Democrats are communicating loud and clear that they support law enforcement so long as it abuses police power to serve their political goals. They want to defund police who enforce the law and expand police forces that use law as a political weapon on Democrats’ behalf.
One proof is that in last week’s hearing on FBI weaponization, support for the FBI was split exactly by political party. Democrats uniformly supported the FBI in face of evidence of gross and systemic abuse of power, while Republicans uniformly criticized it. This is a clear tell that Democrats consider the FBI to be working for them — a shocking and dangerous situation.
“Every single Republican on the Judiciary Committee is committed to fundamental change in how that [FBI secret warrant] process works,” Rep. Jim Jordan told Maria Bartiromo Sunday in a post-hearing interview. “…the FISA and the appropriations process is how you rein in this agency that targeted good men, like Garret O’Boyle, Stephen Friend, and Marcus Allen, who had the courage to come forward and testify this week and tell the American people what’s going on with their tax dollars in the Justice Department.”
The last week has surfaced numerous new facts about serious ongoing and systemic FBI abuses of law enforcement powers. Special Counsel John Durham’s report showed that the FBI acted in a clearly partisan manner in multiple situations, including protecting the Hillary Clinton campaign while placing informants and electronic wiretaps on the Trump campaign based on fabricated evidence their agents didn’t check.
In Thursday’s hearing, the three whistleblowers detailed the FBI’s cruel retaliation against themselves and their families when they filed legally protected ethics complaints about: the FBI surveilling parents who complained about Democrats’ education policies at school board meetings; the FBI pursuing a SWAT-style raid against a cooperative man who attended the Jan. 6, 2021 rally; and the FBI inflating “domestic terrorism” cases to bolster Democrats’ false and horrifying claim that their political opponents are terrorists.
Allen told the committee it appears the FBI is conducting a “purge” of conservatives. Michael Shellenberger and Madeleine Rowley reported, “No mainstream media journalist interviewed the FBI whistleblowers before demonizing them.”
During that hearing, it was also revealed that the Bank of America gave the FBI private banking information about any American who used BOA credit cards near the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, without any warrant, and regardless of whether those people committed any crimes or even were on the Capitol grounds that day.
“FBI leadership pressured agents to reclassify cases as domestic violent extremism (DVE), and even manufactured DVE cases where they may not otherwise exist, while manipulating its case categorization system to create the perception that DVE is organically rising around the country,” says a congressional staff report released May 18.
Saturday reporting on a secret court filing showed the FBI broke the law by spying on Americans 278,000 times, without any warrants, in 2021 alone. “For each American the FISA court permitted the FBI to target, the bureau illicitly surveilled almost 1,000 additional Americans,” reported the New York Post on Sunday. The whistleblowers noted that the FBI rewards agents for opening more warrantless surveillance and searches of Americans’ communications.
Then on Sunday a poll came out showing the majority of Americans believe the FBI covers up Democrats’ crimes — specifically those of the Biden family. It also showed that 70 percent of Americans are concerned the FBI and other intelligence agencies interfere with elections, and believe the agencies need “wide-ranging reform.”
Don’t forget, either, that the only former president’s home the FBI has ever raided was a Republican’s, while FBI officials bent over backward to avoid touching even convincing evidence of criminal behavior related to Clinton, according to Durham’s documentation. The FBI’s recent record is clearly partisan, and that’s why its support is also now partisan.
This partisanship is not just typical politics. It’s over fundamental issues, not differing ways to get to the same goal. It’s also very dangerous to our country.
When federal law enforcement becomes the shock troops of only one political party, you don’t have the rule of law anymore. Law is only legitimate if it is equally applied to all. When members of one party or set of political beliefs are above the law and use the law not for justice but as a weapon against their political enemies, that’s what we call a police state.
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.
Headlines recently proclaimed that eight of Trump’s “fake” electors accepted immunity deals. Of course, in reporting the news, the corporate outlets all missed the real story — that the electors’ testimony failed to incriminate anyone, including Trump, and that the county prosecutors engaged in massive misconduct. Equally appalling, however, was the corrupt media’s continued peddling of the “fake electors” narrative.
There were no “fake” electors. There were contingent Republican electors named consistent with legal precedent to preserve the still ongoing legal challenges to the validity of Georgia’s certified vote.
Nor was appointing an alternative slate of electors some cockamamie plan devised by Trump lawyers. On the contrary, Trump’s election lawyers and the contingent electors followed the precise approach Democrats successfully used when the date Congress established for certifying an election came before the legal challenges John F. Kennedy had brought in Hawaii were decided. And that approach allowed Kennedy to be certified the winner of Hawaii’s three electoral votes on Jan. 6, 1961, even though the Aloha State had originally certified Richard Nixon the victor.
The Hawaii scenario in 1960 mirrors in every material respect the facts on the ground in Georgia on Dec. 14, 2020 — the date both the Democrat and Republican presidential electors met and cast their 16 electoral votes for Joe Biden and Donald Trump respectively.
Here’s What Happened in Hawaii Six-0
Election day in 1960 fell on Nov. 8 and pitted Kennedy, a Democrat, against Republican Richard Nixon. The outcome remained unknown for some time, with a total of 93 electoral votes from eight different states undecided in the days following the election. Hawaii was one of those states.
By Dec. 9 of that year, Kennedy had accumulated enough electoral votes to win the White House, but Hawaii’s winner was still in question. While the presidency did not depend on Hawaii’s three electoral votes, Democrats there had challenged the initial returns that gave Nixon a 141-vote edge, or 0.08 percent margin of victory.
Based on the original count in favor of Nixon, the acting governor of Hawaii, Republican James Kealoha, certified the Republican electors on Nov. 28, 1960. On Dec. 13, over the objections of the state attorney general, state circuit court Judge Ronald Jamieson ordered a recount. Then, on Dec. 19, both the Nixon and Kennedy electors met, “cast their votes for President and Vice President, and certified their own meeting and votes.”
In casting their electoral ballots for Kennedy, the three Hawaiian Democrats certified they were the “duly and legally qualified and appointed” electors for president and vice president for the state of Hawaii and that they had been “certified (as such) by the Executive.” The Hawaii electors further attested: “We hereby certify that the lists of all the votes of the state of Hawaii given for President, and of all the votes given for Vice President, are contained herein.”
Two of the three Democrat electors were retired federal judges, William Heen and Delbert Metzger, and Heen personally mailed the Democrat electoral votes to Congress on Dec. 20. In fact, the envelope containing the certificates, further attested: “We hereby certify that the lists of all the votes of the state of Hawaii given for president … are contained herein.”
Ten days later, on Dec. 30, 1960, Judge Jamieson held that Kennedy had won the election. In so holding, Jamieson stressed the importance of the Democrat electors having met on Dec. 19, as prescribed by the Electoral Count Act, to cast their ballots in favor of Kennedy. That step allowed the Hawaii governor to then certify Kennedy as the winner of Hawaii’s three electoral votes and, in turn, Congress to count Hawaii’s electoral votes in favor of Kennedy.
The Peach State Repeat
The Georgia situation in 2020 mirrored the events of 60 years ago in Hawaii.
Election day in 2020 fell on Nov. 3, although by then many ballots had already been cast, given the adoption of mass mail-in and early voting. Trump held a lead in Georgia until the morning of Friday, Nov. 6, when Biden overtook the incumbent. With the margin remaining tight, on Nov. 11, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced a statewide audit.
Following the audit, Biden remained in the lead by approximately 12,000 votes, leading Raffensperger to certify the election results on Friday, Nov. 20, 2020. Republic Gov. Brian Kemp signed the certification the same day. Then on Nov. 21, Trump requested a recount, as allowed under Georgia law given the closeness of the count.
On Dec. 4, 2020, then-President Trump and Republican elector David Shafer filed suit in a Fulton County state court against Raffensperger, arguing tens of thousands of votes counted in the presidential election had been cast in violation of Georgia law. While Trump’s lawsuit was still pending, on Dec. 7, 2020, based on the recount, Raffensperger recertified Biden as the winner of Georgia’s 16 electoral votes by a margin of 11,779.
Trump and Shafer’s Fulton County lawsuit contesting the election results remained pending on Dec. 14, 2020, the date the presidential electors were required by federal law to meet. Thus, while the Democrat electors met and cast their ballots for Joe Biden, the Republican electors met separately and cast their 16 votes for Trump.
At that time, Shafer made clear the Trump electors had met and cast their votes to ensure Trump’s legal battle in court remained viable. Nonetheless, following Biden’s election, Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis targeted the Republican electors as part of her criminal special purpose grand jury investigation.
While the grand jury has since issued a report and been disbanded, Willis agreed to grant immunity to eight of the electors, likely to push them to implicate the other electors. However, their lawyer confirmed in a court filing that none of the electors implicated anyone in criminal activity.
Since then, Shafer’s attorneys, Holly Pierson and Craig Gillen, wrote Willis a detailed letter reviewing the Hawaii precedent. The attorneys noted they had made three prior written requests to meet “to discuss the factual and legal issues” relevant to Shafer’s role as a contingent Trump elector but had “not yet received any response to those requests.”
The 11-page, single-spaced letter then proceeded to detail both the Hawaii precedent for Shafer’s actions following the 2020 election and the legal advice the Republican elector received that “he and the other contingent presidential electors should meet at the state capitol building on December 14, 2020, and perform the duties of a presidential elector to preserve potential remedies in the event Trump et al. v. Raffensperger, et al. was successful.”
In addition to detailing the Hawaii precedent from 1960, Shafer’s lawyers highlighted the fact that in contesting the 2000 election, lawyers for then-Democrat presidential candidate Al Gore cited that very precedent to support his position that two elector slates could be appointed. In fact, Democrat Rep. Patsy Mink of Hawaii suggested the 2000 Florida electoral dispute be resolved based on that Hawaii precedent too. And three Supreme Court justices in Bush v. Gore cited the Hawaii precedent as a basis for allowing the Florida recount to proceed.
As the letter and Hawaii precedent make clear, Shafer and the other Trump electors not only did nothing wrong, but they acted prudentially to ensure that if the state court lawsuit resolved in the president’s favor, Georgia’s electoral votes would be properly counted on Jan. 6, 2020.
Here we see one of the only differences between Trump’s legal challenge and Kennedy’s: The Hawaii state court promptly resolved the merits of Kennedy’s legal challenge, while in violation of the Georgia Election Code that requires lawsuits contesting elections to be heard within 20 days, the Fulton County court delayed assigning a judge to hear Trump’s election dispute and then delayed the first scheduled hearing until Jan. 8, 2021 — two days after Congress certified Biden the winner of the 2020 election.
Now you know the rest of the story. There were no fake electors. The question now is whether Willis will charge Shafer and others with fake crimes.
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.
Contrary to misleading headlines, none of the eight electors granted immunity in Fulton County’s anti-Trump war ‘said anything … incriminating to themselves or anyone else.’
“At Least Eight Trump Electors Have Accepted Immunity in Georgia Investigation,” headlines uniformlyblared on Friday. The legacy outlets echoing that narrative, however, buried the lead, which is that Fulton County’s get-Trump district attorney can’t even find incriminating evidence against the former president when she grants immunity to targets of her criminal investigation. A strong secondary story, also ignored or downplayed by the left-wing media, reveals multiple incidents of alleged misconduct by the D.A.’s office.
The attorney representing eight Republicans targeted by the Fulton County D.A. filed a scathing response on Friday to the D.A. office’s motion to disqualify her from continued representation of her clients. Kimberly Debrow’s 28-page response detailed several previously unknown instances of questionable conduct by prosecutors targeting Donald Trump, his lawyers, and several high-profile Georgia Republicans. And contrary to the misleading headlines of the last several days, Debrow revealed that none of the eight individuals granted immunity “said anything in any of their interviews that was incriminating to themselves or anyone else.”
How We Got Here
Debrow’s response began by providing an important backdrop to Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis’ motion to disqualify Debrow from the still-ongoing probe into supposed “coordinated attempts to unlawfully alter the outcome of the 2020 elections in this state.” Willis’ probe began in earnest in January of 2022, when she obtained permission from the chief judge of Fulton County to impanel a “special grand jury.” While the “special grand jury” lacked the authority to indict anyone, it had subpoena power and was also charged with issuing a report making “recommendations concerning criminal prosecution.”
The special purpose grand jury issued its report earlier this year. Although much of the report remains under seal, in February a state court judge authorized the release of limited excerpts, including the grand jury’s conclusion “that perjury may have been committed by one or more witnesses testifying before it.” However, as I detailed when the story broke, that conclusion is meaningless without context, and the context makes clear that Willis misrepresented to the grand jury — and the American public — the substance of then-President Trump’s telephone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021.
Specifically, Willis falsely portrayed Trump as asking Raffensperger to “‘find 11,780 votes’ in the former President’s favor.” As the transcript of Trump’s conversation with Raffensperger established, however, the then-president did nothing of the sort. Instead, during the call, Trump’s lawyer explained to Raffensperger that “the court is not acting on our petition,” and sought an investigation into several categories of votes that appeared cast in violation of Georgia law.
While Willis branded Trump’s call to Raffensperger a “central focus” of her investigation, as Friday’s court filing reveals, the Fulton County D.A. also targeted Republicans named as “Trump electors” from the 2020 presidential election. Initially, the D.A.’s office told those electors, all 11 of whom were jointly represented by Debrow and fellow attorney Holly Pierson, they were “solely witnesses in the investigation.” Under those circumstances, they voluntarily agreed to be interviewed by Willis’ team. In late April 2022, Nathan Wade, a “private attorney” Willis hired to be special prosecutor, interviewed two electors and then canceled a third interview before unexpectedly subpoenaing the Republicans to testify before the grand jury.
A legal dispute between Wade and the defense attorneys ensued over the extent to which the Fifth Amendment’s right against self-incrimination protected the electors from being forced to respond to questions before the grand jury. Before the court had a chance to rule on the matter, however, Wade informed the court that the D.A.’s office intended to offer immunity to one or more of the electors.
Immunity Talk
While not identifying which of the 11 electors the D.A. would offer immunity to, Wade represented that the D.A. was prepared to offer “full immunity from prosecution for any acts taken related to the December 14, 2020, meeting at the Georgia State Capitol to execute purported electoral college votes in favor of former President Donald J. Trump and former Vice President Michael R. Pence.”
In response, Pierson and Debrow wrote to each of their clients, explained the existence and implications of the potential immunity offers, and noted whether a conflict of interest existed because the lawyers represented all 11 electors, but the D.A. would only be offering some of them immunity. The defense attorneys gave their clients a follow-up 13-page, single-spaced memo that comprehensively detailed the issues and then spoke with each client individually. All 11 electors opted to continue with joint representation and rejected the D.A.’s suggestion of immunity.
At the time, the defense attorneys informed both the court and the D.A.’s office of their clients’ decision, noting first their fundamental distrust of “the motives and intentions of the DA and the investigative team in this case,” and “their perception that this investigation into their lawful conduct is not based on (or even interested in) the facts or the law but instead is politically motivated.”
The defense counsel further noted their clients had “grave concerns” that if they testified truthfully “that neither they nor the other electors committed any illegal act or engaged in any sort of conspiracy with regard to the 2020 election the DA and your team would not accept that truth…” The electors thus feared prosecutors would “charge them with perjury or false statements to law enforcement officials or similar after their truthful, immunized testimony merely because the immunized witness is not in a position to tell the DA’s Office or the grand jury the story they want to hear.”
After the electors rejected the prosecutors’ overtures, the D.A.’s office responded by filing a motion to disqualify Pierson and Debrow, which would force the electors to hire new attorneys. In late November 2022, the court held that joint representation was permissible for 10 of the electors but that a conflict of interest required Chairman David Shafer to be separately represented. The electors and their attorneys then decided Pierson would represent Shafer and Debrow would represent the 10 remaining electors, and the court ruled such representation was permissible, over the D.A.’s objections.
Soon after, Debrow emailed the D.A.’s team to discuss a potential immunity deal, but it was not until April 4, 2023, that prosecutors responded. On April 7, 2023, Wade, the attorney Willis hired to be special prosecutor, provided draft immunity agreements for eight of the 10 electors. The two not offered immunity opted to obtain new legal representation, and Debrow’s remaining eight clients then accepted the revised immunity offers. Thereafter, seven of the eight electors sat for recorded interviews with Wade questioning them on behalf of the D.A.’s office and with Debrow representing them. The final elector was out of the country and thus has not yet been interviewed.
Manipulation and Intimidation
During Wade’s questioning, Debrow claims he attempted to mislead and confuse her clients by suggesting the D.A.’s office had previously made an actual offer of immunity in late 2022, as opposed to merely floating the potential for an immunity deal. In one case, Debrow detailed how, when she attempted to clarify for her client Wade’s misleading questions, the prosecutor threatened to leave, rip up the immunity agreement, and indict the elector.
The D.A.’s office then filed a second motion to disqualify Debrow, falsely representing to the court that “some of the electors represented by Ms. Debrow told members of the investigation team that no potential offer of immunity was ever brought to them in 2022.” The Fulton County D.A. knew that representation was false, Debrow stressed in her response, highlighting the evidence previously presented to both the court and prosecutors that detailed the extensive discussions Debrow had with her clients about the initial immunity outreach.
Willis also sought to force Debrow off the case by arguing some of her clients “stated that another elector represented by Ms. Debrow committed acts that are violations of Georgia law.”
“This statement is categorically false, and provably so,” Debrow countered. Here, Debrow first detailed her extensive legal experience, including her service as an assistant district attorney in three Georgia counties, before stressing she was present for every interview and would have recognized any such incriminating testimony. “Nothing even similar to any such statements were made by any of the interviewed electors,” Debrow said, adding that the transcripts confirmed her representation.
Significantly, Debrow told the court that “none of the interviewed electors said anything in any of their interviews that was incriminating to themselves or anyone else,” meaning they also had not implicated Trump, his lawyers, or any of the other potential targets of Willis’ criminal investigation. That fact was lost on the reporters, however, who since Friday have focused instead on the mere fact that the eight electors had accepted immunity agreements — implying that meant they had dirt to dish.
Ignoring the Real Story
The corporate media were likewise content to ignore the allegations of serious misconduct. Those included Willis’ misrepresentation to the court about whether the electors’ attorney had informed them of the prior immunity discussion and Wade’s alleged attempt to mislead and intimidate one of the witnesses by threatening to indict him.
Wade’s involvement here is particularly ironic given that a Fulton County judge held the special prosecution team could no longer investigate one of the electors, then-state Sen. Burt Jones, because Willis had hosted and headlined a fundraiser for Charlie Bailey — a Democrat seeking to challenge Jones in the general election for lieutenant governor. Wade, like Willis, had donated to Bailey’s campaign.
Noteworthy too is Wade’s work with Willis, as Wade was a private attorney whom Willis specifically hired to work on 2020 election investigation. Willis bringing on a pit bull to further her get-Trump efforts smells disgustingly similar to Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg’s use of outside “special assistant district attorneys,” including three from a high-powered, Democrat-connected law firm, to help find a way to indict Trump.
Also appalling is the attempt by Willis’ office to force Debrow off the case — a tactic sadly seen sometimes when a prosecutor proves unable to manipulate a witness into saying what the government wants.
The trial court has yet to rule on the Fulton County D.A.’s motion to disqualify Debrow, and maybe there will be something more of concern that the prosecutor omitted from the motion. But the detailed excerpts included in Debrow’s response brief appear to doom Willis’ attempt to force the electors to hire new attorneys. And if, as Debrow’s represented, the electors said nothing “incriminating to themselves or anyone else,” much more of the Fulton County D.A.’s case is likely doomed too.
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.
The members of the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project conspired with state, local, and federal government officials to violate the First Amendment rights of social media users, a class-action lawsuit filed on Tuesday in a Louisiana federal court alleged.
Over the course of the 88-page complaint, the named plaintiffs, Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft and Co-Director of Health Freedom Louisiana Jill Hines, detailed extensive direct and indirect government involvement with the defendants’ censorship activities, allegedly making the private entities and individuals “state actors” for purposes of the Constitution.
Here are the highlights of the government’s alleged connection to the defendants’ censorship activities.
A Bit About the Defendants
Formed in 2020, the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) describes itself as a partnership “between four of the nation’s leading institutions focused on understanding misinformation and disinformation in the social media landscape: the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.” In early 2021, the same four entities expanded their focus to address supposed Covid-19 “misinformation” on social media, calling the effort the “Virality Project.”
In both the run-up to the 2020 election and since then, EIP and the Virality Project pushed Big Tech companies to censor speech. Excepting the University of Washington, which was not named in the class-action lawsuit, the institutions involved in the EIP and Virality Project are private entities, and the individuals running those institutions are non-governmental actors. Thus, without more, the censorship efforts would not implicate the First Amendment.
The Alleged Conspiracy
But there was more — much more — a conspiracy between the defendants, according to the complaint. Those defendants include the Stanford Internet Observatory and the Leland Stanford Junior University and its board of trustees, the latter two of which are allegedly legally responsible for the observatory’s conduct; Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory; Renée DiResta, the Stanford Internet Observatory’s research manager; the Atlantic Council; the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab; and Graham Brookie, the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab.
In support of the alleged conspiracy, the plaintiffs quoted at length the defendants’ own words, much of it culled from the EIP’s post-election report, but also pulled from interviews and its webpage. Here we see the EIP boast of its “coalition” that exchanged information with “election officials, government agencies,” and “social media platforms.” “The work carried out by the EIP and its partners during the 2020 U.S. election,” the defendants stressed, “united government, academia, civil society, and industry, analyzing across platforms, to address misinformation in real time.”
The united goal, according to the complaint, was censorship. This is clear from Stamos’ Aug. 26, 2020, comment to The New York Times, when the Stanford Observatory director explained that the EIP sought to collaborate with Big Tech to remove “disinformation.” The EIP further explained that it saw itself filling the “critical gap” of monitoring supposed election “misinformation” inside the United States — a gap the EIP recognized existed because the First Amendment prevents the government from censoring speech.
But the EIP did not act alone. In fact, the EIP was created “in consultation” with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, with the idea for the EIP allegedly originating from CISA interns who were Stanford students. The CISA then assisted Stanford as it sought to “figure out what the gap was” the EIP needed to address. Two weeks before EIP officially launched, Stanford also met “with CISA to present EIP concept.”
Government Collaboration with EIP
The government continued to work with EIP after its formation. Both federal and state-level government officials submitted “tickets” or reports of supposed misinformation to EIP, which would then submit them to the social media companies for censorship. EIP’s post-election report identified government partners who submitted tips of misinformation, including CISA, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), and the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, the last of which received reports of disinformation from state and local government officials. EIP would then forward the complaints to the social media companies for censorship.
CISA also helped EIP by connecting it with election-official groups, such as the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors, both of which represent state and local government officials. CISA facilitated meetings between EIP and those groups as well, leading to censorship requests fed to the EIP and then forwarded to social media companies.
The government’s entanglement with the censorship efforts of EIP was more pronounced when it came to the Center for Internet Security because CISA both funded the Center for Internet Security and directed state and local election officials to report supposed misinformation to it. CISA further connected the Center for Internet Security to EIP, resulting in the former feeding the latter a substantial number of misinformation tickets. EIP then pushed those censorship requests to social media companies.
Later, as the 2020 election neared, CISA coordinated with the Center for Internet Security and EIP “to establish a joint reporting process,” with the three organizations agreeing to “let each other know what they were reporting to platforms like Twitter.”
Overlapping Personnel
The individuals responsible for EIP, including Stamos, DiResta, and Kate Starbird, all “have or had formal roles in CISA.” Both Stamos and Starbird are members of CISA’s Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, while DiResta is a “Subject Matter Expert” for a CISA subcommittee.
Additionally, two of the six CISA members who “took shifts” in reporting supposed misinformation to Big Tech companies apparently worked simultaneously as interns for CISA and at the Stanford Internet Observatory and EIP, reporting “misinformation” to the social media companies on behalf of both CISA and EIP. In fact, the two interns reported “misinformation” to platforms on behalf of CISA by using “EIP ticket numbers.” One of the CISA interns also forwarded a detailed report of supposed “misinformation” from the Election Integrity Partnership to social media companies using CISA’s reporting system.
