 40-year sentence.
8. Senate Chamber Breached by Biden Himself
In now-President Joe Biden’s farewell address to the Senate in 2009, he claimed to have broken into the chamber and sat in the vice president’s chair when he was 21 years old. The first time he stood on the Senate floor was when he visited with friends in the early 1960s, he said.
“I remember vividly the first time I walked in this chamber. I walked through those doors, but I walked through those doors as a 21-year-old tourist,” Biden claimed. “In those days, you could literally drive right up to the front steps. … I drove up to the steps and there had been a rare Saturday session. It had just ended. So I walked up the steps, found myself in front of what we call the elevators, and I walked to the right to the Reception Room.”
“There was no one there. The glass doors, those French doors that lead behind the chamber, were open. There were no signs then. I just walked,” Biden continued. “…I sat in the presiding officer’s chair. I was mesmerized.”
He was then caught by a Capitol Police officer. I wonder if Biden thinks his self-guided Capitol tour “borders on sedition“?
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
The 2020 presidential election was unlike any in American history.
Hundreds of laws and processes were changed in the months leading up to the election, sometimes legally and sometimes not, creating chaos, confusion, and uncertainty. Tech oligarch Mark Zuckerberg, one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, spent $419 million — nearly as much as the federal government itself — to interfere in the government’s management of the election in key states.
Powerful tech oligarchs and corrupt propaganda press conspired to keep indisputably important news stories, such as allegations of corruption regarding the Biden family business, hidden from voters in the weeks prior to voting. Information operations were routinely manufactured about President Trump in the closing months of the campaign, including the false claim that Russians paid bounties for dead American soldiers and Trump didn’t care, and that Trump had called dead American soldiers losers. Both were disputed by dozens of on-the-record sources.
Effective conservative voices were censored by the social media arms of the Democrat Party. And all this was done after the establishment spent years running an unprecedented “Resistance” that falsely claimed Trump was a traitor who had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.
It’s not surprising that polls show most Republicans are deeply concerned about the integrity of such an election. If anything, it’s surprising that all of them aren’t screaming from the rooftops about it. But it is interesting and telling how little the media and other Democrats are willing to talk about efforts to rig the election.
Time’s article didn’t come out until February 4, 2021, but in the months prior to its publication, Republicans grew increasingly concerned that the rigging it described had, in fact, happened.
Their desire for free and fair elections they could trust, elections that “well-funded cabals of powerful people” weren’t able to rig, resulted in mass protests following the November election. The fact that the election was exceedingly close didn’t help matters.
Media and other left-wing pollsters had put out preposterous suppression polls to help Biden get over the finish line. For example, the Washington Post’s final poll claimed Biden would win the swing state of Wisconsin by 17 points, indicating a nationwide blowout of historic proportions. (He won it by seven-tenths of a percent.) The actual outcome took weeks to calculate and came down to just 43,000 votes across three states, even closer than Trump’s close victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The media and other Democrats have used the January 6 riot at the Capitol as a way to ignore legitimate concerns about what they did to the election system, and as a way to continue the assault on election security.
As part of their political operation, they have used a propaganda technique of redefining efforts to secure the integrity of elections as attacks on democracy.
The 2020 campaign to destroy election security by flooding the system with tens of millions of mail-in ballots was run by Marc Elias, a braggadocious Democrat attorney and former general counsel for Hillary Clinton who also ran the Russia collusion hoax that seriously damaged the country. In fact, one of his partners in the scheme was recently indicted by prosecutor John Durham for lying about his role in the hoax. Elias and his “well-funded cabal of powerful people” are hoping to make permanent or even expand the weakening of election security.
The propaganda press have also downplayed Zuckerberg’s staggering $419 million expenditure, or falsely presented it as non-partisan help to voters. Independent researchers have shown that the funding dollars overwhelmingly poured into Democrat counties, and particularly such counties in swing states.
The money was used to enable the private takeover of government election offices, erasing the bright red line between campaign operations and government administration of elections. The massive grants were used to run Get Out The Vote operations through these government offices, in a manner that benefited Democrats in overwhelmingly disproportionate ways. The funds were used mostly to register Democrats to vote, encourage Democrats to vote, harvest Democrat ballots, cure defective Democrat ballots, count Democrat ballots, etc.
No right-wing billionaire could have gotten away with even thinking about such an operation, but had he, the media would be all over it. A few hundred thousand dollars in Russian Facebook ads for both Clinton and Trump generated years of hysterical media coverage from the corrupt press. Yet Zuckerberg funding the private takeover of elections to secure Democrat victories has barely been mentioned — much less obsessed over — by most of corporate media.
The media and Democrats’ J6 hysteria is meant as a distraction to keep Americans from properly dealing with the very real problems with how the 2020 election was overseen.