Coordination with Virality Project
As noted above, after the 2020 election, the Election Integrity Project replicated its censorship efforts to combat so-called Covid “misinformation” through the Virality Project. The Virality Project used the foundations established with the government’s assistance for the EIP and continued to collaborate with government officials and Big Tech.
The Virality Project boasted of its “strong ties with several federal government agencies, most notably the Office of the Surgeon General (OSG) and the CDC.” The Virality Project also identified “federal health agencies” and “state and local public health officials” as “stakeholders” who “provided tips, feedback and requests to assess specific incidents and narratives.” And as was the case with the Election Integrity Project, the Virality Project flagged content for censorship by social media companies, including Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, through a ticket system.
While it was those private platforms that censored Hoft, Hines, and an untold number of other Americans, the class-action complaint establishes it was the government that initiated and pushed for that censorship, while hiding behind EIP and other organizations. And because EIP allegedly conspired with the government to silence the plaintiffs’ speech, the class-action lawsuit seeks to hold it liable too.
The defendants have some time before responding. When they do, they’ll likely seek to have the lawsuit tossed, arguing they aren’t the government and thus could not violate the First Amendment. The detailed allegations of collaboration with the government make it unlikely they will succeed on a motion to dismiss, however, which will mean the plaintiffs will be entitled to discovery — and that’s where we’ll likely see the real evidence of a conspiracy.
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.
Did Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in California and Washington, D.C., block the filing of criminal tax charges against Hunter Biden?
Accusations levied by an IRS whistleblower on Wednesday suggest the federal prosecutors did just that, contradicting Attorney General Merrick Garland’s recent congressional testimony and raising an avalanche of questions concerning the independence of the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office overseeing the Hunter Biden investigation. Given the severity of the claims, the U.S. attorney should speak up immediately.
A cryptic letter sent to a slew of congressional committee chairs on Wednesday revealed an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whistleblower’s claims of political interference in the criminal investigation of a high-profile, politically connected individual. While the letter omitted the specific details the whistleblower sought to present to the oversight committees, unnamed sources reportedly confirmed the criminal case concerned Hunter Biden; they also revealed several more scandalous claims.
In attorney Mark Lytle’s letter to the congressional chairs and ranking members, the Nixon Peabody partner explained that his client, “a career IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent,” sought to “make protected whistleblower disclosures to Congress.” After noting that his unnamed client “had been overseeing the ongoing and sensitive investigation of a high-profile, controversial subject since early 2020,” Lytle broadly identified three disclosures the whistleblower was prepared to make.
First, the whistleblower’s testimony would “contradict sworn testimony to Congress by a senior political appointee,” the letter said. Second, according to Lytle, the career IRS agent would reveal the “failure to mitigate clear conflicts of interest in the ultimate disposition of the case.” And finally, the letter claimed the whistleblower had detailed evidence of “preferential treatment and politics” that improperly infected “decisions and protocols.”
Individuals claiming to be “directly familiar with the case” put flesh on the barebones allegations summarized by Lytle. Those sources claim Hunter Biden is the “high-profile” individual under investigation and “that at least two Biden DOJ political appointees in U.S. attorneys’ offices have declined to seek a tax indictment against Hunter Biden despite career investigators’ recommendations to do so.” The sources further claimed career prosecutors in the Department of Justice tax division had cleared the prosecution of Hunter Biden — something generally required in criminal tax cases.
The whistleblower, who had previously filed complaints with the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General, decided to inform congressional oversight committees of the claimed political improprieties after hearing Garland’s March 1, 2023, testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, sources claim.
During the Judiciary Committee’s oversight hearing, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, questioned Garland on the ability of the federal prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden, Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, to pursue criminal charges in a different judicial district, without special counsel authority.
Garland responded that the Delaware U.S. attorney had been advised he has authority “to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it is necessary.” “If he needs to bring [a case] in another jurisdiction, he will have full authority to do that,” Garland assured.
It was that testimony by Garland, who was reportedly the unnamed “senior political appointee” referenced in Lytle’s letter, that the whistleblower’s disclosures would reportedly contradict. Specifically, sources claim the whistleblower intends to reveal that the Delaware U.S. attorney sought permission to bring tax charges in other districts, but two U.S. attorneys appointed by Biden denied the requests. The whistleblower allegedly also claims that Weiss had asked “to be named a special counsel to have more independent authority in the probe but was turned down.”
Weiss’s supposed need to enlist the Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys to move forward with criminal charges seemingly stems from a DOJ policy that criminal tax prosecutions proceed in the judicial district where the defendant lived at the time the pertinent tax returns were filed. And here, Grassley gave a clue of the U.S. attorney offices that allegedly refused to pursue criminal charges when he asked Garland whether the D.C. or California U.S. attorney’s offices had denied a request by Weiss to bring charges against Hunter Biden.
Garland responded that he did not know the answer to that question and did not want to “get into the internal decision-making” of the U.S. attorneys, but that Weiss had been advised he will not be denied anything he needs.
Grassley’s reference to the California and D.C. U.S. attorney’s offices meshes with details of Hunter Biden’s various residences. Before moving to California, the Biden son listed his residence in 2018 as his father’s house in Wilmington, Delaware, but he claimed a D.C. address prior to that. Hunter also rented office space in D.C. for Rosemont Seneca Advisors, one of his many LLCs — another basis for bringing a federal criminal tax case in D.C.
Biden has since moved to California, reportedly living in Hollywood Hills and Venice, establishing connections to the second judicial district Grassley referenced. Both Hollywood Hills and Venice fall in the Central District of California, so The Federalist asked the office of the Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney E. Martin Estrada whether he had rejected recommendations of career prosecutors to charge Hunter Biden. A press representative said they had no comment.
The Federalist also contacted the D.C. U.S. attorney’s press office for comment, and a representative of U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves said they neither confirm nor deny the existence of any investigation.
Whether these two U.S. attorneys prevented the filing of criminal tax charges against Hunter Biden is unknown — at least to the public. Weiss, however, knows what happened, and rather than force the whistleblower to suffer through what will surely be months of attempted character assassination, Weiss should clear the record.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
A federal judge on Wednesday denied Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s request for a court order to prevent the House Judiciary Committee from questioning a former prosecutor involved in the investigation of Donald Trump. Bragg, however, didn’t just lose on the merits. The court’s 25-page order eviscerated the Manhattan D.A. — and his former prosecutor, Mark Pomerantz.
Two weeks ago, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, issued a subpoena directing Pomerantz to appear before the House Judiciary Committee at 10:00 on April 20, 2023. Pomerantz was previously a special assistant district attorney before abruptly resigning because Bragg had allegedly decided not to seek criminal charges against Trump.
Bragg responded to news of the subpoena by directing Pomerantz not to provide any information about his prior work to the Judiciary Committee. He also filed a complaint in federal court against Jordan and the committee, seeking an order declaring the Pomerantz subpoena invalid. Bragg simultaneously sought entry of a temporary restraining order to freeze the subpoena pending resolution of his lawsuit.
On Wednesday, federal Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil denied Bragg’s request to stop the Judiciary Committee from questioning Pomerantz. “Mr. Pomerantz must appear for the congressional deposition. No one is above the law,” Vyskocil wrote in a transparent swipe at the New York prosecutor who hung his pathetic indictment on that platitude.
While Bragg posited that the Judiciary Committee lacked a valid legislative purpose to issue the subpoena, Vyskocil rejected that argument. Congressional committees have the constitutional authority to conduct investigations and issue subpoenas, the court explained, and the court’s role is “strictly limited to determining only whether the subpoena is ‘plainly incompetent or irrelevant’” to any legitimate committee purpose. Because Jordan and the committee identified several valid legislative purposes underlying the subpoena, the court held Bragg could not quash it.
The court also held that the “speech or debate clause,” which provides that “for any Speech or Debate in either House,” Senators and Representatives “shall not be questioned in any other Place,” likely would prevent Bragg from suing Jordan and the committee.
Vyskocil also rejected Bragg’s argument that requiring Pomerantz to submit to questioning would infringe on the attorney-client and work-product privilege the Manhattan D.A.’s office held regarding communications Pomerantz was privy to. Here, the court stressed that the indictment of Trump occurred long after Pomerantz had resigned and that any privilege that may have existed was likely waived by Pomerantz publishing his book, “People vs. Donald Trump: An Inside Account.”
“As its subtitle indicates, the book recounts Pomerantz’s insider insights, mental impressions, and his front row seat to the investigation and deliberative process leading up to” the Trump indictment, the court wrote. Yet Bragg did next to nothing to stop the publication of the book. Under these circumstances, “Bragg cannot seriously claim that any information already published in Pomerantz’s book and discussed on prime-time television in front of millions of people is protected from disclosure,” the court concluded.
It Gets Better
The court’s conclusion, however, wasn’t the highlight of the decision. Rather it was Vyskocil’s summary of how the country arrived at a place where it sees a state prosecutor filing a complaint in federal court against the House Judiciary Committee that includes 35 pages and a vast majority of exhibits that “are nothing short of a public relations tirade against former President and current presidential candidate Donald Trump.”
That descriptor alone should give pause to anyone still believing Bragg’s indictment of Trump was righteous. But the opinion highlighted many more facts that confirm the targeting of Trump was a witch hunt.
For instance, it included many excerpts from Pomerantz’s book showing the criminal charges against Trump were ridiculous. So-called “hush money” payments to Stormy Daniels “did not amount to much in legal terms,” Pomerantz wrote. “Paying hush money is not a crime under New York State law, even if the payment was made to help an electoral candidate.”
The book excerpts quoted by the court included numerous additional problems Pomerantz saw with the legal theory Bragg eventually relied upon in charging Trump. Trump and his legal team have been highlighting these same many flaws. And now a federal judge just told the country that the “very experienced, sophisticated, and extremely capable attorney” Pomerantz — who had wanted to charge Trump — agreed with all (or most) of Trump’s legal arguments.
The court also noted that Pomerantz was a “pro bono” attorney for the Manhattan D.A.’s office. This should strike the public as strange, especially in light of the well-heeled credentials the opinion highlighted: his clerkship at the Supreme Court, his work as a federal prosecutor, and his many years as a criminal defense attorney and partner at the prominent New York City law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
While the court omitted any mention of Paul, Weiss’ connections to the Biden administration and Democrats, referring to Pomerantz’s “pro bono” status should raise some red flags.
If not, Vyskocil was more explicit elsewhere in the opinion, such as when she said she was “unmoved by Bragg’s purported concern at the prospect of ‘inject[ing] partisan passions into a forum where they do not belong.’”
“By bringing this action, Bragg is engaging in precisely the type of political theater he claims to fear,” the court wrote.
Beyond chastising Bragg for playing politics, Vyskocil rebuked him for his legal arguments, most devastatingly when Bragg argued the court should quash the subpoena of Pomerantz to ensure the grand jury’s secrecy.
“The secrecy of the grand jury proceedings in the pending criminal case was compromised before the indictment was even announced,” Vyskocil countered, citing CNN’s coverage of the charges against Trump based on leaks.
The court also unleashed a few zingers on Pomerantz. While Pomerantz complains he is in a “legally untenable position” because he will be forced to make a choice between “legal or ethical consequences” or “potential criminal and disciplinary exposure,” the court “notes that Pomerantz is in this situation because he decided to inject himself into the public debate by authoring a book that he has described as ‘appropriate and in the public interest.’”
And in response to Pomerantz making “it abundantly clear that he will seek to comply with Bragg’s instructions” not to respond to the subpoena, the court remarked that Pomerantz “claimed deference to the District Attorney’s command is a surprising about-face, particularly given that Pomerantz previously declined the District Attorney’s request to review his book manuscript before publication.”
What Next?
Those already well-versed in the outrageousness of the indictment will take delight in the court’s ripostes. The question remains, however, whether the opinion’s detailed summary of the flaws in Bragg’s legal theory — as identified by Pomerantz himself — will convince the remainder of the country that the indictment is a sham. Or will they discard Vyskocil’s decision as a Trump-appointee diatribe?
Maybe it will take the Judiciary Committee questioning Pomerantz on those precise weaknesses for the unconvinced to realize that once again Trump is right — it is a witch hunt.
We should know soon whether the questioning will go forward and whether Pomerantz will respond to the questions or follow Bragg’s directive. But if the latter, both Bragg and Pomerantz will find themselves back in front of Vyskocil because the Trump appointee wisely ruled that any future disputes related to the Pomerantz subpoena or other subpoenas related to the Judiciary Committee’s inquiry must be filed in the same case mater.
Vyskocil’s devastating conclusion likely caused Bragg as much heartache as her denial of his motion to declare the subpoena of Pomerantz invalid. For Bragg knows that absent reversal by the Second Circuit, the same outcome awaits further challenges of the House Judiciary Committee’s subpoena power.
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 New York City law firm with “strong ties” to Democrats and the Biden administration, and a big-time fundraiser for both, lent the Manhattan district attorney three lawyers to help him take down Donald Trump. This cohort included former Special Assistant District Attorney Mark F. Pomerantz, whose leaked resignation letter appears responsible for the Manhattan prosecutor’s decision to indict Trump.
Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg became the first prosecutor to bring criminal charges against a former president when he moved forward last week with the arraignment of Trump on 34 counts of falsifying business records. The pathetic, barebones indictment was quickly denounced by pundits on both sides of the political aisle. Then on Friday, the House Judiciary Committee raised additional concerns about the role Matthew Colangelo, the former No. 3 man in the Biden administration’s Department of Justice, played in the targeting of Trump.
While Bragg’s hiring of Colangelo to reportedly “jump-start” the investigation into Trump further indicates the indictment was politically motivated, the Manhattan D.A. office’s unprecedented use of outside, Democrat-connected lawyers to investigate Trump pre-dates Colangelo’s arrival by nearly a year.
A Pattern
In early to mid-February of 2021, Bragg’s predecessor, District Attorney Cyrus Vance, arranged for private criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor Mark Pomerantz to be a special assistant district attorney for the Manhattan D.A.’s office. Pomerantz, whom The New York Times noted was to work “solely on the Trump investigation,” took a temporary leave of absence from his law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, where he had defended former Sen. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., against alleged campaign finance violations. But even before being sworn in as a special assistant to the Manhattan D.A., Pomerantz had reportedly “been helping with the case informally for months…”
According to the Times, “the hiring of an outsider is a highly unusual move for a prosecutor’s office.” One must wonder, then, how much more unusual it is for the Manhattan D.A.’s office to receive the “informal” assistance of a private criminal defense attorney. The legacy news outlet, however, justified the hiring of Pomerantz based on the “usual complexity” of “the two-and-a-half-year investigation of the former president and his family business.”
A few months later, the D.A.’s office welcomed two more outsiders, Elyssa Abuhoff and Caroline Williamson, who also both took leaves of absence from the New York powerhouse Paul, Weiss to work on the Trump investigation as special assistant district attorneys.
For a law firm to lend not one but three lawyers to the Manhattan D.A.’s office seems rather magnanimous, until you consider Paul, Weiss’s previous generosity to Joe Biden. During Biden’s White House run, the law firm hosted a $2,800-per-plate fundraiser for about 100 guests.
The chair of the Paul, Weiss law firm, Brad Karp, also topped the list of Biden fundraisers, bundling at least $100,000 for the then-candidate. “As someone who cares passionately about preserving the rule of law, safeguarding our democracy and protecting fundamental liberties, I’ve been delighted to do everything I possibly can to support the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris ticket,” Karp wrote in an email.
Karp’s support of the Democrat presidential ticket isn’t surprising given that his fellow Paul, Weiss partner Robert Schumer is Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s brother.
Biden’s connection to the firm, however, dates much further back, with the former secretary of homeland security in the Obama-Biden administration, Jeh Johnson, also heralding from Paul, Weiss. Once elected president, Biden nominated Jonathan Kanter, a former partner of Paul, Weiss, to serve as the top antitrust enforcement official at the Justice Department. In fact, according to Bloomberg, Paul, Weiss has “emerge[d] as Biden-Era N.Y. Power Center.”
A Resignation
The three Paul, Weiss alumni sent to the Manhattan D.A.’s office to bolster the Trump investigations would all make news, but for different reasons. Pomerantz first garnered headlines when he resigned as a special assistant district attorney in early 2022, after Bragg became Manhattan’s D.A.
In his resignation letter, leaked to The New York Times, Pomerantz said that in late 2021, Bragg’s predecessor, Vance, had “concluded that the facts warranted prosecution, and he directed the team to present evidence to a grand jury and to seek an indictment of Mr. Trump and other defendants as soon as reasonably possible.” But after replacing Vance as D.A., Bragg decided “not to go forward with the grand jury presentation and not to seek criminal charges at the present time,” Pomerantz wrote, adding, “The investigation has been suspended indefinitely.”
What Pomerantz’s letter did not say, however, was that in late 2021, “at least three career prosecutors asked to move off the investigation,” reportedly “concerned that the investigation was moving too quickly, without clear evidence to support possible charges.” Instead, in his resignation, Pomerantz declared he believes “Donald Trump is guilty of numerous felony violations,” that “the public interest warrants the criminal prosecution of Mr. Trump,” and that “such a prosecution should be brought without any further delay.”
Pomerantz later rejoined Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and authored a book about the Trump investigation.
Pomerantz’s letter and his claims that Bragg had suspended the Trump probe triggered a political firestorm, which the Manhattan D.A. sought to quell by telling the public the investigation was ongoing.
Criminal Charges
Meanwhile, the Manhattan D.A.’s office pushed forward in its criminal case against the Trump Corporation. A grand jury had indicted the Trump Corporation in late June of 2021 on charges it engaged in a scheme to avoid paying taxes on the salaries of high-level executives by instead funneling compensation through perks, such as luxury apartments and cars. A second Trump corporation would later be added to the criminal case that went to trial in late 2022.
The trial team that prosecuted the case included the other two Paul, Weiss attorneys on loan to the Manhattan D.A.’s office: Abuhoff and Williamson. Bragg borrowed a third outside attorney, Gary T. Fishman, from New York’s Democrat Attorney General Letitia James. Along with three regular members of the Manhattan D.A.’s office, the three “special assistant district attorneys” helped convict the Trump-related business entities in early December 2022.
After securing convictions of the two Trump corporations, Abuhoff and Williamson ended their “special assistant district attorney” relationship with Bragg’s office in December 2022 and went back to Paul, Weiss — a return that would be short-lived. Abuhoff rejoined the Manhattan D.A.’s office in February 2023, and Williamson returned the next month, but now both as regular members of the staff.
So short was their time back at Paul, Weiss, in fact, that one must wonder if the firm paid them bonuses following their departure from the Manhattan D.A.’s office. The Federalist posed this question to Paul, Weiss, but the inquiry went unanswered. Paul, Weiss also did not respond to questions concerning whether the lawyers received any compensation or Paul, Weiss benefits while on leave to the D.A.’s office.
Abuhoff and Williamson’s return to the D.A.’s office followed the news that in early December, Bragg had hired Matthew Colangelo from the Biden DOJ to “jump-start” the office’s investigation into Trump. Upon his inauguration, Biden had appointed Colangelo to serve in the No. 3 slot at the DOJ, showing the trust Biden has in the lawyer now charged with taking down his opponent Trump.
Colangelo had also previously worked in the Obama-Biden administration and as chief counsel and executive deputy attorney general in A.G. James’ office, where he and Fishman reportedly investigated Trump. As noted above, James would later lend Fishman to the Manhattan D.A.’s office, keeping with her campaign promise to “be a real pain in the -ss” to Trump. It’s no wonder House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan is concerned about Colangelo’s role in the unprecedented indictment.
Connecting the Dots
But the issue goes much beyond Colangelo, for it seems likely Bragg never would have hired Colangelo had Pomerantz’s resignation letter never been leaked to The New York Times. It’s outrageous that Pomerantz was reportedly “informally” advising the former Manhattan D.A. while working for the “Biden-Era N.Y. Power Center” law firm with extensive connections to Democrats. Equally outrageous is the fact that the same law firm lent the D.A.’s office three lawyers to bolster the Trump investigation.
It seems Bragg was swayed by New York politics to alter the communist boast of Joseph Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” The Manhattan D.A. had the man but couldn’t find the crime.
“Lend me your top attorneys to show me a crime,” is the new motto of the political machine New York Democrats built to purge the country, communist style, of Trump. That should horrify every American.
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.
The federal government peddled technology to Big Tech companies to assist them in censoring Americans’ speech on social media in the run-up to the 2020 election, according to emails Missouri and Louisiana uncovered in their First Amendment lawsuit against the Biden administration. Specifically, the State Department marketed this censorship technology through its Global Engagement Center. In other words, our tax dollars not only funded the development of tools to silence speech that dissented from the regime’s narrative. They also paid for government employees to act as sales reps pitching the censorship products to Big Tech.
I’ve been “tasked with building relationships with technology companies,” Samaruddin Stewart, then a senior adviser for the State Department’s Global Engagement Center or “GEC,” wrote in an early-February 2020 introductory email to LinkedIn, allegedly requesting a meeting. According to the lawsuit, his email also suggested he would be reaching out to other social media companies interested in “countering disinformation.”
On March 9, 2020, Stewart again contacted LinkedIn, referencing an earlier verbal discussion and writing:
I’ll send information [to LinkedIn representatives] about gaining access to Disinfo Cloud — which is a GEC funded platform that offers stakeholders an opportunity to discover companies, technology, and tools that can assist with identifying, understanding, and addressing disinformation.
These two emails are explosive. Yet because they were revealed in two passing paragraphs of the 164-page complaint filed by Missouri, Louisiana, and a handful of other plaintiffs against the Biden administration, they — and their enormous significance — have been overlooked.
‘Cold-Calling’ Big Tech
The Stewart emails establish that in 2020, federal government actors contacted social media giants to promote GEC’s Disinfo Cloud. GEC represented that this government platform provided “companies, technology, and tools” to “assist with identifying, understanding, and addressing disinformation.” Then it gave private tech companies access to Disinfo Cloud.
Almost identical to how GEC described Disinfo Cloud in congressional testimony, the State Department’s webpage marketed it as a “one-stop shop” to “identify and then test tools that counter propaganda and disinformation.” “Fact checking” and “media authentication” are just a couple of the types of technologies available through the dashboard.
GEC didn’t just promote Disinfo Cloud or give Big Tech access to what GEC called“the U.S. government’s online repository.” Government employees at GEC also offered to help private companies identify tools to suit their specific needs. Just “write” to the GEC’s Technology Engagement Division about “what your office needs to counter propaganda and disinformation,” the State Department instructed on its webpage, and the government will “assist” in finding “a technological solution.”
‘Testbed’
Access to Disinfo Cloud, according to the State Department’s webpage, also provides “a gateway” to the GEC’s Technology Engagement Division’s “Testbed,” allowing users to review and test the technology against their unique needs.
While Stewart’s emails don’t expressly mention the “Testbed” feature, the State Department boasts that the “private sector” uses both Disinfo Cloud and Testbed. The GEC’s webpage also invites Disinfo Cloud users to ask “for assistance in identifying a technological solution or draft a test proposal for a tool.” If Disinfo Cloud users can’t find a tool that works for them, the GEC Technology Engagement team stresses it “is open to insights and is here to help implement ideas to move the counter propaganda and disinformation mission forward.”
Infomercials
Deposition testimony by FBI Agent Elvis Chan suggests GEC’s marketing of the censorship tools went beyond making cold calls (or emails) to LinkedIn and other Big Tech companies. It also seemingly went further than providing product advice and samples on Disinfo Cloud: The GEC’s Technology Engagement Division apparently hosted infomercials to help the private vendors market their censorship software.
Chan, the assistant special agent in charge of the cyber branch at the FBI’s San Francisco field office, was “one of the primary people” communicating with social media companies about supposed “disinformation,” and thus is one of the named defendants in Missouri v. Biden. As part of that litigation, the plaintiffs deposed Chan. During questioning, Chan testified that ahead of the 2020 election, he periodically spoke with Stewart, who would meet with the social media companies separately from Chan.
According to Chan, Stewart met with policy individuals with the various social media companies about “different initiatives.” Those initiatives included various kinds of vendor-made software “that they would pilot to see if they could detect malign foreign influence on social media platforms.”
Chan further testified that Stewart and GEC “would provide webinars” from these vendors. As Chan explained, “[T]he State Department was just providing a venue where different vendors could show off their products.” The presentations were open to the general public, said Chan, but the GEC “would invite all sorts of audiences, to include researchers, employees from State Department counterparts, so typically Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” The intended audience, according to Chan, was “State Department-equivalent personnel, social media companies, and researchers.”
Chan said he attended only a couple of the webinars because the companies took only a “surface-level” look at the content, and thus he didn’t consider the technology useful to the FBI. But apparently, it was fine for the State Department to market the same tools to social media companies.
From Chan’s deposition testimony, it appears Stewart, the GEC’s then-senior adviser, made the equivalent of sales calls and hosted infomercials, all for the purpose of pushing various censorship services to social media companies.
It is unclear whether these webinars were in addition to the GEC’s “Tech Demo Series” — at which private vendors showcased their knack for fighting so-called disinformation for “U.S. government counterparts and foreign partners” — or whether, after the GEC sent a full-time representative to Silicon Valley in December of 2019 (presumably Stewart), the Tech Demo Series was opened to the public. However, given that the official Disinfo Cloud Twitter account promoted the Tech Demo Series, it seems likely that GEC expanded its target audience for the series to include the private sector and other Disinfo Cloud users.
Either way, Chan’s deposition testimony reveals our government marketed censorship technology to social media companies through “webinars.” And while Chan claimed he didn’t think GEC endorsed the products, the government expressly represented the Disinfo Cloud technology as tools to “assist” with attacking so-called disinformation.
The Tools
So what exactly were those tools?
From open-source material, it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify the entire dataset of tech companies featured on Disinfo Cloud or participating in the Tech Demo Series. That’s because Disinfo Cloud has “been retired as [a] GEC-sponsored effort,” according to the State Department. The DisinfoCloud.com webpage has also been shuttered.
But because GEC ran various “tech challenges,” giving winners State Department “sponsorship” on the government’s Disinfo Cloud Testbed — advertised as worth $25,000 — among other things, several censorship companies involved can be identified, including NewsGuard, PeakMetrics, and Omelas.
NewsGuard’s censorship technology includes “its unreliable reliability ratings database of thousands of news and information websites and a second database of purported hoaxes,” as I detailed in March. NewsGuard’s winning tech-challenge entry built upon those databases and used“AI and social listening tools to identify the initial source of the hoax,” and to find instances of the hoax being “repeated or amplified” online.
The second winner, PeakMetrics, offered a dashboard for tracking mentions of a topic across multiple media channels with social listening technology. The third winner, Omelas, developed tools to visually map online information.
The government gave these winners the ability to pilot their technology on Disinfo Cloud’s Testbed. Then it promoted Disinfo Cloud to social media giants as offering “access to companies, technology, and tools that can assist with identifying, understanding, and addressing disinformation.”
So were NewsGuard, PeakMetrics, and Omelas among the companies GEC marketed to Big Tech? Did they participate in the government-run Tech Demos and present infomercials to the private sector? Did GEC help these vendors test their products for private companies on the Testbed?
In Practice
Consider the implications, using NewsGuard to illustrate.
NewsGuard rates various media outlets on a 100-point scale and provides a red “unreliable” rating if its “experts” score the news source below 60. The company rates The Federalist “red” and claims it is one of the top-10 “most influential misinformers.” Conversely, some of the outlets that botched the biggest political stories of the century maintain a 100 percent reliability score.
The government awarded NewsGuard a $25,000 prize to develop new technology on Disinfo Cloud, using, in part, that ratings system as a backbone. NewsGuard would later receive an additional $750,000 from the government to advance the development of its censorship technology. PeakMetrics and Omelas also both scored additional government funding of $1.5 and $1 million respectively.
But think about the government’s other behind-the-scenes censorship entanglements. The government, via your tax dollars, funded both Disinfo Cloud, which provided the technology necessary to pilot the program, and the outside contractor, Park Advisors, that managed it.
The State Department’s GEC promoted the companies and technology featured on Disinfo Cloud, and a government liaison working for GEC personally contacted social media companies to encourage them to use the platform. The government also hosted Tech Demo Series for the vendors to market their products to the private sector.
Disinfo Cloud regularly promoted private censorship technology on its official Twitter account and retweeted NewsGuard’s announcement of its partnership with Mediabrands to “bring NewsGaurd’s rating work to TV news programming.
Then beyond promoting the censorship tools, government employees working with GEC helped social media and private-sector businesses identify, test, and tweak the most “appropriate” technology for their “needs.”
And what are those “needs?” Censoring the speech of you and your fellow Americans.
A Scandal Like No Other
This scandal far surpasses the one that formerly ensnared GEC, when it was revealed the State Department awarded the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) — another “ratings” company that blacklists conservative outlets — $100,000 as part of the U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge. GDI also reportedly received money from other government-funded organizations. Those taxpayer funds helped finance GDI’s blacklist of conservative media outlets, which advertisers relied upon to defund dissenters.
But what Stewart’s emails now reveal is that the government is not merely funding censorship research. It is acting as a sales rep to market censorship technology to private companies.
The State Department isn’t skirting the First Amendment. It is driving a stake through its heart.
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 Manhattan grand jury has indicted former President Donald Trump, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office confirmed following late-Thursday media leaks. While the indictment remains under seal, one thing seems certain: America has now entered the era of “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” politics.
The Democrat district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, breathed new life into the infamous boast of Joseph Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria, when the Manhattan prosecutor targeted the former president in connection to a 2016 payment made to Stormy Daniels. Bragg’s decision to push for an indictment against Trump, presumably for falsifying business records, promises to herald in a new political age — one in which local prosecutors will target partisan enemies, big and small, making a mockery of the criminal justice system in the process.
The fact that news of the charges leaked to the left’s favorite scribes at The New York Times, while the indictment remained still under seal, punctuates perfectly the Sovietesque times in which we live: The legacy media may not be state-run, but they peddle propaganda, nonetheless.
Guesswork
Until the indictment is unsealed, any discussion of the charges requires some guesswork, and with sources late Thursday reportedly telling CNN the grand jury charged Trump with more than 30 counts, the prognostication is much more difficult. But from earlier reports, it appears the D.A.’s criminal case against Trump revolves around Sections 175.05 and 175.10 of the New York penal code.
Both sections define the state crime of “falsifying business records,” with Section 175.05 providing “a person is guilty of falsifying business records in the second degree when, with the intent to defraud, he makes or causes a false entry in the business records of an enterprise.” Section 175.10 converts the “second degree” misdemeanor to a felony if the person falsified business records with the “intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission” of another crime.
The factual theory for charging the former president with falsifying business records seems to rest on “Trump allegedly causing the Trump Organization to falsely report payments made to Michael Cohen in 2017 as ‘legal expenses,’ when the money instead reimbursed (and then some) Cohen for the $130,000 payment he made to Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to keep the porn star from publicly claiming she had sex a decade earlier.” The Trump Organization then reportedly paid Cohen $35,000 a month for “legal services” in 2017, while Cohen never provided any legal work for the business.
Legal pundits believe the indictment will ratchet up the alleged falsifying of “legal expenses” offense to a felony by charging Trump with lying about the payments to Cohen to conceal a violation of federal election law. Cohen has already admitted to paying off Daniels to advance Trump’s electoral chances, and he appears poised to be a star witness against Trump. Another possibility, however, is that the Manhattan D.A.’s indictment accuses Trump of falsifying the organization’s “legal expenses” to aid in tax fraud.
The U.S. attorney has already declined to charge Trump with federal election law violations, making any attempt by Bragg to tie the federal offense to the state charge of falsifying business records reek of political payback.
Bragg’s expected use of Trump’s physical absence from New York — ironically because he was serving as commander-in-chief in D.C. — to sidestep the five-year statute of limitations that applies to a felony of falsifying business records, will also add to the stench of the case. And a public that watched Trump hounded since he first announced his candidacy for president isn’t likely to focus on the legal technicalities of the statute of limitations. Rather, the average American will consider the delayed charging of Trump to be a desperate ploy to concoct a crime.
Trump himself was quick to advance this theory, opening his press release by calling the indictment “political persecution and election interference at the highest level in history.” “From the time I came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower,” the former president continued, the “Radical Left Democrats … have been engaged in a Witch-Hunt to destroy the Make America Great Again movement.”
“You remember it just like I do,” Trump stressed, ticking off the attacks: “Russia, Russia, Russia; the Mueller Hoax; Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine; Impeachment Hoax 1; Impeachment Hoax 2; the illegal and unconstitutional Mar-a-Lago raid; and now this.”
30-Count Craziness
Trump will reportedly appear in a Manhattan court on Tuesday for his arraignment. Whether the indictment is unsealed before then is unknown. But the leaks continue, including, as noted above, news that the grand jury reportedly charged Trump with more than 30 criminal counts.
Unless Bragg has uncovered something much beyond the details already reported about the Daniels payment, the Manhattan prosecutor will have only made matters worse by pushing for an indictment of the former president on more than 30 criminal counts. Given the lack of leaks about anything new, the most likely scenario is that the grand jury got to 30-plus counts by charging Trump with separate counts for each of the monthly payments made to Cohen in 2017. Then, the grand jury could add additional counts for each month Trump allegedly made the payment to “aid or conceal the commission” of another crime.
With this approach, it isn’t hard to see how easily the grand jury could convert one hush-money payment into some 30 crimes. And while the left and the Never Trump right might see a lengthy indictment as further proof of Trump’s malfeasance, if the indictment contains no new details, the piling on to reach the reported 33 counts against the former president doesn’t make Trump look more guilty — it makes Bragg look more like Beria.
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.
Democrats are working overtime to make it so painful for attorneys to represent Republicans in election cases that the next candidate will be unable to find lawyers willing to battle on their behalf.
A state court judge refused to halt the Texas Bar’s assault on Attorney General Ken Paxton for his decision to challenge several swing states’ execution of the 2020 election in Texas v. Pennsylvania, a little-noticed perfunctory order published in late January revealed.
While the partisan targeting of Paxton represents but one of the many attempts by Democrats to weaponize state bars to dissuade attorneys from representing Republicans, court documents obtained by The Federalist reveal that in the case of the Texas attorney general, the bar went nuclear.
In March of 2022, as Paxton prepared to face Land Commissioner George P. Bush in the May 2022 GOP runoff for attorney general, news leaked that the State Bar of Texas intended to advance an ethics complaint against the Republican attorney general. Then, soon after Paxton prevailed in the primary, on May 25, 2022, the Commission for Lawyer Discipline, which is a standing committee of the State Bar of Texas, filed a disciplinary complaint against Paxton in the Collin County, Texas district court.
While the Texas Bar’s disciplinary complaint represents an outrageous and unconstitutional attack on the attorney general, as will be detailed shortly, the backstory is nearly as troubling — both the machinations underlying the charge against Paxton and, more broadly, the barrage of politicized bar complaints pursued against Republican lawyers who provided legal advice or litigated various issues in the aftermath of the November 2020 general election.
Bars Gone Rogue
The D.C. Bar’s investigation into former Trump administration Assistant Attorney General Jeff Clark based on a complaint from Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., exemplifies the partisan co-opting of the various professional responsibility boards charged with overseeing attorneys’ conduct.
In Clark’s case, the ethics charge was both “demonstrably false and premised on the fraudulent narratives pushed by the partisan politicians running the Jan. 6 show trial and their partners in the press.” Yet Clark has been forced to fight for his livelihood because the D.C. Bar allowed Democrats to convert a disagreement over Clark’s legal opinion into a question of professional ethics. Clark has attempted to put a halt to the proceedings by moving to remove the case to the federal district court, but Clark’s motion has been stalled there for several months.
More recently, the California State Bar joined in the political witch hunt when it filed a 35-page, 11-count disciplinary complaint against attorney and former law professor John Eastman. The California State Bar’s complaint alleged Eastman’s engagement “in a course of conduct to plan, promote, and assist then-President Trump in executing a strategy, unsupported by facts or law, to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by obstructing the count of electoral votes of certain states.” As I wrote at the time:
The 11 charges against Eastman prove troubling throughout, with the State Bar of California proposing to discipline Eastman for presenting legal analyses to his client, Trump, and for speaking publicly on his views about the election, with the bar even attempting to hold Eastman responsible for any violence that occurred on Jan. 6. The disciplinary complaint also misrepresents numerous arguments Eastman and others made concerning the 2020 election, falsely equating claims of violations of election law with fraud.
Eastman’s long and costly battle against the California Bar is only beginning. And that is precisely the point of involving state bars: to make it so painful for attorneys to represent Republicans in election cases that the next presidential candidate — or senatorial or congressional candidate — will be unable to find lawyers willing to battle on their behalf.
A Broader Campaign
These efforts are well-coordinated and well-funded, with the group 65 Project launching in March of 2022 ethics complaints against 10 lawyers who worked on election lawsuits following the 2020 presidential election. According to Influence Watch, “65 Project was ‘devised’ by Democratic consultant and former Clinton administration official Melissa Moss,” and is managed by attorney Michael Teter, a former litigation associate with the DNC-connected law firm Perkins Coie. David Brock, of Media Matters fame, advises the group, and the advisory board includes, among others, the former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D.
The 65 Project reportedly “seeks to disbar 111 lawyers from 26 states in total,” but is “not targeting any Democratic-aligned attorneys who have challenged election laws or results in the past.” Rather, the project’s sole aim is Republican lawyers, such as Eastman, with the group pushing for Eastman’s disbarment from the Supreme Court Bar.
It is not merely private attorneys the Democrat project targets, however. In September, the 65 Project filed complaints against the attorneys general of 15 states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia, advocating the bars in those states take disciplinary action against the attorneys general for conduct related to the 2020 election.
Texas AG Paxton didn’t make the list, though, because local Democrats had already taken up the charge. And here, the backstory reveals the troubling politicization of state bars is not limited to Democratic-connected groups like the 65 Project or to the bars in leftist locales such as D.C. and California.
Anti-Paxton Crusade
In Paxton’s case, the state bar received at least 85 complaints about Paxton related to Texas v. Pennsylvania. The Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel reviewed the complaints and dismissed them, finding “the information alleged did not demonstrate Professional Misconduct.” But then four attorneys appealed the dismissal, including one who, according to court filings, was the president of the Galveston Island Democrats and a friend of a Democrat seeking to run against Paxton for attorney general in the then-upcoming 2022 election.
An appeals body within the Texas State Board reversed the dismissal of the complaints, and later a fifth complaint was added to the charges against Paxton. Paxton was then forced to respond to the allegations, which itself proved difficult because they consisted of vague rhetoric, such as claims that Paxton “violated his duty and obligations as a Texas attorney” and “filed an utterly frivolous lawsuit,” bringing “shame and disrespect to the State of Texas and the legal community of Texas.”
Nonetheless, Paxton filed a detailed response, expanded on the theories Texas asserted in the Texas v. Pennsylvania case, and provided the bar with an extensive discussion of the factual and legal basis underpinning the court filings. The Texas Bar then handed the complaints over to what Paxton described as “an investigatory panel comprised of six unelected lawyers and activists from Travis County.”
As Paxton’s later court filings would stress, “as a group, the panel donated thousands of dollars to federal, state, and local candidates and causes opposed to Attorney General Paxton.” “What’s more,” Paxton argued in opposing the bar’s case against him, “members of the panel voted consistently in Democratic primaries for over a decade. Several have maintained highly partisan social media accounts hostile to Paxton.”
Unsurprisingly, the partisan panel found “just cause” existed to believe that Paxton had violated a catch-all provision of the Rules of Professional Conduct, namely the canon prohibiting attorneys from engaging “in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.”
But in making this finding and filing a disciplinary petition in the state court, the Texas Bar wholely ignored the fundamental flaw in its crusade against Paxton — and one of constitutional dimension: The state bar, as a bureaucratic arm of the judicial branch, violates the Texas Constitution’s guarantee of separation of powers by challenging Paxton’s execution of his duties as attorney general.
Separation of Powers
Paxton concisely exposed this reality in his briefing, first quoting Texas precedent that teaches: “The Texas Separation of Powers provision is violated … when one branch unduly interferes with another branch so that the other branch cannot effectively exercise its constitutionally assigned powers.” “The Commission’s suit against the Attorney General violates the Separation-of-Powers doctrine,” Paxton continued, because the “decision to file Texas v. Pennsylvania is committed entirely to the Attorney General’s discretion. No quasi-judicial body like the Commission can police the decisions of a duly elected, statewide constitutional officer of the executive branch.”
In seeking the dismissal of the state bar complaint against him based on separation-of-powers principles, Paxton’s argument shows the politicization process becomes nuclear when the target is the state’s attorney general, writing: “Unelected administrarors from the judicial branch attempting to stand in judgment of the elected attorney general who is the sole executive officers with the authority to represent the State of Texas in the Supreme Court of the United States.”
While it is bad enough that the state bar has been used as a sword to attack political enemies, such as Eastman in California and Clark in D.C., to deter attorneys in the future from representing unpopular cases or parties, the weaponization of the state bar against a state’s attorney general is not a difference in degree, but a difference in kind. As Paxton wrote:
No other attorney in Texas, no one else on the planet can bring a lawsuit on behalf of the State … but we’ve got an administrative arm of the judicial branch, unelected state bureaucrats telling the chief legal officer of the State of Texas how he can exercise his sole prerogative and his exclusive authority to bring a civil lawsuit on behalf of the State of Texas.
Yet unelected bureaucrats — many of whom are political enemies of Paxton — have put the attorney general literally on trial for exercising the executive function with which he was constitutionally charged. And while Paxton fully briefed his position — that as a matter of constitutional law and the doctrine of separation of powers, the court lacked jurisdiction to proceed on the bar’s complaint against him — the trial judge summarily rejected Paxton’s motion, merely stating the motion was “denied.”
Paxton has yet to state publicly whether he plans to appeal the denial of his motion to dismiss to the Texas Court of Appeals. But as a matter of principle he should; this case represents not merely an attack on him personally, but on the position of attorney general.
The Federalist obtained copies of the relevant court filings and they are available here, here, here, here, here, and here.
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.
Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and the attorneys general from 17 additional states should all be disbarred, according to the reasoning of the disciplinary complaint the State Bar of California filed Thursday against former Trump campaign attorney John Eastman. That detail is one of many buried in the 35-page, 11-count disciplinary complaint made public yesterday in the latest lawfare attack on attorneys who deigned to represent Donald Trump.
State Bar of California’s Chief Trial Counsel George Cardona announced on Thursday the filing of disciplinary charges against Eastman, allegedly arising from Eastman’s engagement “in a course of conduct to plan, promote, and assist then-President Trump in executing a strategy, unsupported by facts or law, to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by obstructing the count of electoral votes of certain states.” The press release announcing the disciplinary charges further claimed that Eastman “made false and misleading statements regarding purported election fraud,” that provoked a crowd into assaulting and breaching the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The 11 charges against Eastman prove troubling throughout, with the State Bar of California proposing to discipline Eastman for presenting legal analyses to his client, Trump, and for speaking publicly on his views about the election, with the bar even attempting to hold Eastman responsible any violence that occurred on Jan. 6. The disciplinary complaint also misrepresents numerous arguments Eastman and others made concerning the 2020 election, falsely equating claims of violations of election law with fraud.
But it is count two of the disciplinary complaint, charging Eastman with “seeking to mislead a court,” that exposes the California State Bar as a kangaroo court.
“On or about December 7, 2020, the State of Texas filed a Motion for Leave to File Bill of Complaint in the United States Supreme Court, initiating the lawsuit Texas v. Pennsylvania,” begins count two of the complaint against Eastman. The complaint then explains that in that lawsuit, Texas argued the defendant states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin “usurp[ed] their legislatures’ authority and unconstitutionally revised their States’ election statutes.” As a remedy, Texas sought an order from the Supreme Court to “enjoin the use of unlawful election results without review and ratification by the Defendant States’ legislatures and remand to the Defendant States’ respective legislatures to appoint Presidential Electors in a manner consistent with the Electors Clause.”
Eastman, on behalf of then-President Trump, sought to intervene in the Texas v. Pennsylvania case, and in that motion, Eastman “expressly adopted the allegations contained in the Motion for Leave to File Bill of Complaint filed by Texas.” In adopting the allegations Texas made, Eastman, according to the California State Bar, “misl[ed] the Supreme Court by an artifice or false statement of fact or law,” in violation of California’s “Business and Professions Code” that governs attorneys’ conduct in the Golden State.
Under the California State Bar’s reasoning, then, Texas’ attorney general who filed the motion likewise “misled” the U.S. Supreme Court, as did the attorneys general of the 17 other states that supported Texas’ motion for leave to file a bill of complaint. So too would have Sen. Ted Cruz, had the Supreme Court agreed to hear the motion, as he had agreed to argue the case on Trump’s behalf in that circumstance.
While count two represents but one of the 11 distinct charges levied against Eastman, it most clearly exposes the logical conclusion reached when state bars use disciplinary proceedings to conduct lawfare against political opponents.
To date, the bars have limited themselves to targeting just a few attorneys working for Trump, with the D.C. Bar pursuing Rudy Giuliani and Jeff Clark, in addition to the California State Bar’s attack on Eastman. But there is no limiting principle to prevent the bars in other states from pursuing any politician with a law license who happens to represent the wrong person.
That is an extremely dangerous precedent, which is why tomorrow at a press conference called by Eastman’s legal team, some big legal names will condemn the move. The hastily called conference is expected to bring together former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III and John Yoo, a current professor of law at the University of California-Berkley, former general counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, and former deputy assistant attorney general. Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman and former California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, among others, are also expected at the conference.
Whether the legacy media will cover Eastman’s detailed response to the State Bar of California’s disciplinary complaint or bother to report on his press conference remains to be seen. But if Cruz and the attorneys general impugned by the California State Bar speak out, the corrupt press may not have any choice but to report on the ridiculous theories underlying the disciplinary attacks on Eastman.
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.
President Biden has finally found a solution to address the surge in illegal crossings at the southern border: tell the tens of thousands of aliens unlawfully entering the United States from Mexico that they can come to America “legally” if they instead fly to a port-of-entry in the interior of the country.
Seriously, for all the Biden administration’s spin, that’s his plan — and it is illegal.
Of course, when Biden announced his administration’s newest policy on Thursday in advance of his midterm inaugural trip to the southern border on Sunday, the press release heralded the plan as a “new border enforcement action.” But as National Review’s Andrew McCarthy exposed in his weekend column, it’s a scam.
The scam, though, is layers thick, both legally and politically. And to reach the core truth — that Biden refuses to faithfully execute his duties as the president of the United States by defending our sovereign border — one must first unpeel the specifics of the newest plan buried in the Department of Homeland Security’s official notice of the changes, while also analyzing the relevant immigration law.
The Plan
Today’s edition of the Federal Register, which serves as “the Daily Journal of the United States Government,” contains the details of DHS’s supposed “new border enforcement action,” in four separate “notices,” titled respectively: “Implementation of a Parole Process for Cubans,” “Implementation of a Parole Process for Haitians,” “Implementation of a Parole Process for Nicaraguans,” and “Implementation of Changes to the Parole Process for Venezuelans.”
Each notice summarizes the Biden administration’s supposed “solution” to the flooding of the southern border, which in short consists of allowing, on a monthly basis, a total of 30,000 aliens to enter the United States “legally” if they are Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, or Venezuelan nationals. To qualify, aliens must have a “U.S.-based supporter,” which could be “non-governmental entities or community-based organizations,” and must “provide for their own commercial travel to an air [port-of-entry] and final U.S. destination.” National security and public safety vetting are also required, as well as any additional public health requirements, such as vaccinations.
But how is it that illegal-alien border crossers can become lawful noncitizens by just jumping through a few hoops and flying to the interior of the country, rather than sneaking over the southern border? They can’t. And in crafting its latest immigration plan, the Biden administration is again acting lawlessly.
Biden’s Lawlessness
The Biden administration maintains it has the authority to allow aliens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to enter the United States legally under section 212(d)(5)(A) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, or INA. That section provides the secretary of homeland security the authority to “parole” noncitizens “into the United States temporarily under such reasonable conditions as [the secretary] may prescribe only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.”