The future of the country rests on the ability of both winners and losers to trust our elections, to make it easy to vote but difficult to cheat, and to have some reasonable level of confidence that voting is conducted privately and without coercion, harvesting, or undue third-party influence.
The media and other Democrats are cartoonishly overhyping the J6 riot to avoid being held accountable for the many ways in which they destroyed election integrity in the months and years leading up to November 2020. Wise people are not fooled by their distraction attempt.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College. A Fox News contributor, she is a regular member of the Fox News All-Stars panel on “Special Report with Bret Baier.” Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, CNN, National Review, GetReligion, Ricochet, Christianity Today, Federal Times, Radio & Records, and many other publications. Mollie was a 2004 recipient of a Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship at The Fund for American Studies and a 2014 Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” Reach her at mzhemingway@thefederalist.com
Alengthy New York Times editorial over the weekend has set the stage for this week’s Jan. 6 anniversary coverage. “Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now,” declare the Times editors, warning that Republican lawmakers in 41 states “have been trying to advance the goals of the Jan. 6 rioters — not by breaking laws but by making them.”
The argument itself, that tweaking state election law is somehow a subversion of democracy, is absurd and incredibly lazy. But it’s important to note, if only because it will serve as the baseline narrative for the entire corporate media’s Jan. 6 coverage this week. Their message — they will all have more or less the same message — is simple: all Republicans are insurrectionists, the GOP is the enemy of the people, and the only way to preserve American democracy is to ensure that only Democrats can win elections.
To make this case, the Times’ editors had to stage a kind of linguistic insurrection. Lawful, constitutional efforts by elected representatives to change state election laws amount, in the Times’ telling, to a “bloodless, legalized” insurrection that “that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court.”
That’s no different than saying “speech is violence.” It’s nonsensical. By definition, there’s no such thing as a “bloodless, legalized” insurrection, any more than there could be a “mostly peaceful” riot. That said, the Times editors are wrong about one thing: state laws, including state election laws, can and often are challenged in court.
But the nonsense here serves a purpose. If the Jan. 6 riot can be conflated with perfectly valid GOP-led efforts to shore up state election rules, then perhaps those efforts can be wholly undermined, regardless of what voters in red states want. The irony is that it isn’t GOP lawmakers trying “to wrest control of electoral votes from their own people,” as the Times editors charge; it’s the Democrats and their media allies.
Consider that last year, 44 states enacted some 285 bills related to elections. In blue states, those bills tended to loosen certain election rules and requirements, especially for mail-in and absentee ballots. That makes sense given that Democrats tend to vote by mail-in ballot far more often than Republicans. Making mail-in and absentee voting easier is merely a way to boost Democratic votes in any given state. It’s simple.
By contrast, Republican-led states tended to pass laws limiting or more strictly defining the rules for mail-in and absentee voting, on the theory that absentee balloting is inherently less secure and more susceptible to fraud, especially when paired, as it often is, with practices like ballot-harvesting.
Republican lawmakers’ motivation here was to prevent a repeat of the free-for-all of the 2020 election, which saw a raft of last-minute changes to mail-in and absentee voting rules, justified on account of the pandemic. Many Republicans rightly felt that judges who overruled state legislatures and re-wrote state elections laws by fiat (as happened in Pennsylvania), undermined the integrity of the election.
By passing such reforms, Republican lawmakers were responding to actions taken by Democrats, unelected public health officials, and Democrat-friendly judges to overhaul state election rules ahead of 2020. If you wanted to be disingenuous about it, you could argue that Democrats staged a “bloodless, legalized” insurrection before the 2020 election even took place.
That’s why the Times and the rest of the corporate press want so badly to talk about Jan. 6 instead of getting into the nitty gritty of what these Republican-passed election reforms actually do. You’ll notice the media always describe these laws as “restricting voter access,” even when they do no such thing. The entire conversation is a bit of legerdemain, nothing more. That’s why you’ll never read a piece in the corporate press about how Georgia’s new election law, which President Joe Biden called “Jim Crow on steroids,” actually makes voting easier than it is in Biden’s home state of Delaware.
Remember that when you read breathless remembrances of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol this week. Yes, the riot was bad and should have been put down with overwhelming force — just as the riots all throughout the summer and fall of 2020 should have been.
But the actions of a relatively small group of rioters that day have absolutely nothing to do with the perfectly valid efforts of GOP lawmakers to ensure that election rules are not changed at the last minute by unelected judges or public health officials. Equating the two, pretending they share a common cause and motivation, is a way to discredit the valid arguments of Republicans, smear them as “insurrectionists,” and eventually justify efforts to silence them.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Texas Monthly, The Guardian, First Things, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
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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 (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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