“parole” for purposes of the INA is a “legal fiction” in which “a paroled alien is physically allowed to enter the country,” but the alien maintains the same legal status as if he or she were held at the border waiting for an application for admission to be granted or denied. But besides obtaining the legal right to be present in the United States, an alien paroled into the United States may obtain employment authorization to work here lawfully.
As the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently explained, “Parole began as an administrative invention that allowed aliens in certain circumstances to remain on U.S. soil without formal admission, with Congress codifying the practice when it initially enacted the Immigration and Nationality Act (the ‘INA’) in 1952.” At that time, Congress gave the attorney general “discretion to parole into the United States temporarily under such conditions as he may prescribe … any alien applying for admission to the United States.”
However, “throughout the mid-twentieth century, the executive branch on multiple occasions purported to use the parole power to bring in large groups of immigrants,” prompting Congress twice to amend the INA “to limit the scope of the parole power and prevent the executive branch from using it as a programmatic policy tool.” First, as the Fifth Circuit explained, in 1980, Congress added a requirement that the executive branch only parole refugees where “compelling reasons in the public interest with respect to that particular alien,” exist. Then, in 1996, Congress amended the INA to provide “parole may be granted ‘only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.’”
While the DHS’s just-announced parole plans claim the department is making parole decisions on a case-by-case basis, the qualifications set forth by the DHS establish that the Biden administration is illegally using parole power “as a programmatic policy tool,” rather than as designed by Congress, for example, by “paroling aliens who do not qualify for an admission category but have an urgent need for medical care in the United States and paroling aliens who qualify for a visa but are waiting for it to become available.”
The Biden administration’s lawless use of its parole power should come as no surprise, though, as since November of 2021, the president’s team has relied on Section 212(d)(5)(A) to release “family units” at the border to supposedly deal with “capacity constraints.” Florida has challenged the Biden administration’s granting of such carte blanche parole, as well as the president’s failure to detain illegal aliens as mandated under the INA, and trial is set to begin on both those claims later today in a federal court in Florida.
The ‘Standing’ Problem
A similar legal challenge to the Biden administration’s recent parole plan seems likely, although by requiring applicants to secure a vetted “supporter” who will commit to providing for the parolees’ financial needs while they are present in the United States, it will be challenging for anyone to show “standing” to challenge DHS’s plan.
For instance, in the Florida case, while the Biden administration argued the state lacked “standing,” or the right to sue, the court rejected that argument, reasoning Florida “plausibly alleged that the challenged policies already have and will continue to cost it millions of dollars, including the cost of incarcerating criminal aliens and the cost of providing a variety of public benefits, including unemployment benefits, free public education, and emergency services to aliens who settle in Florida after being ‘paroled’ into the country.”
But other than providing “free public education,” the same types of monetary harms are lacking in the case of the Biden administration’s latest parole proposal. And it is questionable whether a court will find that providing free public education to children paroled under DHS’s plans will be enough to establish standing.
Absent a plaintiff with standing to challenge DHS’s plan to parole some 30,000 aliens into the United States every month, the only way to fight the Biden administration’s latest lawless move will be politically. Here, those seeking to secure the southern border have ample ammunition, including highlighting the fact that the Biden administration’s plan does nothing to address that portion of the 200,000-some individuals crossing the southern border every month that herald from countries other than Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
Further, while converting 30,000 illegal border crossers into parolees at ports of entry in the interior of the country may provide a reduction to the problem on paper, it does not secure the border nor promise any reduction in the number of individuals attempting to enter via Mexico.
The parole plan presumes, though, that there will be an even greater reduction in illegal border crossings than the 30,000 who enter as part of the parole process. The parole plan, according to the Biden administration, creates a disincentive for citizens of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to enter illegally at the southern border because the DHS’s new policy also provides that aliens who bypass the parole process and enter the United States without authorization will be subject to an expedited removal to Mexico or their country of origin.
If so, then why not just institute a policy of expediting the removal of individuals who enter illegally at the southern border?
Biden’s Border Disaster
According to the figures included in last week’s DHS notices, prior to the surge at the southern border that followed the Biden administration’s change in enforcement policies, there weren’t even 30,000 aliens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela crossing the border illegally on an annual basis.
For instance, the notice reported that for fiscal years 2019 and 2020 respectively, DHS encountered only 3,039 and 4,431 Haitian nationals at the southwest border, but by 2021 the number exploded to 43,484.
From 2014 to 2019, DHS encountered 589 Cubans on average every month, but by 2022, the average monthly encounter at the land border totaled 17,809, and in October and November of 2022, some 62,000-plus Cuban nationals attempted to cross the border.
From fiscal 2014 through 2019, border agents encountered a monthly average of 127 Venezuelan nationals, but by fiscal year 2022, the average number of Venezuelans crossing the border illegally on a monthly basis totaled 15,494 and rose to more than 33,000 in September of that year.
For Nicaraguan nationals, in 2022, DHS encountered an estimated 157,400 aliens, or an average of 13,113 per month, compared to an average of 316 per month from fiscal years 2014-2019.
These figures show the Biden administration does not need a parole policy: It needs an enforcement policy.
No End in Sight
There is a telling admission hidden in the DHS notice from last week that announced changes to the parole plan established for Venezuela in October of 2022. As originally established, the Venezuela plan capped the number of “parolees” at a total of 24,000 beneficiaries. But, as the DHS acknowledged in its notice modifying that plan, just two months in, “demand for the Venezuela process has far exceeded the 24,000 limit.”
“Absent immediate action,” the DHS notice explained, “there is a risk that DHS meets the 24,000 cap, which would in turn cause the [government of Mexico] to no longer accept the return of Venezuelan nationals and end the success of the parole process to date at reducing the number of Venezuelan nationals encountered at the border.” Further, should it reach the 24,000 limit, thereby making prospective migrants no longer eligible for parole, the “DHS anticipates that we would then see increased irregular migration of Venezuelans.”
In other words, the Biden administration is allowing aliens to come to America “legally” because if it doesn’t, foreign nationals will just start crossing the border illegally again.
Further, while the Biden administration’s current plan caps the number of parolees at 30,000 per month, the DHS notices indicate it may revisit that figure if necessary. What then, is there to stop the Biden administration from increasing the 30,000 cap two-fold or ten-fold? Or what is there to prevent the administration from expanding parole to aliens from countries beyond the four — maybe 14, or even 40?
While the intricacies of immigration law are detailed and often convoluted, the bottom line of the Biden administration’s parole plan should be clear to all Americans: Joe Biden has no intention of securing our border or faithfully executing his duties as the president of the United States.
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.
The United States Department of State has just issued its annual watchlist of the world’s worst religious freedom offenders, and strikingly, Nigeria did not make the cut. The country is among the most dangerous in the world to be a Christian, and daily we hear news of abuses imperiling the human rights of all Nigerians. In breaking news: Since at least 2013, the Nigerian military has conducted systematic, wide-scale forced abortions on at least 10,000 women and girls, many of which were kidnapped and raped by Islamist militants.
Yet in spite of clear-cut evidence of mass human rights atrocities, the U.S. government remains silent, failing to designate Nigeria as a “country of particular concern.” Between January 2021 and March 2022, more than 6,000 Christians were targeted and killed in Nigeria. In May of this year, Christian student Deborah Yakubu was stoned to death and her body burned in Sokoto State, Nigeria, after classmates deemed her WhatsApp messages blasphemous. Following this tragedy, Rhoda Ya’u Jatau, a Christian woman from the northeast, is now on trial for blasphemy for sharing a WhatsApp message condemning Deborah’s brutal killing. And earlier this year, humanist Mubarak Bala was sentenced to 24 years in prison for social media posts critical of Islam.
What will it take to break the Biden administration’s silence? Now, Nigeria is garnering international attention as a result of an upcoming case at its Supreme Court challenging a law criminalizing so-called “blasphemous” expression. You can be put to death under Nigerian law for this “crime.” Musician Yahaya Sharif-Aminu, currently imprisoned and facing the death penalty for blasphemy charges, has petitioned the court to protect his fundamental human rights after being convicted under the Sharia Penal Code of Kano State.
In March 2020, Yahaya shared song lyrics via WhatsApp. This simple act would forever change his life. Accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad for what he shared, his house was burned to the ground by a mob, and he was arrested and charged with blasphemy. Without the support of a lawyer, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced by a local Sharia judge to death by hanging.
Innocent of any crime, Yahaya filed his notice of appeal in November at the Supreme Court, and this potential landmark case could abolish once and for all Northern Nigeria’s Sharia blasphemy law.
Twenty years ago, the 12 states in Northern Nigeria introduced Sharia into their criminal law codes, despite the Nigerian Constitution’s protections for religious freedom. These laws are only supposed to apply to Muslims, but leave little room for theological diversity among Muslims, and could potentially be applied to converts to Christianity or those who have left Islam. It is imperative that the Supreme Court bring justice to Yahaya, saving his life and offering much-needed legal clarity to end the horror of blasphemy laws for all in Nigeria.
International law, including the international treaties to which Nigeria is bound as a party, is unambiguous — the right to religious freedom is for everyone, and nobody should be punished, much less killed, for what they believe. Moreover, Nigeria’s own constitution protects Yahaya’s rights to free expression and religious freedom. Any person of faith or no faith at all can be penalized, and even killed, as a result of a blasphemy accusation. In a country of more than 200 million, split nearly evenly between Christians and Muslims, it is clear that all Nigerians stand to lose under the blasphemy regime.
Blasphemy laws are not unique to Nigeria. Approximately 40 percent of countries in the world have blasphemy laws in some form, and there are currently at least seven countries where a conviction for blasphemy can result in the death penalty. Nigeria has before it a crucial opportunity to step out as an international leader, serving as a model for the abolishment of these dangerous laws.
The world awaits justice for Yahaya. Last week, the U.K. prime minister’s special envoy for freedom of religion or belief, Fiona Bruce, urged “the international human rights community to speak out on behalf of Sharif-Aminu and for Nigeria to repeal its blasphemy laws.” As he fights for his life, let us remember that this is a fight for the human rights of all Nigerians, and stand with him in advocating for the rights of all people to express themselves without fear.
Paul Coleman is the author of Censored and serves as executive director of ADF International overseeing the global, alliance-building legal organization. ADF International is supporting the case of Yahaya Sharif-Aminu at the Supreme Court of Nigeria. Find him on Twitter @Paul_B_Coleman.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — On Monday morning, I swept through the marbled halls of the Supreme Court of the United States, off First Street NE here in the nation’s capital, to enter the highest room of jurisprudence in the land. The sound of my footsteps muffled atop thick carpeting, the blinds on the massive windows mostly drawn and the room packed with rows upon rows of chairs, slowly filling.
A daughter of India who grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia, little could I know that over the next four-and-a-half-hours I would ride an emotional rollercoaster as three so-called “liberal” justices and four attorneys overlooked, erased, and tried to gaslight the truth of Asian Americans who face discrimination — or as the ideologues call it, “systemic racism” — in admissions to Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
If not for fierce questioning from the court’s six conservative justices and the arguments of two attorneys for the plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions, Asian Americans would have been erased in the courtroom that day — much as they have been nationwide by “equity warriors” for whom we are an inconvenient minority. Instead, this is my prediction for the rulings, expected next year: a 6-2 victory by Asian American families and students over Harvard and a 6-3 win over the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Born in India, I was on an emotional roller coaster today in the Supreme Court, listening to 3 justices + 4 lawyers try to gaslight America on the reality of anti-Asian racism. Fortunately, 4 justices argued fiercely. My bet: 6-2, Harvard loses. 6-3 UNC loses. America wins 💯 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/IsQ1yK8Ny1
In 332 pages of court transcripts, “diversity” was referenced 202 times, most of the time by the universities’ lawyers and the three justices that supported them, with “Asian” mentioned only 81 times. The universities’ lawyers, the sympathetic U.S. solicitor general, and the three like-minded justices spoke many times about supporting “students of color,” “minorities” and “diversity” but most often excluded Asian Americans. Ironically, the three liberal justices waxed eloquently about “diversity” without once noting the obvious: There wasn’t an Asian American justice beside them.
In the most defining moment of the day, Harvard’s attorney, Seth Waxman, tried to downplay “race” as a “determinative factor” in admissions to Harvard, noting that it was just like, “you know,” being “an oboe player in a year in which the Harvard-Ratcliffe orchestra needs an oboe player will be the tip.”
Chief Justice John Roberts shot that comparison down immediately.
“Yeah. We did not fight a civil war about oboe players,” he said firmly.
“I—,” Waxman tried to interrupt.
Roberts continued, undeterred. “We did fight a Civil War to eliminate racial discrimination, and that’s why it’s a matter of — of considerable concern.”
Across the country, parents listening to the proceedings laughed and cheered. The day before, many of those parents, with names like Jack Ouyang, Wai Wah Chin, Eva Guo, Suparna Dutta, Yuyan Zhou, and Harry Jackson, stood on the steps of the Supreme Court at an “Equal Education Rights for All” rally with signs promoting simple ideas. “Stop Anti-Asian Discrimination.” “Diversity ≠ Skin Color.” Together, over the past years, we had become accidental activists in the war on merit and Asian American students.
Since late August, parents had been meeting at 9 p.m. on Thursday nights over Zoom to ready for the rally, trading messages through the week on WeChat, Telegram, and Signal. CNN and Fox News featured their voices in their coverage of the case. Chinese-language newspapers put news of the rally on their front pages. But inside the Supreme Court, to the lawyers for the universities and the three justices who supported them, it felt as if we were invisible.
‘Gas lighters’
I’d first visited the nation’s capital decades ago as an 18-year-old intern in the summer of 1983, but this was my first time in the Supreme Court hearing room. It is about the size of a soccer field. At 57, I had to be a witness for the approximately 22 million Asian Americans living in the United States, about one of every 15 people, most hailing from 19 countries and the fastest-growing racial group in the U.S., according to Pew Research Center.
In response to a K-12 education system that has largely failed black and Hispanic students, officials at Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill have allegedly rigged their admissions processes with “race-conscious” standards that discriminate against Asian American students to boost the number of black, Hispanic, and other “underrepresented minorities,” known today as “URMs.”
I brought two books into the Supreme Court with me: the big red book, “Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement,” and the yearbook for the class of 2021 from my son’s alma mater, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Alexandria, Virginia, a magnet school known as “TJ,” where about 70 percent of the students are Asian American.
The yearbook theme was simple, “We know exactly how you feel.” Unfortunately, activists for the tenets of critical race theory don’t even pretend to want to know how we feel, and I witnessed this tone-deaf callousness from the three activist justices: Associate Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor. In my notebook, I penned their three names under “Gas Lighters.”
These three justices infused their questions, comments, and analysis with the politics and worldview of critical race theory, the ideology that teaches that society’s injustices must be corrected through the lens of race. Kagan wondered whether “people who have been kicked in the teeth by our society for centuries” can get a “thumb on the scale” instead of “white men.” She spoke about “our color blindness, whatever that means, because our society is not color blind in its effects.” Sotomayor punctuated many a question with “correct?” For example, she said schools are working to examine the “whole” student as “equals” — “correct?”
Quickly, Kagan found a kindred spirit in the country’s solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, who spoke so sing-song it took a careful ear to recognize the disturbing worldview of critical race theory in her words. To the plaintiff’s argument on the “color-blind interpretation of the Constitution,” she said, “There’s nothing in history to support that.”
Under “Fierce Against Racism,” I wrote four names: Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Under “Sympathetic” to the plaintiffs, I penned two names: Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.
Photo/Asra Nomani
Prophets of critical race theory, such as author Ibram X. Kendi, have spread a toxic, unbelievable, and illiberal idea: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” Asian American students have been their sacrificial lambs in their racial experiment, with K-12 schools like TJ in the crosshairs of their war on merit.
In December 2020, after the killing of George Floyd turned educrats into activists, the 12-0 Democratic school board in Fairfax County, Virginia, eliminated the merit-based admissions tests to the school and replaced them with a “holistic” process that would increase the number of black, Hispanic, and other “URM” students, assigning “bonus points” to racially engineer the student body. A group we started, Coalition for TJ, filed a lawsuit with attorneys from a public-interest nonprofit, Pacific Legal Foundation.
In early 2022, a federal judge ruled that the new admissions process is “blatantly unconstitutional,” but the “UnFairfax” school board, as we like to call it, is appealing the case, and it will likely end up in the U.S. Supreme Court as early as fall 2023.
‘Asian’ Does Not Appear
On Monday, to hear the three “Gas Lighters” and the university’s lawyers, you wouldn’t have even known they were weighing the effect of systemic racism against Asian Americans. In fact, at one point, Alito turned to David Hinojosa, an attorney representing current and former students at UNC-Chapel Hill supporting race in admissions and said: “I was struck by the fact that the word ‘Asian’ does not appear one time in your brief. Yet Asians have been subject to de jure segregation. They have been subjected to many forms of mistreatment and discrimination, including internment.”
Like a magician, Hinojosa said there was no mention of “Asian” in his brief because, voila, a “record” of discrimination against Asian Americans “actually doesn’t exist.” He instructed the court to take it up with Harvard.
When Alito pressed the Harvard attorney, Waxman, on why Asian American students received a lower “personal score” than other students on character traits, including “integrity, courage, kindness, and empathy,” the Harvard lawyer did a tap-dance, saying the “syllogism” of the question was “wrong,” then asserted that the personal score difference is a “slight numerical disparity” that doesn’t reveal any “evidence of discrimination in admissions outcomes against Asian Americans,” because it’s “simply a number” that “fades into the background.”
Simply a number.
“They think we’re that stupid.”
Alito pounced with the obvious question: “If it doesn’t matter, why do you do it?” Waxman dismissed the “personal score” as a “matter of triage” for overwhelmed admissions officers.
What about “affinity groups,” the controversial new tool for separating and segregating students in housing, discussion groups, and elsewhere in schools by race and other identity markers, asked Justice Amy Coney Barrett? Oh, they have “incredible benefits,” gushed Hinojosa.
Photo/Asra Nomani
In the 1920s, Harvard President Lawrence Lowell discriminated in admissions against another group: Jewish students, because he believed there was a “Jew problem” with the overrepresentation of Jewish students at the school. In gaslighting back then, Harvard officials said they weren’t discriminating against Jewish students but just putting in place a “holistic” admissions process.
Now, in his closing remarks, Cameron Norris, an attorney for Students for Fair Admissions, said, “Harvard thankfully does say it is ashamed of its history of Jewish discrimination. I hope someday it says the same about how it’s treating Asians.”
Asra Nomani is a senior contributor at The Federalist. A former Wall Street Journal reporter, Nomani writes a regular newsletter, Asra InvestigatesAsra Investigates, with breaking news and analysis on the frontlines of culture and politics. She is a senior fellow in the practice of journalism at the Independent Women’s Network and a cofounder of the Coalition for TJ, a grassroots parent group, and of the Pearl Project, an investigative reporting initiative. She can be reached at asra@asranomani.com and @AsraNomani.
MSNBC host Tiffany Cross recently went on a rant about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in which she referred to him as “Tom” (short for the derogatory term “Uncle Tom”) and invoked a series of other ugly and disrespectful names. But while Cross and her fellow leftwing TV hosts have been spewing hatred, Thomas has been laying out a jurisprudence of faithfulness to the text of the Constitution that now represents a view held by the majority of justices on the Supreme Court. This view does away with the nonexistent constitutional “right” to abortion while reigning in out-of-control federal agencies and giving the Bill of Rights the respect it deserves.
Cross criticized Thomas for not representing black men in his jurisprudence, but where did she get the idea that a supreme court justice is supposed to represent a constituency? In our system of government, a judge’s job is to decide cases according to the Constitution and the law, without regard to any person. Take, for instance, Justice Sonya Sotomayor’s views on affirmative action. It is certainly not her job to represent the median views of Hispanics, 68 percent of whom oppose race being a factor in college admissions, yet she continues to support racially preferential admissions systems that categorize people by their heritage and not their merits.
Contrary to Cross’s claim, working-class black Americans historically have been in agreement with Thomas’ views on virtually every contentious issue. Thomas has long been opposed to affirmative action and racial preference programs, and so are most black Americans. According to a 2022 poll from Pew Research Center, 59 percent of black Americans are against race factoring into college admissions. It is unlikely Cross is a part of this 59 percent.
Justice Thomas has opined for thirty years that there is no constitutional right to abortion. According to a 2020 Gallup article, from 2001-2007, only 24 percent of black Americans believed abortion should be legal in all circumstances. From 2017-2020, only 32 percent did. In a May 2022 YouGov poll, 81 percent percent of black respondents said that abortion should be banned after the 25th week. Cross likely is unwilling to tolerate any limit on abortions up to the moment of birth, which would put her far outside the mainstream of black Americans.
Thomas has ruled that there is no constitutional right to same-sex marriage. While that is wholly different than whether one supports or supports same-sex marriage, it is notable that a large percentage of black Americans have, until very recently, been opposed to the practice. According to Pew Research, only 21 percent of black Americans supported same-sex marriage in 2004, only 30 percent in 2010, and 51 percent in 2019, and now it is 59 percent.
On topics where Thomas has not ruled from the bench, it is noteworthy that 81 percent of black parents support school choice, but the NAACP opposes school choice.Sixty-nine percent of black Americans support Voter ID laws. Only 28 percent of black Americans support leftist calls to defund the nation’s police.
Why do Cross and black leadership groups, like the NAACP, continue to be so out of touch with the black Americans they claim to represent? Why do they prioritize the goals set by rich white socialists? Perhaps it is because the NAACP receives significant funding from a majority of white leftwing organizations and labor unions and, therefore, may feel obligated to parrot the views of their funders. Certainly, that’s what happened in 1991 when the NAACP opposed Justice Thomas’ nomination at the insistence of the white labor unions, despite his support in the black community. Cross works for, in her own words, “a white-run media” company, and she pushes far-left views, whereas Thomas has a lifetime appointment and answers only to the Constitution and his conscience.
Elites have worked to destroy Thomas for years because, among other things, he exposes how out of step they are with the concerns of everyday black Americans. Thomas has argued for affirmative action programs that help students of all races from disadvantaged backgrounds, but the major beneficiaries of racial set-aside programs are wealthy blacks and Hispanics. A recent analysis showed that 71 percent of blacks and Hispanics at Harvard were from wealthy families. These wealthy individuals prevent the truly disadvantaged members of their communities from getting ahead.
During her tirade, Cross also attempted to smear Thomas by mentioning the ridiculous “pubic hair on a Coke can” comment that Anita Hill bizarrely claimed Thomas made to her many years ago. But the majority of the American people – men and women – did not believe Anita Hill’s testimony at Thomas’ confirmation hearings in 1991. A New York Times/CBS News poll showed people believed Thomas by 58-24 percent. Only 26 percent percent of women believed Anita Hill.
In 1998, Anita Hill was interviewed by Tim Russert on “Meet the Press,” where she trashed two women who claimed to have been sexually harassed or assaulted by then-President Bill Clinton, one of whom Clinton later settled with out of court for $850,000. After Hill had zealously defended Clinton, Russert asked if there were a double standard on harassment allegations for liberals and conservatives. Hill said there is a double standard, saying, “We live in a political world, and the reality is that … there are … larger issues other than just individual behavior.” Hill meant thatif you are pro-abortion, women’s groups will give you a pass if you sexually assault or harass women. Despite Hill being a blatant fraud, Cross still used her antics to smear Thomas.
The left and the out-of-touch black leadership have attacked Thomas since he joined the Reagan administration forty years ago. Nevertheless, he does not care what they think or say. Cross’s attacks may play well to her leftist audience, but that’s not a lot of people, given she is the second lowest-rated show on the lowest-rated cable news network.
Nevertheless, it’s important to respond to these attacks to demonstrate how out of touch she and her colleagues are. On the other hand, Thomas will continue building a long-lasting legacy by writing well-reasoned opinions and persuading a majority of his colleagues to join him in ruling in a manner that is faithful to the Constitution.
Mark Paoletta served as a lawyer in the George H.W. Bush White House Counsel’s office and worked on the confirmation of Justice Thomas. He is a senior fellow at Center for Renewing America, and partner at Schaerr Jaffe.
The search warrant affidavit unsealed on Friday confirms the Department of Justice used a bait-and-switch tactic to justify the FBI’s unprecedented raid on former President Donald Trump’s home. The unredacted portions of the affidavit further expose the Biden administration’s manipulative and tenuous basis for the search and its reliance on inapplicable federal criminal code provisions to justify the targeting of a political enemy.
At noon on Friday, the search warrant affidavit used by the DOJ to obtain a warrant to raid Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home hit the public court docket, albeit with heavy redactions. While sparse, the unredacted portions of the affidavit nonetheless proved significant, especially when read in conjunction with the previously unsealed search warrant and the leaks to the compliant media cartel.
“The government is conducting a criminal investigation concerning the improper removal and storage of classified information in unauthorized spaces, as well as the unlawful concealment or removal of government records,” the affidavit opened, before noting that “the investigation began as a result of a referral the United States National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) sent to the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) on February 9, 2022.”
The affidavit then summarized the background of the NARA referral, explaining that “on February 9, 2022, the Special Agent in Charge of NARA’s Office of Inspector General sent a referral via email to the DOJ.” The referral explained that the NARA’s White House Liaison Division director had reviewed 15 boxes NARA had retrieved from Mar-a-Lago including “newspapers, magazines, printed news articles, photos, miscellaneous print-outs, notes, presidential correspondence, personal and post-presidential records, and ‘a lot of classified records.’” “Of most significant,” the search warrant affidavit explained, was that “highly classified records were unfoldered, intermixed with other records, and otherwise unproperly [sic] identified.”
While the next nearly eight pages of the search warrant affidavit remained redacted, the disclosures that followed exposed the affidavit’s focus on “classified records” as a sham. “On or about May 6, 2021, NARA made a request for the missing PRA records and continued to make requests until approximately late December 2021 when NARA was informed twelve boxes were found and ready for retrieval at the [Mar-a-Lago],” the affidavit continued, with the abbreviation “PRA” previously noted to stand for the Presidential Records Act.
As I explained previously, to fully comprehend the Biden administration’s weaponizing of the DOJ and FBI, it is necessary to understand the Presidential Records Act, the concept of “presidential records,” and the NARA’s role, and the search warrant affidavit’s references to those concepts confirm that point. In short:
“The Presidential Records Act provides that documents created or received by the president or his immediate staff, such as memos, letters, notes, emails, and other written communications, related to a president’s official duties, constitute ‘presidential records’ and must be preserved. The act further declares that the United States shall retain complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records.’ And at the conclusion of a president’s term in office, the ‘Archivist of the United States’ ‘assumes responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records.’”
The Presidential Records Act, however, expressly excludes specific documents from the definition of “presidential records,” including any documentary materials that are “official records of an agency,” “personal records,” or “extra copies of documents produced only for convenience of reference, when such copies are clearly so identified.” The federal statute further defines “personal records” as “diaries, journals, or personal notes ‘not prepared or utilized for, or circulated or communicated in the course of, transacting Government business’” or “materials relating to private political associations” or “relating exclusively to the President’s own election to the office of the Presidency.”
The public (understandably) may wish to sidestep the minutia of the mandates of the Presidential Records Act, but three top-line takeaways prove imperative to understanding the scandal of the Mar-a-Lago search. First, the Presidential Records Act is not a criminal statute, and violations of that federal law do not constitute a crime. Second, the Presidential Records Act does not reach broad swathes of documents retained by a former president, including “official records of an agency,” “personal records,” and convenience copies of presidential records. And third, the courts have refused to question a former president’s conclusion that a record constitutes a “personal record” and not a “presidential record.”
Two additional legal points require expansion for the populace to fully grasp the outrageous overreach of the DOJ, which was further exposed in the partially unsealed affidavit. The first legal principle of note concerns a president’s power to declassify documents. As Trump’s attorney stressed in a May 2022 letter to the DOJ, which the government released along with the redacted version of the search warrant affidavit, “a president has absolute authority to declassify documents.”
“Under the U.S. Constitution, the President is vested with the highest level of authority when it comes to the classification and declassification of documents,” Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran explained in his correspondence with the DOJ. Citing both the Constitution and Navy v. Egan, 484 U.S. 518, 527 (1988), wherein the United States Supreme Court wrote, “the President’s authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security … flows primarily from this constitutional investment of power in the President and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant,” Corcoran countered the DOJ’s attempt to frame NARA’s discovery of documents marked “classified” as warranting a criminal investigation.
Trump’s lawyer stressed a second significant legal principle in the same letter, writing that “presidential actions involving classified documents are not subject to criminal sanction.” Then, after noting that “any attempt to impose criminal liability on a President or former President that involves his actions with respect to documents marked classified would implicate grave constitutional separation-of-powers issues,” Corcoran wrote: “Beyond that, the primary criminal statute that governs the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material does not apply to the President.”
The attorney for the former president then quoted the statute that criminalizes the removal, possession, or retention of classified materials before stressing that “an element of this offense, which the government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt, is that the accused is ‘an officer, employee, contractor, or consultant of the United States.’” “The President is none of these,” Trump’s attorney continued, before concluding, “thus, the statute does not apply to acts by a President.”
Corcoran closed his letter by reminding the DOJ of its obligation “to be candid in representations made to judges,” and requested that a copy of the lawyer’s letter be provided “to any judicial officer who is asked to rule on any motion pertaining to this investigation, or on any application made in connection with any investigative request concerning this investigation,” as well as “any grand jury considering evidence in connection with this matter, or any grand jury asked to issue a subpoena for testimony or documents in connection with this matter.”
The search warrant affidavit referenced Corcoran’s letter and provided a copy to Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, who issued the search warrant. The DOJ also informed Reinhart of a Breitbart News article from May 5, 2022, which states that a former Trump administration official, Kash Patel, had characterized as “misleading” reports that documents retrieved by NARA included classified material; Patel alleged that the reporting was misleading because Trump had declassified the materials at issue.
The DOJ informed Reinhart of the above details and thus, in essence, that the government lacked probable cause to search Mar-a-Lago based on a violation of the statute governing the mishandling of classified documents. But what Trump’s legal team did not foresee, and what the search warrant affidavit revealed, was that the DOJ would twist the facts to find other crimes to justify the targeting of Trump.
The introductory section of the affidavit summarized three other legal theories to justify the search, stating first that “the FBI’s investigation has established that documents bearing classification markings, which appear to contain National Defense Information (NDI), were among the materials” contained in the 15 boxes retrieved by the NARA. Second, the affidavit maintained that there was “probable cause to believe that additional documents that contain classified NDI or that are Presidential records subject to record retention requirements currently remain at the Mar-a-Lago.” And third, the affidavit claimed there was “also probable cause to believe that evidence of obstruction will be found at” Mar-a-Lago. Those legal theories track the three statutes cited by the DOJ to justify the search, namely 18 U.S.C. §§ 793(e), 1519, and 2071.
As I previously explained, none of those criminal code provisions require material to be classified for there to be criminal liability. Rather, Section 793(e), also called the Espionage Act, makes it a crime for a person “having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over” “national defense information” to “willfully” share that information with a “person not entitled to receive it” or to “willfully retain” the national defense information and fail to deliver it to an employee of the United States “entitled to receive it,” if “the possessor has reason to believe [it] could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”
The unredacted portions of the search warrant affidavit reveal how the DOJ manipulated the facts to fit within the Espionage Act. First, for the Espionage Act to apply, the material must qualify as “national defense information.” To establish probable cause that “national defense information” remained at Mar-a-Lago, the affidavit noted that a review by FBI agents of the 15 boxes retrieved by NARA “identified documents with classification markings in fourteen of the fifteen boxes.” The FBI agent who signed the search warrant affidavit then attested that based on his “training and experience,” he “knows that documents classified at these levels typically contain NDI” or “national defense information.”
What the DOJ did here, then, was this: It highlighted that the documents retrieved by the NARA contained “classification markings” and then used the FBI agent’s expertise to establish that documents that receive a classification marking typically include “national defense information.” That Trump declassified (or may have declassified) the documents is irrelevant under this analysis because the fact that they were ever classified would mean they likely qualified as “national defense information.”
The DOJ subtly confirmed this point by dropping a footnote that explains that “§ 793(e) does not use the term ‘classified information,’ but rather criminalizes the unlawful retention of ‘information relating to the national defense.’” The footnote continues by noting that Section 793(e) does not define “information related to the national defense,” but adds that courts have construed national defense information “broadly.”
In other words, the DOJ bent the Espionage Act to fit the facts of Trump’s possession of documents at Mar-a-Lago. The Biden administration couldn’t target Trump for mishandling classified material both because he declassified it and because the statute that criminalizes such mishandling doesn’t reach a president or a former president. So instead, they tried to find a crime to get the man.
Even then, there is a second problem with the DOJ’s reliance on the Espionage Act: An Espionage Act violation only occurs if the person has “unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over,” the national defense information. But how was Trump’s possession “unauthorized”?
From the unredacted portions of the affidavit, it appears the DOJ maintained that Trump’s possession of the national defense information was “unauthorized” because the documents were “presidential records” wrongly retained by Trump. But “presidential records” do not include agency records, personal records, or convenience copies, and the documents bearing the classification markings likely originated from intelligence community agencies and/or were hard copies printed for convenience, meaning Trump’s possession of those documents would not be “unauthorized” under the Presidential Records Act.
For the same reason, the DOJ’s reliance on Section 2017, which criminalizes the removal, destruction, or concealing of government records, falters because that criminal provision protects the government’s access to its own records, and merely possessing copies of government records is not enough to constitute a crime. Yet from the search warrant affidavit and the search warrant, it appears the government sought to recover from Trump hard copies of information it already had within its possession, either through various agencies or the electronic copies maintained by the relevant authorities. And it is a stretch for the government to rely on Section 2017 to criminalize Trump’s possession of the records.
Again, what we are seeing is a bending and twisting of the law to find a crime on which to launch the Mar-a-Lago raid. Mishandling of classified materials wouldn’t work, and Trump’s attorney made sure the DOJ knew that, so the creative team working under Attorney General Merrick Garland combed the federal code and found two plausible statutes on which to rely, adding a claim of obstruction of justice to round out the search warrant affidavit. While it is unclear from the affidavit the basis for the government’s obstruction of justice allegation, the affidavit establishes that the other criminal provisions relied upon representing illicit maneuvering to manufacture a crime for the man who was their political enemy.
Americans may shrug when prosecutors use pretext to target known drug dealers or human traffickers, but manipulating the criminal code to find a basis to search the home of a former president and a political enemy represents an appalling weaponization of the criminal justice system. And while large portions of the affidavit remain under seal, the country has seen enough to know that is precisely what the Biden administration did to get Trump.
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.
Police are often placed in situations where they have to make life-or-death decisions in an instant.
Thanks to the attitudes of the establishment media, the results of those consequential choices usually only get publicized if police can be blamed for making the wrong call.
However, now dramatic body cam footage was released where police successfully handled a dangerous situation in which a 4-year-old boy used his father’s gun to open fire on the officers. They were able to disarm the child before anyone got hurt.
Multiple versions of the body cam recordings were shared in a YouTube video. Watch:
ABC4 in Utah linked highlights from the videos and summarized the events that took place on February 21. The police were summoned when “employees reported that a man brandished a gun in the drive-thru after his order was incorrect.”
Sadaat Johnson, 27, was in the McDonald’s drive-thru with two children in the car, a 4-year-old and a 3-year-old.
Johnson did not comply with police instructions, and the situation escalated until officers were forced to pull Johnson from the vehicle.
The video does not show what happened next in the car. While the police were making the arrest of Johnson, the 4-year-old boy picked up the gun. An officer saw the weapon and shouted “Gun!”
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ABC4 reported, “The officer used his hand to sweep the gun away and the gun went off, hitting the upper part of the McDonald’s building. The officer then yelled at the person inside of the car to drop the gun, and after looking inside the car, realized that it was a small child.”
The children can be heard crying as they exit the car. The officers ask “Are you all right, kid?” and try to reassure them: “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
The discharge may have been accidental. However as reported in the New York Post, “The investigation showed that Johnson then ‘told the child to shoot at the police,’ authorities said. It was not clear exactly when he gave the order and it was not caught in the bodycam clip.”
“The boy — who was taken into protective custody — said he shot at the cops because ‘he wanted his daddy back,’ according to court records obtained by ABC4.”
Johnson also explained to the authorities “this wasn’t the first time his 4-year-old child had gotten his hands on a gun.”
Johnson ended up pleading guilty to two third-degree felonies, child abuse or neglect and aggravated assault. Johnson was sentenced to 120 days in jail, three years of probation and courses on anger management and parenting. He can no longer own guns.
A huge contributing factor to this near-disaster was Johnson’s disrespect and disregard for the police. This attitude leads to more danger in police interactions, despite the absurd progressive activist campaign to defund the police based on claims that it’s police presence that starts the problems.
This is not to say law enforcement does not need some reform. But it needs to be reform that puts police back into serving and protecting communities, rather than abusing citizens on behalf of the political class.
Police should also question even their own self-serving agendas. The Utah body cam footage was in stark contrast to footage from the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. There, the cams caught almost 400 law enforcement personnel unable to handle a lone shooter for almost an hour, while kids died.
In the Utah case though, it is a testament to God’s mercy and the police that no one was killed or injured through the careless abuse of firearms. There could have been causalities of officers, kids or both.
The trouble was caused due to a series of bad decisions and actions by Sadaat Johnson, as much as some want to blame the gun or the cops instead.
Richard Bledsoe is an author and internationally exhibiting artist. His writings on culture and politics have been featured in The Masculinist, Instapundit and American Thinker. You can view more of his work at Remodernamerica.com.
The usual suspects are at it again, and I’m not talking about isolated, mentally ill young men. I’m talking about the politically motivated talking heads who don’t even wait until bodies are cold after tragic mass shootings to spout off about the need for red flag laws, “assault weapons” bans, and “universal background checks” because — you’ve heard this one before — “Why are we willing to live with this carnage?”
After the mass shooting in a wealthy Chicago suburb over the holiday weekend that left seven dead and dozens more wounded in one of the most gun-controlled areas of one of the most gun-controlled states in the country, local State’s Attorney Eric Rinehart did exactly that. He touted the state’s “strong” red flag law and insisted on the need to “ban assault weapons in Illinois and beyond.” Vice President Kamala Harris likewise made an unscheduled visit to the community to call for more gun control, however incoherently. And the typical Twitter blue checks all had something to say.
Meanwhile, as the armchair class prattles on about how our first freedoms are an existential threat, the face and name of the 21-year-old alleged shooter are plastered all over every news channel as he sits remorseless in jail facing a slew of charges that will probably amount to life in prison at worst. The upper echelons of chattering politicos will accomplish nothing but celebritizing murderous cowards — but hey, anything to signal virtue, pick up a few progressive voters, and pad their pockets with a little extra donor cash.
You know how we know they aren’t accomplishing anything? Because the reforms Rinehart called for are both already on the books in Highland Park where the shooting occurred. Despite a local so-called assault weapons ban plus red flag laws and a state with some of the strictest gun-control laws in America, many people died. If the latest shooting taught us anything about guns, it’s that even tightly restricting them doesn’t deter killers.
It’s time for a new approach, and this case presents the perfect set of circumstances to justify it. The Highland Park shooter should be executed, and he should be executed quickly.
There would be nothing “just” about criminal justice if we dispensed with due process, but it’s not much more than a formality that we use the word “alleged” to describe this particular shooter. Not only have authorities confirmed that the male suspect dressed as a woman to conceal his identity, hide his face tattoos, and blend into the frantic crowd. Not only were these facts captured on video, with a witness apparently watching the suspect wrap his firearm in a red blanket before ditching it. Not only has he had multiple run-ins with local law enforcement that were ultimately relayed to state police in a report identifying him as a “clear and present danger,” plus an incident wherein police confiscated 16 knives, a dagger, and a sword from him after he threatened to “kill everyone” in his house.
But he also already told police he’s the shooter. And if his confession of guilt weren’t enough, he also admitted that he almost attacked another July Fourth celebration in Madison, Wisconsin, but decided against it because he just hadn’t had enough time to plan out a murderous scheme.
There’s a more effective deterrent to this carnage than catapulting mass murderers into the limelight by detailing every step of their grisly crimes or featuring their faces on the cover of Rolling Stone. There’s a better way than making impassioned speeches about gun violence, but then helping to bail out violent rioters and advocating for low bail that enables offenders to violently mow down women and children with a vehicle. It’s time to be honest about the fact that bans on AR-15s and red flag laws, in addition to stomping out due process and being ripe for political weaponization, simply don’t work to deter crime. Illinois tried that experiment. It failed.
There are a handful of things that become apparent about deterrence, but here’s a pretty basic idea: Swiftness and certainty are more important than severity. Of course, if punishment must be proportional for justice to truly be just, then execution is warranted in cases of mass murder, the perpetrators of which cannot die enough deaths to make up for the many they stole.
But it isn’t the mere execution of a known mass murderer that deters other disturbed individuals from shooting up jubilant innocents. The reality of taxpayer-funded eons on death row wouldn’t appear to have any concrete deterrent effect, much like lengthy incarceration. But what about a visual representation of this chilling message: You will be caught, and you will be put to death — soon. Certainty and swiftness accomplished.
We’ve watched the inverse cycle play out before. A young man goes on a gruesome killing spree. Everyone learns his face and name during wall-to-wall coverage of his acts, including the alienated who get inspired to pursue their own moments of infamy. He’s charged with crimes, and politicians pounce for their own personal benefit. And then — nothing. The perpetrator gets whisked away to some facility to await trial for ungodly amounts of time, and that’s the last we hear of it. If we get any updates on his fate (which is intended to deter others but fails on account of its slowness and uncertainty), those are afforded a fraction of the attention by the media and are likely to be buried by coverage of the next catastrophe.
It’s time to end this cycle. If politicians are serious that they’re sick of “living with this carnage,” the Highland Park shooter should be tried and convicted on the basis of his confession and executed immediately. Perhaps instead of inspiring another coward to pick up a gun, it will inspire them to think again.
Kylee Griswold 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, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
Governors and other state officials don’t have to stand idly by as the Biden administration plots a federal takeover of elections. That’s the message being sent by the heads of two good government groups in a new memo to state officials.
“The Biden administration wants to use federal government resources for political, get-out-the-vote purposes, and it’s up to strong leaders in state and local government to stop them,” wrote Russ Vought of the Center for Renewing America and Tarren Bragdon of the Foundation for Government Accountability. “We strongly urge those in positions of power to stop President Biden’s power grab and act soon.”
Biden issued an executive order on March 7, 2021, directing all 600 federal agencies to submit a plan to the White House to increase voter registration and turnout. Many agencies subsequently developed a plan to turn federal facilities, particularly those that deliver federal benefits, into voter registration agencies.
For example, Housing and Urban Development is trying to turn assisted housing centers into get-out-the-vote hubs. Health and Human Services is doing the same with its public health centers. Even as labor problems are out of control, the Department of Labor is turning its American Job Centers into voter registration agencies.
The agencies are allowed to work with voting groups approved by left-wing partisans in the White House, reminiscent of the Zuckerbucks plot to destabilize the 2020 election by running get-out-the-vote operations in the Democrat areas of swing states.
It’s a “backdoor approach that’s designed to ensure Democratic victories at the polls in 2022 and beyond,” Vought and Bragdon wrote.
The two recommend that state officials take action to prevent Biden’s plot. Since the National Voting Rights Act provides states the authority to designate voter registration agencies beyond those already required by federal law, the federal government cannot designate additional agencies without a change to federal law enacted by Congress.
So when federal agencies send “guidance” memorandums to state agencies about turning federal benefit centers into voter registration agencies, Vought and Bragdon recommend state officials contact those agencies and “order them not to implement that guidance because it is illegal at worst and unethical and partisan at best.”
Further, they remind states that they can issue a gubernatorial executive order or the legislature can pass a law or resolution prohibiting state agencies from applying to become voter registration agencies.
“With increasing brazenness, President Biden is taking advantage of a loyal federal bureaucracy to wield the power and influence of the federal government to influence elections by increasing Democratic voter registration and turnout,” write Bragdon and Vought. They say the actions are particularly troubling given recent lawsuits filed by the Department of Justice against conservative efforts to fortify election integrity and make it more difficult to cheat.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of 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
Former Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Nebraska, has been sentenced to probation for lying to the federal government. But the only things we know for certain are that the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) lied to entrap Fortenberry, and used two men who broke campaign finance laws to betray the congressman in his zeal to help persecuted Christians in the Middle East.
A Los Angeles jury convicted Fortenberry in March on three felony counts of lying to the FBI and scheming to cover it up. The congressman faced a maximum sentence of 15 years — five years for each count. The prosecution had sought a six-month prison sentence. Tuesday, however, U.S. District Judge Stanley Blumenfeld, Jr. sentenced the former congressman to two years of probation, as well as a $25,000 fine and 320 hours of community service.
In handing down his sentence, Blumenfeld said that everyone, including the prosecution witnesses, attests that Fortenberry is “a man of exceptional character.” Fortenberry and his defense team are appealing the convictions.
Under 18 U.S.C. §1001, it is a federal crime to tell a government official or agency a “material” lie. That means a lie that, if the government were to believe it, would have the tendency of affecting an official’s or agency’s course of conduct. Ironically, the FBI and the DOJ are guilty of doing exactly the things with which they charged Fortenberry.
Would I Lie to You?
The case stems from a February 2016 fundraiser in Los Angeles in which Fortenberry participated. Toufic Baaklini, a U.S. citizen, Maronite Catholic, and advocate for Christians in the Middle East, used the fundraiser to channel the money of a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire, Gilbert Chagoury, to Fortenberry’s campaign. Campaign donations from foreign nationals are illegal.
Baaklini, then a long-time friend of the congressman, testified at Fortenberry’s trial that he knew such conduit donations were illegal, but he misled Fortenberry by having $30,000 of Chagoury’s money divided among a number of people at the fundraiser so no red flags would be raised regarding the contributions.
Dr. Elias Ayoub, another Maronite Catholic who helped organize the L.A. fundraiser, also admitted in court that he has made a number of illegal campaign contributions using Chagoury’s money, including to U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, and Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah. In addition, both Baaklini and Ayoub testified that Fortenberry didn’t know the contributions had come from Chagoury, and Baaklini testified that Fortenberry raised that very issue early in the fundraising process.
As KOLN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska, reported this past March, Baaklini made a stark admission in court to John Littrell, Fortenberry’s lawyer, saying he didn’t want Fortenberry to know about the illegal nature of the contributions, even when the congressman specifically asked if there was anything wrong with the fundraiser.
So why isn’t Baaklini facing possible prison time, as well as Ayoub? Because the FBI and the DOJ wanted a bigger fish—a sitting U.S. congressman—and used Baaklini and Ayoub as witnesses at Fortenberry’s trial.
A Man of Good Character
In serving Nebraska’s first congressional district since January 2005, Fortenberry has distinguished himself as a man of integrity in both his personal and professional life. In sworn testimony, U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-California, a liberal Democrat and Chaldean Catholic who has worked with Fortenberry on aiding Christians in the Middle East, affirmed her Republican colleague’s character.
“I think he brings honor to what he does because of the individual he is,” Eshoo said. “He’s faith-filled, he’s honest. His word is always good, and I can’t say that about all members of Congress, and you find out the hard way.” Eshoo added that Fortenberry had a reputation of being a rule-follower.
Also, Fortenberry had been regularly targeted by opponents in his reelection campaigns, including because of his defense of the unbornand women harmed by abortion, yet he easily won reelection term after term. So, if Fortenberry is known by Democratic colleagues as being honest, and he directly asked Baaklini if the 2016 fundraiser in L.A. was tainted and was told everything was fine, how did the government make their case against the congressman?
Anatomy of an Abusive Prosecution
Even though the DOJ had zero evidence that Fortenberry had committed any crime, they had Ayoub tape a June 2018 conversation with the congressman. After the call, Fortenberry was concerned enough to tell his wife, his chief of staff, and his lawyer that he had renewed concerns about the 2016 fundraiser.
Then, in March 2019, the FBI came to Fortenberry’s home in Nebraska and deliberately lied to him and his wife, saying they were there for a national security issue, not a criminal matter. That lie disarmed Fortenberry, striking him as believable because of his service on a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee whose work deals with U.S. foreign relations.
The FBI agents also quizzed Fortenberry on various matters, and later said Fortenberry lied about not knowing Ayoub. In fact, the congressman didn’t recognize a 10-year-old photo of Ayoub, as it showed him with dyed-black hair and black eyebrows, whereas, Ayoub, now 77, has silver hair and silver eyebrows.
An FBI agent did ask Fortenberry whether he knew that lying to a federal agent was a crime. The congressman responded that he did. His recollections of his unbeknownst-taped conversation with Ayoub the previous June were sketchy, not because he lied, but because of faulty recall and Fortenberry’s tendency to multi-task during fundraising calls, as his wife Celeste testified, because he didn’t enjoy doing them.
In the process, Fortenberry missed Ayoub’s point that Chagoury had likely contributed to the 2016 fundraiser. His failure to recall that was another instance, the DOJ argued, which showed the congressman’s intent to deceive, as well as Fortenberry’s assertion on the same call that he’d be interested in doing another fundraiser with Ayoub.
In a July 2019 interview in Washington, D.C., the FBI also lied to Fortenberry and his attorney, Trey Gowdy, the former Republican congressman from South Carolina. Gowdy specifically asked the FBI agents whether Fortenberry was a target of their investigation. They said he wasn’t.
That wasn’t true, and the FBI and DOJ cobbled together a case, saying that Fortenberry had not only lied but had deliberately tried to deceive the FBI. Part of making their case was that Fortenberry’s former lawyer testified she couldn’t recall the contents of her June 2018 conversation with Fortenberry, but she said she would’ve definitely remembered had he mentioned anything about possible illegal donations.
A Stickler for the Law Who Also Deliberately Deceives?
Never mind that this same attorney testified that Fortenberry was in the habit of calling her a lot—a virtue that affirms Eshoo’s assessment that Fortenberry is committed to adhering to the law. Nevertheless, based on the attorney’s testimony, the DOJ argued that Fortenberry had further willfully withheld self-incriminating evidence about the fundraiser, even though, again, Baaklini had testified that the congressman had directly asked whether the contributions were illegal early in the process and he—Baaklini—had lied to Fortenberry in saying they weren’t.
In addition, Fortenberry’s alleged crimes took place while he was on the phone in his Nebraska home. Nevertheless, because the prosecution argued his actions had relevance to their investigation in California, they succeeded in changing the legal venue to Los Angeles, a well-known leftist region where seating a jury unfavorable to the congressman was much more likely than in Nebraska, Fortenberry’s congressional home.
The venue issue is a likely ground for Fortenberry’s appeal, as is the argument that Fortenberry didn’t materially lie to the FBI.
Lying Is Okay if the Government Does It
Meanwhile, the government’s conduct in this case is very disturbing. An FBI agent admitted at the March trial that he had lied to Fortenberry at his home in March 2019, but he said that is part of the FBI’s normal tactics to extract the truth.
However, the DOJ and the FBI, both agencies of the executive branch of the U.S. government that includes the president as chief executive, had no substantive basis to pursue a criminal investigation of Fortenberry, a sitting congressman who had a sterling reputation for integrity. Instead, even though they knew that Baaklini and Ayoub had clearly violated the law, and despite Baaklini’s admission that the congressman had directly asked him whether the L.A. fundraiser was tainted, they pursued Fortenberry.
In short, they went on a legal fishing expedition to concoct a case against the congressman. Fortenberry’s failure to be attentive during his fundraising calls, and errors in his recall, are evidence of personal imperfections. But they are certainly not the basis of a legitimate criminal prosecution, let alone convictions.
A Disturbing Legal Precedent
Our federal government, based on a system of checks and balances that the founders established almost 250 years ago, presumes that the respective branches—executive, legislative, and judicial—will conduct themselves with integrity in interacting with each other. When trust is undermined, our system of government is jeopardized. By abusively wielding power to intimidate a legislator, the FBI and DOJ threaten that delicate balance.
Unhealthy competition between the branches will consume them and devour any chance that public officials will rise above petty bickering and destructive partisanship to cooperate in the best interests of the country. By enlisting the judiciary to turn that threat of prison into a potential reality, the FBI and DOJ have turned the system on its head. What the founders intended as an aggressive but civil competition is now in danger of becoming a deadly serious game which menaces the civil liberties and freedoms of those who dare to undertake public service.
This episode should be especially disconcerting to all faithful Catholics and other Christians concerned about their place in a society that is increasingly hostile to religion. Indeed, Fortenberry ended up a prosecutorial target precisely because of his work defending the right of Middle Eastern Christians to live and practice their faith. Christians especially must answer the call, and stand up against this most troubling evolution in the DOJ and FBI’s battle with Congress.
Tom Nash is a journalist, theologian, and author who has served the Catholic Church for more than 30 years, including as a theology advisor at the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN). Joseph Cosby is a seasoned attorney with more than 30 years of experience litigating cases in federal court. He practices law in Washington, D.C.
With Thursday’s official announcement by Justice Stephen Breyer of his impending retirement, conservatives are strategizing on the best approach to prevent confirmation of a leftist activist justice. Instead, Republicans should be praying that President Biden nominates the looniest, most far-left lawyer possible for a slot on the high court. Why? Because history has proven that a far-left justice will be no worse than a moderately liberal justice in the casting of Supreme Court votes, meaning there is no downside to a far-left pick, while the upside potential is huge, given that it is Biden appointing the new justice and not a Republican president: Thank you very much, Never Trumpers.
While over the last four decades justices appointed by Republican presidents have demonstrated a penchant to “grow” in office or have proven more moderate or pragmatic than proclaimed during confirmation, the same is not true for Democrat-appointed justices, who vote in near-perfect lockstep over their careers.
Then there are the Republican-appointed justices who do not abandon their judicial philosophy, but conclude that a faithful application of originalism requires them to vote with the leftist wing of the court. Justice Neil Gorsuch provides a perfect example of this phenomenon, providing the fifth vote in several cases in the criminal context, and before him the now-late Justice Anton Scalia.
Conversely, in close or contentious cases, Democrat-appointed justices “represent a block geared toward progressive policy outcomes.” It matters whether these justices are perceived as center-left or hard-left: The desired liberal outcome dictates the decision. So, fighting for a less leftist justice serves no purpose. On the other hand, there are many positives to the conservative cause if Biden nominates a far-left candidate to the Supreme Court. With midterm elections later this year, Biden naming an extremist to the high court positions Republicans perfectly to talk about the importance of elections—and specifically control of the Senate. The nomination of a far-left candidate will also provide an opportunity during the confirmation process for Republicans to highlight the recent public revelations of the Democratic Party’s true far-left goals. President Biden has already showcased the party’s obsession with identity politics by promising the country his nominee would be a black woman, so men and whites need not apply.
Further, if Republicans maintain decorum and respect during the process, and focus on the nominee’s judicial philosophy and policy, they can score points with a public disgusted by the left’s disgraceful treatment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh and his family. And the more leftist Biden’s candidate, the more restrained Republicans will appear by comparison. Moreover, the further left the candidate, the more justified a “no” vote will be for swing-state Republicans, allowing them to vote against the nomination based on principle, and thereby avoid the obstructionist label. Likewise, moderate Republicans or Republican senators in purple or blue states could justify a “yes” vote based on their view that a president is entitled to his nomination.
The more extreme Biden’s candidate, the more this position will inure to Republicans’ benefit when a supposedly far-right candidate finds himself or herself nominated to the Supreme Court by a future Republican president. The same moderate Republicans can point to their vote for Biden’s extremist justice as proof of the consistency of their position that a president is entitled to his nominee, or if they are kicked out of office over their vote for Biden’s nominee, a stronger senator could be in that office. And should Democrat senators en mass vote against a future Republican nominee, the hypocrisy charge will strike more squarely the more extreme Biden’s leftist nominee is.
It is also not just the fight that will benefit the conservative cause: Elevation of a far-left justice to the Supreme Court will advance originalism more than if Biden were to replace Breyer with a milquetoast moderate. That premise may seem counterintuitive because we think of “moderates” in the context of politics and not precedent.
For a Supreme Court decision to be “precedential,” five justices must agree with both the outcome and the analysis. Were Biden to appoint a so-called “moderate,” her vote would tally with the far-left wing of the high court and her reasoning would likely be mainstream enough to, at times, shift Justice John Roberts or Justice Brett Kavanaugh to join with the other two leftist justices to create a majority opinion that binds lower courts.
Conversely, a far-left justice will also vote with Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan but may drag her sister justices too far to the left to entice any so-called moderate justices to join in the decision. Then, either the leftist side will lose, or the outcome will favor the leftist position, but the Supreme Court’s decision will be fractured, with several of the justices writing separately, resulting in no binding precedent and only dicta.
Of course, originalism would benefit more from the appointment of an originalist justice, but that is not an option now, as President Biden is our president and Breyer submitted his resignation effective upon confirmation of his successor. So the choice is between Justice Breyer and another liberal justice or a far-left one. Stalling in the hope of obtaining a more palatable liberal will leave us with Justice Breyer and the need to delay an appointment for three years.
Conservatism would be better served by using Biden’s appointment to remind the public that elections have consequences. The loonier left his nominee is, the better that point can be made.
Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. 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 Friday, a Pennsylvania court declared the state’s statute authorizing no-excuse mail-in voting was unconstitutional. Within hours, Pennsylvania officials filed a notice of appeal with the state Supreme Court, putting on hold the lower court decision and thereby leaving in place the vote-by-mail option until the state’s high court rules.
With Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices elected on a partisan ticket and Democrats currently holding a 5-2 majority on the state’s high court, Democrats are predicting the no-excuse mail-in voting law will be upheld. That forecast seems accurate given the hyper-partisan approach to legal analysis seen since the 2020 election. It’s unfortunate because yesterday’s opinion in McLinko v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania reached the proper conclusion as a matter of constitutional analysis and controlling precedent.
The McLinko case consisted of two lawsuits consolidated by the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court. Both cases challenged the constitutionality of no-excuse mail-in voting. Doug McLinko, a member of the Bradford County Board of Elections, was the plaintiff in one case, and Timothy Bonner and 13 additional members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives were the plaintiffs in the second case.
At issue in the consolidated case was Act 77, which, as the court explained in Friday’s opinion, “created the opportunity for all Pennsylvania electors to vote by mail without having to demonstrate a valid reason for absence from their polling place on Election Day.” The plaintiffs argued that provision violates Article VII, Section 1 of the Pennsylvania Constitution.
Article VII, Section 1 of the Pennsylvania Constitution provides (emphasis added):
Every citizen 21 years of age, possessing the following qualifications, shall be entitled to vote at all elections subject, however, to such laws requiring and regulating the registration of electors as the General Assembly may enact.
1. He or she shall have been a citizen of the United States at least one month.
2. He or she shall have resided in the State 90 days immediately preceding the election.
3. He or she shall have resided in the election district where he or she shall offer to vote at least 60 days immediately preceding the election, 10 except that if qualified to vote in an election district prior to removal of residence, he or she may, if a resident of Pennsylvania, vote in the election district from which he or she removed his or her residence within 60 days preceding the election.
The key language in Section 1, the plaintiffs argued, and the court held, was “shall offer to vote,” which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had previously interpreted in Chase v. Miller, a case from 1862. At issue in Chase was whether 420 votes received from Pennsylvania soldiers fighting in the Civil War, who had cast their ballots by mail, were valid. While Pennsylvania’s legislature had authorized absentee ballots for military members, the state Supreme Court held the Military Absentee Act of 1839 violated the state’s constitution because “offer his vote” required in-person voting, explaining:
To ‘offer to vote’ by ballot, is to present oneself, with proper qualifications, at the time and place appointed, and to make manual delivery of the ballot to the officers appointed by law to receive it. The ballot cannot be sent by mail or express, nor can it be cast outside of all Pennsylvania election districts and certified into the county where the voter has his domicile.
We cannot be persuaded that the constitution ever contemplated any such mode of voting, and we have abundant reason for thinking that to permit it would break down all the safeguards of honest suffrage. The constitution meant, rather, that the voter, in propria persona, should offer his vote in an appropriate election district, in order that his neighbours might be at hand to establish his right to vote if it were challenged, or to challenge if it were doubtful.
In other words, “to offer his vote,” required a qualified elector to “present oneself. . . at the time and place appointed” and to make “manual delivery of the ballot.” The fuller discussion in Chase, however, provides a helpful reminder of the long-understood danger of absentee voting: “a break down” of “the safeguards of honest suffrage.”
Pennsylvania’s constitution was later amended to permit electors in military service to vote by absentee ballot. Then in 1923, the state legislature again attempted to expand absentee voting to allow non-military citizens, “who by reason of his duties, business, or occupation [are] unavoidably absent from his lawfully designated election district, and outside of the county of which he is an elector,” to cast an absentee ballot in the presence of an election official.
Another election dispute, however, resulted in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 1924 In re Contested Election of Fifth Ward of Lancaster City, declaring the 1923 Absentee Voting Act unconstitutional. The Lancaster decision again concluded that the “offer to vote” language of the Pennsylvania state constitution requires in-person voting. Because at that time the constitution only authorized absentee voting for individuals absent by reason of active military service, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held the 1923 Absentee Voting Act unconstitutional.
“However laudable the purpose of the [1923 Absentee Voting Act], it cannot be sustained,” the Pennsylvania Supreme Court explained, adding: “If it is deemed necessary that such legislation be placed upon our statute books, then an amendment to the Constitution must be adopted permitting this to be done.”
In Friday’s decision in McLinko v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the three-judge majority opinion found Chase and Lancaster City controlling and struck down Act 77’s authorization of no-cause mail-in voting. In holding Act 77 unconstitutional, the McLinko court rejected the acting secretary of state’s argument that Article VII, Section 4 of the Pennsylvania Constitution granted the state legislature authority to allow mail-in voting for any reason. That constitutional provision provides: “All elections by the citizens shall be by ballot or by such other method as may be prescribed by law: Provided, That secrecy in voting be preserved.”
The court rejected Pennsylvania’s argument, noting that when Lancaster City was decided, the Pennsylvania high court had quoted the entire text of Article VII, Section 4, and yet held that the “offer to vote” language required in-person voting unless the constitution expressly authorized absentee voting. Friday’s decision explained that Section 4 merely authorized the state to allow mechanical voting, as opposed to voting by ballot. (Two judges dissented from the McLinko decision, reasoning that mail-in voting is not a subset of absentee voting but a new method of voting the legislature may be approved under Section 4.)
Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of state’s argument that Section 4 of the state constitution authorizes the legislature to permit no-fault mail-in voting defies logic. As the McLinko court explained, if Section 4 gave the legislature that power, then there was no need for the state’s constitution to be amended in 1997, to add as a permissible basis for absentee voting, “observance of a religious holiday or Election Day duties.”
While concluding it was bound by Chase and Lancaster City, the majority in Friday’s decision in McLinko added that “no-excuse mail-in voting makes the exercise of the franchise more convenient” and that, “if presented to the people, a constitutional amendment to end the Article VII, Section 1 requirement of in-person voting is likely to be adopted.” “But a constitutional amendment must be presented to the people and adopted into our fundamental law,” the court in McLinko concluded, “before legislation authorizing no-excuse mail-in voting can ‘be placed upon our statute books.’”
The majority’s detailed analysis in McLinko was correct, both as a matter of constitutional interpretation and precedent. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, however, will not be bound by its decisions in Chase and Lancaster City, even though the principal of stare decisis should caution the justices against overturning that precedent.
That prudential principle is especially relevant here, where the “offer to vote” language “has been part of the Pennsylvania Constitution since 1838 and has been consistently understood, since at least 1862, to require the elector to appear in person, at a ‘proper polling place’ and on Election Day to cast his vote.”
A decision by the Democratic-controlled Pennsylvania Supreme Court abiding by that precedent and reminding its citizens that the constitution controls notwithstanding the passions of the day would also go a long way toward healing a divided populace.
Further, striking Act 77 now, when no votes have been cast and no citizens would be disenfranchised, would do no harm to Pennsylvanians. That was the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s justification in Kelly v. Commonwealth, for refusing to consider the constitutionality of Act 77 as part of a challenge to the results of the November of 2020 based on the equitable doctrine of “laches.”
“At the time this action was filed on November 21, 2020, millions of Pennsylvania voters had already expressed their will in both the June 2020 Primary Election and the November 2020 General Election,” the state Supreme Court explained in Kelly v. Commonwealth and striking the state statute at that point, “would result in the disenfranchisement of millions of Pennsylvania voter.”
There is no such danger, now, however. So, will the constitution control or will the partisan interests of the Democratic-majority of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court supplant the rule of law? Sadly, that latter danger is everpresent.
Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. 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.
At least 50 high-powered law firms that went out of their way to defend foreign terrorists in Guantanamo Bay free of charge are nowhere to be found as hundreds of American citizens languish in prison for charges related to entering the U.S. Capitol building during the January 6 riot.
When foreign terrorists, including the accused mastermind who helped plan the 9/11 attack, were being held in the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, law firms from across the country volunteered to represent them pro bono. Now, nearly 600 Americans face an intense legal battle over their participation in the events of January 6, and these same firms are leaving them defenseless. Not one of the legal firms that assisted Gitmo terrorists have helped any of those charged with ties to January 6.
In 2009, the American Civil Liberties Union went so far as to create an entire group of lawyers ready to defend Gitmo detainees under the John Adams Project, to show their dedication to ensuring all have a top-notch defense.
John Adams, whose patriotism was proven in his instrumental legal role in helping found the American republic, defended British soldiers after the Boston Massacre in an American courtroom. Although undoubtedly a revolutionary hero, Adams felt convicted that the judicial system cannot be just if everyone doesn’t receive a quality defense. With popular opinion so staunchly against the soldiers, Adams risked his reputation to uphold this principle.
Attorney Steve Schaefer explained to me that a strong legal defense for all accused of crimes is necessary, as it is the only way to reveal the truth of what occurred before the court. If the facts don’t come to light, the American justice system is in jeopardy, as people are at the will of an arbitrary power. Schaefer said, that causes Americans to lose trust in the American experiment, so the importance of quality representation prior to adjudication in court can’t be overstated.
“It’s indispensable to have to have a strong advocacy on behalf of criminal defendants — even if the allegations are unsavory — because our entire process hinges on a protection of the citizen and that the government has to meet the highest burden, which is beyond a reasonable doubt, in order to convict them of a crime,” Schaefer said.
Without a strong criminal defense, the government can take away individual rights without a clear demonstration of the guilt of the accused. The firms who trumpeted the right to a strong defense for everyone charged in the American legal system when it came to Guantanamo Bay are well aware of the need for a competent defense for citizens today, yet they have not allocated any resources to an equal defense for some accused of crimes.
The law firm Wilmer and Hale told The New York Times in 2008 that establishing a proper defense for Gitmo detainees “was about as important as anything we could take on.”
Despite widespread allegations of prosecutorial zealotry and differing standards of prosecution for the January 6 rioters compared to the thousands of rioters across the nation in 2020 who besieged the White House, federal courthouses, police precincts, national symbols, and small businesses, no similar defense fund or coordination has been provided for those charged in the January 6 riot.
Julie Kelly, a reporter covering dozens of January 6 defendants since their cases began, said the majority of those who have been charged have no prior experience navigating the legal system. Few have been charged with any crime before in their lives and now must rely on government-provided public defenders because they can’t afford anyone else.
“We have a Gitmo in Washington D.C.,” Kelly told me. “We have a prison that has been used solely to house and detain men arrested and charged — not convicted, just charged with offenses — related to January 6.”
Some of the nonviolent defendants were so misinformed by the FBI that they thought they were being questioned to help them find violent offenders, all while the FBI was gathering evidence against those being questioned, she said.
“These people are being treated in court as domestic terrorists. Dozens of them are held under pre-trial detention orders, which means they don’t even have a chance to make bail,” Kelly noted. “They are considered too dangerous to be let out of jail, awaiting trials which won’t start until the middle of next year at the earliest.”
Capitol rioter Paul Hodgkins’ prosecutor referred to him as a domestic terrorist in his sentencing, and FBI Director Christopher Wray has designated January 6 an act of domestic terrorism. Many who didn’t even know they were doing anything wrong, entering the Capitol as police opened doors for them, face detrimental charges threatening to turn them into convicted felons, revoking their right to vote and to own a gun for the rest of their lives.
While corporate media and other establishment institutions have long encouraged pro-bono legal representation of those held at Gitmo, they have discouraged it for those charged in the January 6 riot. Media and political figures argue those charged in the riot were violent insurrectionists seeking to overthrow the government. However, not a single person at the riot has been charged with inciting insurrection. They have instead been charged with obstruction of an official proceeding, which is the felony charge that the government is adding to mostly misdemeanor cases of trespassing.
The vast majority of those charged with ties to January 6 carried no weapons, harmed no one, vandalized nothing, and stole nothing, according to Kelly. Most walked through the capitol against no resistance at 2:40 p.m., took a selfie, and were out by 3 p.m. These defendants are also being tried in front of a jury in Washington, D.C., a city where more than 92 percent of the voters voted to elect Joe Biden last November.
Civil liberties advocates say the treatment of January 6 defendants reveals an alarming threat to American jurisprudence. Some blame intimidation from well-funded leftist groups for the lack of a competent defense. Lawyers who do exert effort in providing such a defense have been harrassed.
According to NPR, attorney Nabeel Kibria represented one of the first defendants in the investigation to plead guilty, after which point Kibria began facing attacks and death threats 48 hours after her client’s plea deal “from people … who you would think were on a whole different spectrum than what the Bustles [a married couple on trial] are in terms of political ideology or the people of the January 6 riots.”
Firms that consider themselves advocates for the least among us fail to uphold their convictions by abandoning people like Hodgkins. The system of justice that exists in this country, outlined in the Constitution in no uncertain terms, requires a strong defense.
“It is extremely frustrating and heartbreaking to see the Beltway’s legal and judicial system so heavily stacked against these people who have no means to defend themselves,” Kelly said. “And you have no lawyers on the right willing to step up and take these cases either pro bono, or even low bono, to help these people.”
One thing is clear: Those on the left put a lot of work into defending Afghan terrorists a decade ago, touting the need for providing a quality legal defense to those who were least likely to have quality, willing representation. Now, in the hour of need for Americans charged with much lesser crimes than mass murder, the same firms remain silent.
Allison Schuster is a research assistant for Hillsdale College in DC and a 2021 Hillsdale graduate, as well as a former intern for The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @allisonshoestor.
Demonstrators rally outside the Pennsylvania Capitol Building to protest the continued closure of businesses due to the coronavirus pandemic on May 15, 2020, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. (Mark Makela / Getty Images)
In one of the first signs that American citizens are cognizant of the country’s dangerous descent into a one-party rule, residents of Pennsylvania sent a powerful message to those responsible on Tuesday: Stop!
The pandemic provided governors, mayors and other local leaders with extraordinary opportunities to expand their influence over the citizens in their states. Nowhere were these emergency powers more egregiously abused than in states, cities and towns governed by Democrats. By all measures, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf was one of the worst offenders.
WHYY-TV reported that two constitutional amendments passed statewide referenda that will provide the state’s General Assembly with “more power to block emergency declarations.”
The amendment to Article III, Section 9 of the Pennsylvania Constitution grants the legislature the ability to “terminate the Governor’s Covid-19 disaster emergency declaration without presenting it to the Governor for his approval.”
Prior to this amendment, measures passed by both the state House and Senate required the approval of the governor. Needless to say, all of the Republican-controlled legislature’s attempts to end or minimize Wolf’s orders ended in vetoes which required a two-thirds vote in both chambers to override. With the passage of this resolution, a simple majority vote in the state House and the Senate is all that is necessary. Veto power is no longer available to the governor.
Under the old law, the governor had the authority to issue an emergency order which would remain in effect for 90 days, at which point he or she could either renew it or end it. The new amendment stipulates that a “disaster emergency declaration will expire automatically after 21 days, regardless of the severity of the emergency, unless the General Assembly takes action to extend the disaster emergency.”
WHYY noted that a COVID-19 emergency order is currently in effect and is set to expire on Memorial Day. If Wolf chooses to renew it, a simple majority vote in the state House and Senate could end it in 21 days.
Democrats are reportedly worried that the legislature will act “to cancel COVID-19 emergency declarations without considering public health or consulting with the Governor’s office.”
State House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff and Speaker Bryan Cutler, both Republicans, sought to reassure them in a joint statement which said, “We stand ready to reasonably and responsibly manage Pennsylvania through this ongoing global pandemic, the scourge of opioid addiction, and other long-term challenges that may come to face this Commonwealth.”
State Republican lawmakers Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward and Senate President Jake Corman were more direct. In a joint statement, they wrote, “This decision by the people is not about taking power away from any one branch of government. It’s about re-establishing the balance of power between three equal branches of government as guaranteed by the constitution.”
Gov. Wolf, unsurprisingly, vehemently opposed these amendments. According to The Morning Call, the governor said in January that “Republicans were injecting partisan politics into emergency disaster response in a ‘thinly veiled power grab.’ Just last week, he warned that the provisions were a threat to a functioning society that must respond to increasingly complicated disasters.”
A thinly veiled power grab? I’m practically speechless. What stunning hypocrisy coming from a man who used the COVID-19 pandemic to trample all over his constituents’ rights by shutting down businesses, halting participation in high school sports, closing schools and mandating mask-wearing outside the home.
Anyway, the governor held a news conference on Wednesday in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. He said he’d spoken to leaders of both parties in the legislature to discuss “a path forward,” the Morning Call reported.
“We’re starting that conversation. You can’t just flick a switch and make the change,” he told reporters. “But the voters have spoken, and we’re going to do what I think the voters expect us to do and make the best of it.”
WHYY reported the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency expressed its disappointment with the election results in a statement which read, “The constitutional amendments have the potential to politicize future disasters and their management. PEMA always stands ready to respond to any situation but we’re extremely disappointed that our efforts, and the efforts of our other state agencies, could be constrained by partisan politics, which has no place in emergency response efforts.”
The passage of these amendments was a victory for those with whom the principles of liberty and freedom still have meaning. In an email provided to The Western Journal, Commonwealth Foundation President and CEO Charles Mitchell reacted to the passage of these amendments with tremendous joy and relief. He called Tuesday a “momentous day in the history of Pennsylvania and the United States” and wrote that “voters have defended some of our most important founding principles, including the separation of powers between branches of government and the fundamental importance of each citizen’s liberty.”
Many governors “saw their emergency powers laws as a vehicle for them to act in contradiction to their own state constitutions and the U.S. Constitution for as long as they’d like.” Most of us would agree with that statement.
Mitchell quoted James Madison in Federalist Paper No. 51: “But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department, the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others … it may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.”
“Two hundred and thirty-three years after Madison wrote that statement, voters in Pennsylvania reaffirmed its truth,” Mitchell concluded.
Elizabeth is a contract writer at The Western Journal. Her articles have appeared on many conservative websites including RedState, Newsmax, The Federalist, Bongino.com, HotAir, Instapundit, MSN and RealClearPolitics. Please visit Elizabeth’s new conservative blog: TheAmericanCrisis.org
Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas responded to MSNBC host Joy Reid’s racist remarks against him by questioning why the network permitted her to get away with it and saying that comments of the like were leading Hispanics to turn their back on the Democratic Party.
On Tuesday, Reid discussed the Texas senator with guests Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California and NAACP legal counsel Janai Nelson, and made a reference to the movie “Django Unchained” — comparing Cruz to a traitorous house slave in the film for not supporting the For the People Act, which aims at altering voting processes across the country.
Cruz’s rebuttal was swift, calling out the host of the MSNBC segment “The Reid Out” for “using overt racial slurs” to make assumptions concerning how Hispanic-Americans should vote.
“I appreciate MSNBC lecturing me on how people of ‘my race’ are supposed to vote,” Cruz tweeted on Wednesday. “This arrogant condescension is a big reason Hispanic voters are moving right in large numbers.
“Also, why is MSNBC ok with their hosts using overt racial slurs (‘Stephen from Django’)?”
Cruz called the For the People Act, officially known as House Resolution 1, “Jim Crow 2.0” — a reference to President Joe Biden’s remarks about Georgia’s new voting law, which the president called “Jim Crow in the 21st Century.”
“Jim Crow laws were bigoted, racist, and disenfranchised millions of people,”Cruz said in a Tuesday tweet. “Those laws were drafted by Democrats and implemented by Democrats to keep Democrats in power. Today, Democrats are doing it again. The Corrupt Politicians Act is Jim Crow 2.0.”
Reid was highly critical of Cruz and the GOP after his comment, alleging that the Republican Party was attempting voter suppression in his state of Texas.
“Ted Cruz says a lot of stupid things,” Reid said Tuesday. “He does a lot of stupid things. But I personally — as a person of color, as a black person — am beyond offended that he would dare use the word ‘Jim Crow’ when his party is literally a ‘Jim Crow’ party at this point, trying to suppress the votes of people, including in his home state.”
She later called Cruz “Stephen from Django Unchained.”
Reid continued with attacks on the Texas senator, saying that he “could give a d**n about Jim Crow,” and that he has “never raised once concern ever in his entire life … about Jim Crow or racism or discrimination.”
WARNING: The following video contains vulgar language that some viewers will find offensive.
Reid suggested Cruz was a traitor to Hispanics and defended HR 1, saying that if it fails to pass, America may never see free and fair elections again.
Republicans, however, have said that the act threatens election integrity and the rights of states.
“The legislation would strip states of their constitutional authority to run elections and allow the federal government to decree what’s best,” Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said in a Fox News Op-Ed.
“It would ban voter ID laws, which maintain the integrity of elections in my state and a majority of others … To put it simply: states don’t need Washington, D.C., to strip them of their authority and impose burdensome requirements to fix problems that do not exist,” Moore said.
Reid has made racist comments about Republicans in the past. She has made an “Uncle Tom” reference, alluding to the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel, about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whom she called “Uncle Clarence.” She has also called Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina the token black person in the Republican Party.
As the courts have become hyper-politicized over the past few decades, the judicial nomination process has deteriorated. With this presidential term drawing to a close, we should note the new depths of obstruction that have become a part of the Senate Democrats’ playbook these past four years.
Origins of Obstruction
Matters were already bad when a Democratic Senate rejected Robert Bork for the Supreme Court in 1987 with such notorious vilification that “bork” was added to the dictionary as a verb denoting such unfair and harsh tactics. Four years later came personal vilification for Clarence Thomas before he squeaked by the Senate on a 52–48 vote.
Thomas nonetheless made it through a Democratic Senate that had not entirely shaken a long tradition of bipartisanship on judicial nominations. In fact, from the government’s establishment in 1789 through 2000, 97 percent of Senate-approved judges faced no recorded opposition, and 96 percent were confirmed by voice vote or unanimous consent as opposed to roll-call votes.
Recorded votes tended to be lopsided. When President Bill Clinton nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer to the Supreme Court, instead of Republicans retaliating for past treatment, the nominees were confirmed respectively by margins of 96–3 and 87–9. This was despite a number of known controversial positions Ginsburg had taken during her career that Republicans chose not to highlight.
During George W. Bush’s administration, Democrats engaged in wholesale filibusters of circuit court nominees, a tactic that resulted in the defeat of several. Previously, only one judicial nomination fell apart after coming up short on a vote on cloture — the procedure by which senators, with a supermajority vote, could end debate and force a confirmation vote. That was the fate of Justice Abe Fortas, whom Lyndon B. Johnson tried to elevate to chief justice in 1968.
Whether Fortas could garner the simple majority of senators required for confirmation was unclear. His unusual case included bipartisan opposition and ethical questions — he actually resigned from the Supreme Court the following year — and did not leave even the most strident opponents of Bork and Thomas with a sense that they had the filibuster in their procedural toolbox.
In 2005, early in Bush’s second term, Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist proposed to change the supermajority requirement for cloture on nominations (then at 60 votes) to a simple majority, an idea known as the “nuclear option,” which would have effectively ended judicial filibusters. Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid threatened to retaliate with an unprecedented level of obstructionism that would freeze most Senate business. This scenario did not play out after a compromise, engineered by the “Gang of 14,” derailed any change to cloture.
Eight years later, however, Reid was majority leader, and with the shoe on the other foot, he orchestrated by parliamentary maneuver the very rule change that had once evoked his threats of senatorial Armageddon, essentially ending the filibuster for all nominations other than for the Supreme Court in 2013.
Unprecedented Partisanship During the Trump Era
Gorsuch Filibuster
That exception for filibusters on Supreme Court nominations was quickly put to the test after Donald Trump became president in 2017 and Democrats launched a filibuster of the new president’s first judicial nominee to reach the floor, Neil Gorsuch. Thanks to Reid’s handiwork in 2013, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell garnered support for adding Supreme Court nominations to the others that were subject to simple majorities to invoke cloture.
Abuse of Cloture Motions
Although Democrats were in the minority in the Senate throughout Trump’s term, they used the tools in their arsenal more than any Senate minority before them. While the simple majority threshold made it easier than before to invoke cloture, even when a cloture motion succeeded, a confirmation vote was not immediate but subject to a limit of 30 hours of further consideration.
That time notoriously went by with little-to-no actual debate on the nomination at issue, but of course, actual deliberation was not the goal. By forcing votes on cloture, Democrats could take up more of the Senate’s time and make it that much more difficult to process nominations, not to mention other business.
This the Democratic minority did indiscriminately. All three of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees — Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — were subjected to cloture votes. Adding Samuel Alito (a George W. Bush appointee) to those three, four of the six sitting Republican-appointed justices have faced cloture votes, in contrast to all four of the justices nominated by Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Senate Democrats have also regularly forced cloture votes for even noncontroversial nominees to circuit courts, district courts, and even the non-life-tenured courts of federal claims. Eight district court nominees who had previously been nominated by Obama before Trump renominated them were subjected to cloture votes despite a lack of meaningful opposition; five of them received between 95 and 100 votes for confirmation and zero against, and another was confirmed by a voice vote.
It was only after the cloture rule was broadened in 1949, during Harry Truman’s presidency, to cover any pending matter that nominations could be subject to a cloture motion. Since then, there were a total of 136 cloture votes on judicial nominees through the end of the Obama administration. Trump’s nominees have considerably more than that entire total, at 192 and counting.
The Disintegration of Bipartisanship
The bipartisanship that used to attend most judicial nominations is also falling apart. According to the Heritage Foundation, more confirmed judges received more than 30 percent opposition votes during the Trump administration than during all previous administrations combined, from George Washington to Obama. Moreover, the majority of negative votes cast against judicial nominees in American history were against Trump nominees.
The three Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices were confirmed with almost total Democratic opposition. Only three Democrats voted to confirm Gorsuch, one to confirm Kavanaugh, and none to confirm Barrett, making her the first Supreme Court nominee to be confirmed without any votes from a major minority party since 1869.
In Kavanaugh’s case, Democrats employed kitchen-sink tactics of obstruction that included repeated interruptions during his hearings and deluging him with more written questions for the record than the combined number of such questions to prior Supreme Court nominees in American history. All other tactics were eclipsed by the disgraceful last-minute attempt to destroy Kavanaugh, when Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual-assault allegation, after being buried for six weeks by ranking member Sen. Dianne Feinstein, was sprung on the committee after the initial hearings, a desperate tactic that flouted the process for handling sensitive matters.
Weaponization of the Blue Slip
On top of everything else, Democrats tried, in the words of long-serving Senate Judiciary Committee member (and former chairman) Orrin Hatch, to “weaponize the blue slip” tradition for circuit and district courts. That was the courtesy established in approximately 1917 in which a nominee’s home-state senators receive blue pieces of paper on which they could express their views about the nomination to the committee. It was a tradition (as opposed to a rule) intended to encourage pre-nomination consultation, but Democrats during this administration routinely withheld positive blue slips, especially for circuit nominees, as a workaround in the absence of a true filibuster.
“Today, Democrats are trying to turn the blue-slip process into a de facto filibuster,” Hatch charged in 2017. “They want a single senator to be able to do in the Judiciary Committee what it once took 41 senators to do on the Senate floor.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley, who chaired the committee during the first two years of the Trump administration, noted that only two of 19 Judiciary Committee chairmen who served over the span of a century treated the blue slip as a strict veto that would preclude a hearing in the absence of two positive blue slips, and he was not going to allow Democratic obstructionism to prevent him from proceeding with hearings for circuit nominees. Still, the blue slip has impeded the advancement of district court nominations through committee, and many trial court judgeships in states with Democratic senators remain vacant due to the withholding of blue slips or the threat of doing so.
It is thanks to current Republican leadership in the Senate and specifically the Judiciary Committee that so many nominees have been processed and made their way to confirmation. As the repeated operation of the 30-hour rule took its toll on nominations, McConnell garnered a majority to reduce the post-cloture clock to two hours for district court nominations.
To date, the Senate has confirmed 229 Article III (life-tenured) judges nominated by Trump. That total includes 53 circuit court judges, which ranks second among all four-year presidential terms to that of Jimmy Carter, who, boosted by the creation of 35 new seats on the courts of appeals in 1978, holds the record at 56. For several months this year, there was no room for Trump to increase his appointments to the courts of appeals because every vacancy had been filled.
Historical Support for Lame-Duck Confirmations
There are now two more appellate nominees, Thomas L. Kirsch II for Barrett’s former seat on the Seventh Circuit and Raúl M. Arias-Marxuach to fill the First Circuit vacancy created by the death of Juan Torruella on Oct. 26. There is no reason they cannot be confirmed before Inauguration Day. Kirsch already had his hearing before the Judiciary Committee, as have 11 pending nominees to district or federal claims courts.
While any nomination that is not processed by Jan. 3, the end of the current congressional term and beginning of the next, is automatically returned to the president, it can be resubmitted and processed without the need for a new hearing. There is ample precedent for lame-duck judicial confirmations, from John Adams’ appointment of John Marshall as chief justice after his re-election defeat, to Carter’s appointment of Breyer to the First Circuit after his loss to Ronald Reagan.
There is an unmistakable dissonance between Joe Biden’s calls for national unity and his party’s judicial obstructionism over the past four years. As a Judiciary Committee chairman, Biden helped to lay much of the groundwork for this sorry state of affairs. For his Democratic successors in the Senate, obstructionism is an ongoing project that seems to find no limit.
Consider the exception that proved the rule: When leftist interest groups criticized Feinstein after she praised Graham’s handling of Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination hearings and gave the chairman a hug — never mind that every Democrat voted against the nominee — Feinstein’s party compelled her to step down as the Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat. Is there any level of malevolence toward judicial nominations that would satisfy today’s Democratic leadership?
Frank Scaturro served as counsel for the Constitution on the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee between 2005 and 2009, in which capacity he worked on the nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court and Neil Gorsuch to the Tenth Circuit. He is the author of, among other titles, “The Supreme Court’s Retreat from Reconstruction” (Greenwood Press, 2000). Follow him on Twitter at @FrankScaturro.
Fraud represents only one aspect of concern over the results from last week’s election. Of equal import when judging the legitimacy of the next president of the United States is whether states complied with the election rules established by their legislatures. These are not questions of mere “technical errors,” but raise significant constitutional concerns.
On Wednesday, Jim Geraghty of National Review tweeted his “Morning Jolt” summary of post-election lawsuits. “The Trump campaign,” Geraghty stressed, “conceded in oral arguments they were not contending fraud or improper influence, merely technical errors,” he wrote of a recent election case. Geraghty’s article, linked in his tweet, continued: “It is one thing to fume on Twitter that there is a sinister effort to steal an election; it is another thing to assert that sweeping claim in a court of law, before a judge, under penalty of perjury and/or disbarment.”
Not to pick on Geraghty, whom I respect immensely, but he is conflating two separate issues: fraud and violations of the election code. Those are two distinct problems, yet there has been little analysis of the latter, which over the next several weeks might prove more significant.
There are multiple allegations of fraud, such as the middle-of-the-night arrival of unsecured ballots in Detroit or the dead man voting in Nevada. Then there’s the even more devastating suggestion that votes for Donald Trump were swapped to Joe Biden via vulnerable computer systems. Frankly, this idea strikes me as unbelievable, but then again, so did the idea that the FBI would obtain illegal secret court warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, and we know how that turned out.
Election Code Violations Might as Well Be ‘Fraud’
Violations of the election code, however, are a different matter, and unfortunately, sometimes the public views election officials’ bending of the rules as a harmless ignoring of technicalities. As the attorney in the Montgomery County Board of Elections case noted after “conceding” he was not alleging fraud: “The election code is technical.”
That makes technical violations constitutionally significant because Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 grants state legislatures the ultimate authority to appoint the electors who choose the president: “Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.”
In Bush v. Gore, former Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist stressed the significance of this constitutional provision in a concurrence joined by Justice Clarence Thomas and former Justice Antonin Scalia. As Rehnquist wrote, that clause “convey[s] the broadest power of determination” and “leaves it to the legislature exclusively to define the method” of appointment of electors. Furthermore, “a significant departure from the legislative scheme for appointing Presidential electors presents a federal constitutional question.”
The three concurring justices in Bush v. Gore concluded that the Florida Supreme Court’s order directing election officials to count improperly marked ballots was a “significant departure from the legislative scheme,” and “in a Presidential election the clearly expressed intent of the legislature must prevail.” Accordingly, those justices would have declared the Florida recount unconstitutional under Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2.
While the concurrence in Bush v. Gore failed to garner support by a majority of the justices, the Supreme Court’s composition has changed dramatically since then, and the reasoning of this concurrence provides a strong basis to view deviations from the technicalities of the election code as unconstitutional. As Rehnquist stressed, “[I]n a Presidential election the clearly expressed intent of the legislature must prevail.”
So, if the legislative branch mandates voter signatures, or verification of signatures, or internal secrecy sleeves, or counting only in the presences of poll-watchers from each party, it is no answer to say it is a technicality and not fraud at issue. The state legislatures, through the election code, define the validity of votes, and allowing state officials or courts to read those provisions out of the law raises serious questions under Article 2 of the Constitution.
Ignoring the Election Code Denies Equal Protection
Allowing state officials to fudge on the mandates of the election code raises a second significant constitutional issue, this one under the Equal Protection Clause, which served as the basis for the majority opinion in Bush v. Gore. The majority in Bush v. Gore held that the varying standards violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, reasoning: “The right to vote is protected in more than the initial allocation of the franchise. Equal protection applies as well to the manner of its exercise. Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of another.”
When state officials ignore the technicalities of the election code, however, it virtually guarantees voters will be denied equal treatment. The proof is in Pennsylvania. There, for instance, even though the election code prohibited inspecting ballots before Election Day, some county officials — those in larger counties with access to mail-sorting machines that could weigh ballots — weighed the ballots to determine if the voter failed to include the required inner secrecy sleeve.
Then those officials, again contrary to the election code, provided information to representatives of the Democratic Party so they could identify the voters whose ballots would be canceled. Voters whose election officials abided by the technicalities of the election code, however, did not receive that notice nor the opportunity to “cure” their ballot.
Now thanks to the unprecedented push toward mail-in voting over the last year, we are seeing this same pattern repeat itself throughout the country. Some election officials bent (or broke) the rules the legislative branch had set, while others followed the letter of the law. As a result, voters in different counties in the same state were treated disparately and on an arbitrary basis. Unlike the situation in Bush v. Gore, however, it is not the state courts altering the plain language of the election code, but secretaries of state or local election officials.
The majority in Bush v. Gore recognized the rightful place of election officials to interpret and apply the rules established by the legislative branch. This difference provides some leeway to states, which through interpretative guidance tweak the technicalities of the election code. But as in other areas of the law, such interpretations must be reasonable and must not violate the clearly expressed intent of the legislature.
The Supreme Court will likely decide where that line will be drawn in the coming days.
Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. Cleveland served nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk to a federal appellate judge and is a former full-time faculty member and adjunct instructor at the college of business at the University of Notre Dame. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
As arguments about voter fraud have escalated across the country, it’s time to recognize that despite what an unmitigated disaster widespread expansion of absentee balloting has been, concerns about its abuse aren’t the most important argument in the ongoing fight over the legitimacy of this election. Sure, the media and Big Tech’s widespread white-washing and censoring of very real voter fraud concerns are damaging to the social fabric in existential ways, just as ignoring norms (and in some cases laws) requiring transparency destroys public trust and confidence in the outcome.
The Pennsylvania lawsuit isn’t yet proof that election-altering fraud occurred, although it does present compelling evidence that if proved shatters the media narrative on election security. A closer look at the allegations of direct fraud weighed against the likelihood of proving that enough occurred to alter the outcome — on a shortened timeline — reveals a daunting task for the president’s legal team.
President Trump’s lawyers, however, aren’t making the same argument as your uncle on Facebook; they’re playing for keeps. Some Republicans have been content to publicly call for the “process to play out” while privately predicting losses or maybe a few favorable rulings on some esoteric technicalities. But the president is not tired of winning yet.
Shortly after the filing, Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to the Trump campaign, put it succinctly: “Pennsylvania is irredeemably compromised.”
The thrust of their legal argument doesn’t hinge on the numbers of fraudulent ballots cast, but on the inconsistent and illegal application of Pennsylvania election law, which dilutes legally cast votes — so-called disparate treatment, from which the U.S. Constitution is supposed to protect us.
The other key legal argument is that those changes in the election law, which were implemented by an unelected appointee of Pennsylvania’s executive branch, namely Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar, were an impermissible usurpation of the legislature’s prerogative even if Pennsylvania’s judicial branch approved them.
Bush v. Gore Already Wrestled with These Concerns
Underlying the president’s legal argument is the recognition that the Pennsylvania legislature implemented an imperfect regime that rationally valued security of the election as more important than avoiding disenfranchising any voters. Even amid a pandemic, the Pennsylvania legislature understood that their expansion of ballot-by-mail increased risks to election security, and thus sought to mitigate that as best they could. It was partisan state courts that unilaterally overrode those determinations in the middle of a presidential campaign in an unconstitutional way.
The discussion about what types of fraud, and how much, is important because it goes to the very heart of election integrity, and our system cannot stand without trust in the outcome. That argument, however, won’t decide the Pennsylvania case from a legal standpoint. It will come down to whether a ministerial appointee of Pennsylvania’s executive branch can work with Pennsylvania’s judicial branch to subvert the expressed will of the legislature, and hastily put in place an election process wherein citizens who chose to vote differently had their votes disparately treated.
Recall that in 2000, the legal argument that eventually carried the day was equal-protection grounds; by implementing different methods for recounts and different scrutiny for different counties, voters were receiving unequal treatment. The Supreme Court held 7-2 that “Upon due consideration of the difficulties identified to this point, it is obvious that the recount cannot be conducted in compliance with the requirements of equal protection and due process without substantial additional work.”
Twenty years is a long time as far as the public attention span goes, and most have allowed the “selected not elected” mantra to pervade our consciousness. Contra the prevailing narrative, however, Justices William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas framed their decision as one of judicial restraint that saw a key part of the court’s role was in protecting the Florida legislature from impermissible interference by the Florida courts:
In most cases, comity and respect for federalism compel us to defer to the decisions of state courts on issues of state law. That practice reflects our understanding that the decisions of state courts are definitive pronouncements of the will of the States as sovereigns. Of course, in ordinary cases, the distribution of powers among the branches of a State’s government raises no questions of federal constitutional law, subject to the requirement that the government be republican in character. But there are a few exceptional cases in which the Constitution imposes a duty or confers a power on a particular branch of a State’s government. This is one of them. … Thus, the text of the election law itself, and not just its interpretation by the courts of the States, takes on independent significance.
A significant departure from the legislative scheme for appointing Presidential electors presents a federal constitutional question.
If we are to respect the legislature’s Article II powers, therefore, we must ensure that postelection state-court actions do not frustrate the legislative desire to attain the ‘safe harbor’ provided by §5. (Rehnquist concurring, but writing separately; Citations and dicta omitted)
Admittedly, this “Article II view” was a more expansive view on why the ongoing Florida recount was suspect than the Supreme Court ultimately held, but clearly, at least three justices believed that the courts — even state courts, which usually receive great deference to interpreting state law — don’t have a right to tweak the express will of the state legislature about presidential electors.
To be sure, the equal-protection claims also present differently, so they aren’t a slam-dunk here, and the Rehnquist concurrence isn’t controlling precedent (two of the three justices who signed on to the opinion are no longer on the court), so it might not carry the day.
Three of the young lawyers on the Bush team advocating this view of the law in 2000 have received pretty notable promotions since that time, however, and three other guys likely to have a say have signaled their belief in exactly this interpretation, stating recently, “The provisions of the Federal Constitution conferring on state legislatures, not state courts, the authority to make rules governing federal elections would be meaningless if a state court could override the rules adopted by the legislature simply by claiming that a state constitutional provision gave the courts the authority to make whatever rules it thought appropriate for the conduct of a fair election.”
It’s anyone’s guess how the Supreme Court would rule if it gets to that point, but when three current justices (Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch) have signaled they’re sympathetic to the basic legal argument, and three other justices (John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) were part of the team that advanced very similar legal arguments in Bush v. Gore, the president and his team must like their chances.
The Changes Disproportionately Helped Biden
Pundits and some Trump supporters have engaged in navel-gazing and resigned themselves to the line of reasoning that “maybe Trump shouldn’t have down-talked absentee voting.” We know in addition to increased risk of fraud, however, voters who cast absentee ballots have historically had a significantly greater likelihood of being disenfranchised than in-person voters.
For Trump to push his supporters to vote in ways that were more likely to count isn’t irrational. It instead raises the question of why former Vice President Joe Biden wasn’t concerned with his voters being disenfranchised if they voted absentee, given the historical risks.
Both the potential for fraud and increased probability of disenfranchising voters sound intuitively like things we should fix, but the Pennsylvania legislature didn’t. They saw fit to keep the bar high to offset the risk of fraud and associated effects to public confidence in the election that unrestricted mail balloting would cause.
There’s a rational basis for that, and the entire saga has played out nationally. With the non-legislative changes, absentee voters were significantly less likely to be disenfranchised than before — indeed, Boockvar’s unilateral changes in Pennsylvania removed nearly every barrier the duly elected state legislature had put in place.
This created an environment where the constitutional guarantee of one person, one vote was tilted significantly in the direction of a voting modality (mail balloting versus in-person balloting). Not only was this ripe for greater abuse, but that tilting of the playing field disproportionately benefited the voters of one presidential candidate. Making this even more obvious are new revelations that show how the larger Democratic strongholds were equipped to quickly pre-sort potentially invalid ballots, and Democratic operatives were gearing up to capitalize on the eventual changes to the statutory pre-canvass period before Boockvar’s office even announced them.
What if the Supreme Court Invalidates a State’s Election
For conservatives, an intellectual challenge now presents itself: If you were OK with the Supreme Court stopping the Florida recount in 2000, you need to prepare yourself to be comfortable with the same court invalidating the Pennsylvania electors. Indeed, you should want them to, whether or not there was underlying direct fraud sufficient enough to affect the outcome. Alternatively, you should start working on your tortuous rationale for why, on constitutional grounds, what was legitimate in 2000 is not legitimate in 2020.
Whether you’re persuaded by the equal protection reasoning in the Bush v. Gore holding or in the minority’s separate concurrence emphasizing the plenary powers of the Pennsylvania legislature under Article II, Section 1, Clause 2, if the case makes it to the Supreme Court it won’t hinge on some threshold level of fraud that tipped the scales against Trump, nor will it be about the raw power of a conservative court to hand the election to Trump (which will certainly be the media narrative if it gets to that point). It will be, and always has been, about the rule of law.
Where the actual fraud becomes important — an actual measure of it, and whether it delivered an illegitimate win to Biden — is in how the Pennsylvania legislature, and potentially Congress, should react to the Court prohibiting the certification of the November election with respect to presidential electors. There is nothing wrong or abhorrent to our constitutional system if the elected representatives of the citizens of Pennsylvania are required to weigh in and clean this up on behalf of their voters. They need to be prepared to make their case to their voters if the predominant media narrative remains that the fraud wasn’t significant enough to affect the election outcome in Pennsylvania.
Regardless of how the Pennsylvania case gets resolved, it won’t change the overall outcome on its own. The 20 electoral votes wouldn’t be enough to swing the election to Trump if existing media projections for Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan stay in Biden’s column. If any of those changes, whether through ongoing canvassing efforts or other simultaneous legal challenges — such as the president’s filing Wednesday in Michigan making similar constitutional claims — well, Katy, bar the door.
Our way of government is strong enough to endure this. The only way through is through.
For nearly twenty years, Matt Beebe served as a countermeasures engineer in the Air Force and a contractor in the intelligence community before launching an IT and computer security firm in San Antonio, Texas. He is active in Texas politics and can be found on Twitter @theMattBeebe.
President Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate have taken the reliably liberal 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and tilted it to the Right. The 9th Circuit is the largest circuit court, covering many of the West Coast states, including California, Hawaii, and Arizona. The court just received its 10th judge from the Trump administration, effectively changing the court’s liberal makeup into a more ideologically diverse lineup. In just three years, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Trump joined forces to place more justices to lifetime appointments on the 9th Circuit than President Barack Obama did in his eight years in office.
One judge from the circuit said the rapid influx of Trump appointees had been jarring, telling the Los Angeles Times, “Ten new people at once sends a shock wave through the system.”
Many of Trump’s appointments have been praised by their peers on the 9th Circuit, but others appear to be rattled. For instance, Judge Daniel Collins has been criticized for his “combative” objections to other judges on the circuit.
“Collins has definitely bulldozed his way around here already in a short time,”one judge from the 9th Circuit said. “Either he doesn’t care or doesn’t realize that he has offended half the court already.”
Democratic-appointed judges still hold a slight majority in the circuit, with 16 appointees compared with 13 Republican appointees, but 9th Circuit Judge Milan Smith Jr., an appointee of George W. Bush, said Trump’s judicial picks were about to take over.
“Trump has effectively flipped the circuit,” Smith said. “You will see a sea change in the 9th Circuit on day-to-day decisions.”
Democratic appointees have controlled the 9th Circuit Court since 1978, when federal law changed to add 10 seats to the court, allowing President Jimmy Carter to select every judge to fill the openings. President Ronald Reagan got only three nominations on the circuit, and appointees from President Bill Clinton and Obama built out the rest of the former liberal stronghold.
Because the court was reliably liberal, it was often the go-to court to challenge Trump’s policies, often forcing a review from the Supreme Court. In the early days of Trump’s presidency, the 9th Circuit struck down his “travel ban” from several Muslim-majority countries and deemed many of his immigration policies unconstitutional. The Supreme Court overturned many of the rulings from the 9th Circuit. Still, delays caused by the lower courts can hinder the president’s policies from moving forward when he wants them to begin.
In total, Trump has appointed 51 circuit court judges to lifetime appointments alongside the two justices he landed on the Supreme Court. McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, has joked that his motto while leading the GOP majority in the Senate is to “leave no vacancy behind.”
House Democrats are not letting the conclusions of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report impede them from further investigations of President Donald Trump. “We’re going to move forward with our investigations of obstruction of justice, abuses of power, corruption, to defend the rule of law, which is our job,”House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, said Sunday, according to Bloomberg.
Nadler insisted his wide-ranging probe, which he has already begun, is not a rehash of the Mueller report.
“It’s a broader mandate than the special prosecutor had,” he said.
Mueller was initially charged with investigating allegations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia in 2016. As noted by Attorney General William Barr in a note to Congress, those allegations have been proven false.
“The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 US Presidential Election,”Barr said in a letter to Congress.
But Nadler is now digging into the gray area in the Mueller report — whether Trump obstructed justice.
Barr’s letter said the report “leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as ‘difficult issues’ of law and fact concerning whether the President’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction. The Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.’”
Nadler said that he wants to put Barr in the hot seat to determine how Barr decided not to pursue an obstruction case against Trump.
“Attorney General Barr, who auditioned for his role with a memo saying that it was almost impossible for any president to commit obstruction, made a decision in under 48 hours,” Nadler said Sunday, according to CBS.
He referenced a 2018 memo Barr wrote that said “Mueller’s obstruction theory is fatally misconceived” and based “on a novel and insupportable reading of the law.”
Mueller said Barr needs to better explain himself.
“Given what Barr found on obstruction of justice, I think all of us should be very concerned about the even-handedness,” Nadler said Monday. “The American public needs to know how exactly did he conclude there is no obstruction of justice.”
Nadler issued a statement co-authored with fellow Democrats House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff of California and House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings of Maryland that gave Barr a zinger for not charging Trump.
“It is unacceptable that, after Special Counsel Mueller spent 22 months meticulously uncovering this evidence, Attorney General Barr made a decision not to charge the President in under 48 hours. The Attorney General did so without even interviewing the President. His unsolicited, open memorandum to the Department of Justice, suggesting that the obstruction investigation was ‘fatally misconceived,’ calls into question his objectivity on this point in particular,”the statement said.
The three Democrats maligned Barr’s impartiality.
“The only information the Congress and the American people have received regarding this investigation is the Attorney General’s own work product,” the chairmen said.
“The Special Counsel’s Report should be allowed to speak for itself, and Congress must have the opportunity to evaluate the underlying evidence,” the statement said.
It is unclear yet whether the full Mueller report will ever be released. Both Trump and his Democratic critics, however, have said it should be released in full.
Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
LifeNews.com Pro-Life News Report Monday, January 14, 2019
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Top Stories •Judge Forces Little Sisters of the Poor and Christian Groups to Fund Abortions •Pro-Life Advocate Brutally Assaulted for Telling Man “Jesus Loves You” •Andrew Cuomo’s Bill Allowing Abortion Up to Birth Could Make being Pro-Life a Crime •Poll: 70% of Millennials Support Abortion Limits, Only 7% Back Democrats’ Pro-Abortion Platform
More Pro-Life News •Youngest Black Legislator in America is 19 and Pro-Life •35 Senators File Bill to Permanently Ban Taxpayer Funding of Abortions • Trailer Released for New Roe v. Wade Movie: The Story of What Really Happened •Pro-Life Vice President Mike Pence to Address 37th Annual March for Life Rose Dinner • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
A group of charitable nuns will be forced pay for drugs that may cause abortions in their employee health plans as a result of a federal judge’s ruling Sunday.Click to Read at LifeNews.com
A Texas pro-life advocate was brutally assaulted Friday outside a Fort Worth abortion facility, according to a video that captured the incident on film.Click to Read at LifeNews.com.
A new national poll of millenials finds a very large majority of young Americans oppose unlimited abortions and disagree with the Democrat Party’s platform, which supports abortion up to birth and paid for at taxpayer expense.
Learn the messages and prophecies. Our Lady: “Communion in the Hand is a sacrilege.” For a free rose petal blessed by Jesus and Mary with powers of cure and conversion, contact:
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The West Virginia House of Delegates convened Wednesday with a record-setter in its midst — freshman Del. Caleb L. Hanna, who became the nation’s youngest black legislator following his election at age 19 in November 2018.
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
In this Oct. 7, 2008, file photo, Jerome Corsi, right, arrives at the immigration department in Nairobi, Kenya. (AP Photo)
Conservative author Jerome Corsi filed a “criminal and ethics” complaint against special counsel Robert Mueller on Monday, alleging his team threatened prosecution if Corsi refused to provide false testimony against Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Fox News reported the 78-page complaint, filed with the Department of Justice and the DOJ’s inspector general, stated “Dr. Corsi has been criminally threatened and coerced to tell a lie and call it the truth.”
The filing also calls for the removal of Mueller and his prosecutors for their misconduct.
“Special Counsel Mueller and his prosecutorial staff should respectfully be removed from his office and their practice of the law and a new Special Counsel appointed who respects and will obey common and accepted norms of professional ethics and the law and who will promptly conclude the so-called Russian collusion investigation which had been illegally and criminally spinning out of control,” the document reads.
According to his complaint, Mueller’s team wanted Corsi to testify to acting as a liaison between Trump campaign associate Roger Stone and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange regarding the release of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee. The filing reads that Mueller’s office “knowingly and deceitfully threatening to charge Dr. Corsi with an alleged false statement,” unless he gives them “false testimony”against Trump and others.
Corsi announced last week on multiple media outlets that he would not sign Mueller’s agreement calling for him to plead guilty to one count of perjury.
“They can put me in prison the rest of my life. I am not going to sign a lie,”the 72-year-old told CNN.
According to a court filing by Mueller’s team, Corsi wrote in a short email to Stone in July 2016, “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.”
“Time to let more than (Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta) to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to drop HRC (Hillary Rodham Clinton),” “The Obama Nation” author added. “That appears to be the game hackers are now about.”
Corsi explained to Fox News host Tucker Carlson last week that he had fully cooperated with Mueller’s investigators, turning over his computer and cellphone, but he initially forgot about the email, until it was brought to his attention. He amended his statement to Mueller’s team in September, which they accepted without complaint, but prosecutors changed their tune after they determined, he “could not give them what they wanted,” according to Corsi.
“They do this what I call a perjury trap,” Corsi told Carlson. “They ask you a question. They have material they won’t show you. You’ve forgotten about. They say, ‘You’ve just lied,’ because this email you’ve forgotten about 2016 proves your current memory is wrong. It’s a memory test.”
In a statement on Monday, his attorney Larry Klayman charged Mueller with “effectively seeking to overthrow a duly elected president” through coercing false testimony.
“This rogue government tyranny perpetrated by a Special Counsel and his prosecutorial staff, which is designed to effectively overthrow a duly elected president by coercing and extorting false testimony from Dr. Corsi and others, cannot be permitted in a civilized society,”he said.
Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz argued last week that Mueller’s probe is creating crimes rather than uncovering past ones, and that the “devastating” report against Trump he will write will be based on people “who have lied.”
“Virtually all of his indictments and pleas come from people who he got to lie in front of investigators by setting perjury traps for them,”Dershowitz told Fox News host Sean Hannity. He added, “(A)nd the other ones have to do with financial dealings unrelated to the president. Where’s the beef? Where’s the crime?”
Randy DeSoto is a graduate of West Point and Regent University School of Law. He is the author of the book “We Hold These Truths” and screenwriter of the political documentary “I Want Your Money.”
Dr. Brenda Snipes, Broward County Supervisor of Elections, left, looks on with an unidentified elections official during a canvassing board meeting on November 10, 2018 in Lauderhill, Florida. Three close midtern election races for governor, senator, and agriculture commissioner are expected to be recounted in Florida. (Photo by Joe Skipper / Getty Images)
As both parties scrutinize the vote count in Florida’s Broward County, with the state’s gubernatorial and senatorial races closing in on a tie, Sen. Marco Rubio said the county’s elections office has a history of malfeasance.
“This is at a minimum a pattern of incompetence. Voters deserve better,” the Florida Republican said Thursday on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
“This is not even a partisan thing. This is a county that apparently cannot even count votes as well as a county that just got wiped out by a hurricane.”
The state’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott filed a lawsuit Thursday against Broward election supervisor Brenda Snipes for allegedly refusing to tell them about votes she has not yet counted. The vote totals Snipes tabulated two days after the election would have readers believe thatmore people cast votes for agricultural commissioner than for U.S. Senator.
Additionally, lawyer Marc Elias of Perkins Coie — who hired Fusion GPS for the Democratic National Committee to investigate Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election — has been hired to litigate a recount on behalf of Democrats.
The Republican National Committee also pointed out 12 times news stories using its own headlines where Snipes has “been outright incompetent and possibly criminal”:
Founded by Tucker Carlson, a 25-year veteran of print and broadcast media, and Neil Patel, former chief policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, The Daily Caller News Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit providing original investigative reporting from a team of professional reporters that operates for the public benefit.
The narrative that liberals have hung their hopes on to stop Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is falling apart. There are now so many holes in the story, it’s incredible Democrats are still running with it.
Christine Blasey Ford is the woman who accused Kavanaugh of drunkenly groping her at a party way back when he was 17 years old, but she has been largely unable to produce solid evidence or witnesses to back up her serious claims.
One of the only points in her favor was that she took a “lie detector” polygraph test, which was widely reported by the media as supporting her story by showing that she wasn’t lying.
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That is, until now. On Wednesday, the actual details from that polygraph were released to the public — and they make her already-flimsy story seem downright unbelievable.
The biggest problem with the so-called “lie detector” results are that the examinernever actually asked questions about Kavanaugh during the polygraph test.
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Bizarrely, the person conducting the polygraph — who was a third-party examiner and not a law enforcement official — had Ford scribble down her nearly 40-year-old memory of the drunken party, and then asked her two vague questions.
Those two questions were: “Is any part of your statement false?” and “Did you make up any part of your statement?”
This is absolutely important to understand: Again, the polygraph test didn’t actually ask the main accuser any questions about Kavanaugh. His name was never brought up by the interviewer. Instead, Ford was simply asked if she believed her own hand-written statement.
It gets even more strange, as nowhere in that written statement does the name “Kavanaugh” appear, either.
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And, to make matters worse, the statement from Ford that she was then asked about by the polygraph examiner directly contradicts different versions of the alleged event that the accuser has also given.
“Ford’s polygraph letter contradicts letter she sent to Feinstein,”pointed out Charles C. W. Cooke, the editor of The National Review.
“Polygraph letter says ‘4 boys and a couple of girls’ were at party. Letter to Feinstein says ‘me and four others,’”he continued. “No way to reconcile the two — irrespective of whether she’s counting herself in polygraph letter.”
It’s important to remember that fundamental facts such as how many people witnessed the alleged incident and what their genders were have been up in the air already. Even journalists from the left-leaning Washington Post are seemingly unable to keep the details straight.
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“July 30 (to Dianne Feinstein): It was me and four other people. August 7 (to polygraph examiner): There were four boys and a couple of girls. September 16 (to Washington Post reporter): There were three boys and one girl,”The Federalist co-founder Sean Davis posted to Twitter, summarizing the inconsistencies.
Here’s another huge point: The fact that Ford “passed” the polygraph based on a statement that she later herself contradicted while telling the story to other people shows how unreliable this “evidence” truly is.
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Contrary to how it’s shown in the movies, a polygraph can’t actually determine if a person is lying or not. All it can do is indicate how calm or stressed somebody is compared to a baseline. It can be used to indicate deception, but a completely delusional person can also “pass” a polygraph.
In other words, Ford may believe that something happened at a party four decades ago, and she may be confident that some version of her story is true, but the vagueness and unscientific nature of this process proves absolutely nothing. The problems with this accuser’s story don’t stop there. Buried in the release of the weak polygraph results was the fact that Ford was in Maryland — on the other side of the country from her home in California — to take that test.
But the supposed reason she couldn’t appear to testify in front of the Senate and answer questions about her accusations was that she’s afraid of confined spaces, which means she won’t travel by plane.
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“The GOP has been told that Ford does not want to fly from her California home to Washington … which means she may need to drive across the country,”reported Politico just five days ago. “Ford has reportedly told friends she is uncomfortable in confined spaces, indicating a physical difficulty in making the trip by plane.”
Yet the letter from Ford to Senator Feinstein made no mention of this difficulty, and casually mentioned that she planned to be back in California from the East Coast in less than three day’s time. It takes at least 42 hours of nonstop driving to go from Maryland, where the polygraph was administered, to Palo Alto, California, where Ford lives and teaches at a university.
This borders on being humanly impossible: Anybody who has done long road trips knows that a realistic daily limit is about ten hours of driving a day before exhaustion sets in. USA Today has recommended that people set aside between four and six days to do this arduous drive.
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When none of the details add up or pass even the most basic sniff test, something is wrong.
This entire ordeal looks increasingly like a slimy and desperate effort to delay Kavanaugh’s confirmation at any cost. But the truth always has a way of coming out, and it doesn’t even need a polygraph.
Benjamin Arie has been a political junkie since the hotly contested 2000 election. Ben settled on journalism after realizing he could get paid to rant. He cut his teeth on car accidents and house fires as a small-town reporter in Michigan before becoming a full-time political writer.
Activists attacked the Trump administration Sunday for its treatment of children who were detained at the border, based upon a picture that showed children sleeping in a cage. There was only one flaw in the tweets that called the treatment “inhumane” and laid it at the door of President Donald Trump.
The image was from an Arizona newspaper report from 2014, during the second term of former President Barack Obama, The Daily Caller reported.
Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau began the avalanche of tweets with a since-deleted comment.
“This is happening right now, and the only debate that matters is how we force our government to get these kids back to their families as fast as humanly possible,”Favreau wrote. He added a link to the image, which was part of an Arizona Republic photo gallery from 2014.
A series of tweets followed as many used the outdated image and applied it as though it was current.
“Children of immigrants are being held in cages, like dogs, at ICE detention centers, sleeping on the floor. It’s an abomination,” Shaun King tweeted.
Others followed.
Context for the picture was provided by Fox News, which noted that the picture was taken at a time when immigration officials had detained more than 1,000 children who illegally crossed America’s Southern Border. Controversy over the image reflects the debate over immigration policy that separates children from their parents.
Trump has called for changing that policy as part of broad-based immigration policy reform.
Even after the true origin of the picture was revealed, few of those who tweeted it clarified that the picture was from Obama’s days in the White House.
One who did was Jake Silverstein, editor in chief of the New York Times Magazine.
“Correction: this link, which was going around this morning, is from 2014. Still disturbing, of course, but only indirectly related to current situation. My bad (and a good reminder not to RT things while distracted w family on the weekend),”he tweeted.
Federal Judge T.S. Ellis said on Friday that Robert Mueller has exceeded his boundaries. He also gave the Justice Department two weeks to come up with an unredacted copy of Deputy AG Rosenstein’s memos authorizing the special counsel. So far the Justice Department has kept most of the memo explaining the boundaries of Mueller’s investigation under<!– AddThis Advanced Settings above via filter on wp_trim_excerpt –><!– AddThis Advanced Settings below via filter on wp_trim_excerpt –><!– AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on wp_trim_excerpt –><!– AddThis Share Buttons above via filter on wp_trim_excerpt –><!– AddThis Share Buttons below via filter on wp_trim_excerpt –>
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Federal Judge T.S. Ellis said on Friday that Robert Mueller has exceeded his boundaries.
He also gave the Justice Department two weeks to come up with an unredacted copy of Deputy AG Rosenstein’s memos authorizing the special counsel. So far the Justice Department has kept most of the memo explaining the boundaries of Mueller’s investigation under wraps.
Former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program created something of a legal limbo for a select class of illegal immigrants, shielding them from deportation without granting them legal status. Now, some of the program’s enrollees could quite literally be paying for that uncertainty.
According to The Washington Times, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that DACA recipients, also known as “dreamers,” are not eligible for the in-state tuition rates that some state colleges and universities were offering them, and instead will have to pay out-of-state rates.
That 7-0 decision upheld an earlier 3-0 state court of appeals ruling against the Maricopa Community Colleges, who had decided on their own volition to extend in-state tuition rates to DACA recipients. The ruling applies to all state colleges and public universities in Arizona.
The appeals court had ruled that both federal and state law granted that sort of decision-making power to the state’s political branches, and not the colleges or universities. At the heart of the decision was a 2006 law passed by voters known as Proposition 300, which declared that illegal immigrants were not eligible to receive state benefits, including in-state tuition rates.
“While people can disagree what the law should be, I hope we all can agree that the attorney general must enforce the law as it is, not as we want it to be,” stated Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich.
The Arizona Republic reported that an estimated 2,000 DACA recipients are currently enrolled in community colleges or state universities at in-state tuition rates, and could now find themselves being compelled to pay nearly three times as much for out-of-state rates if they wish to remain in school.
As might be expected, advocates for DACA recipients are incensed by the court’s ruling. They have claimed the decision essentially blocks access to education for dreamers by making it “impossible” for them to afford, especially when considering these particular illegal immigrants aren’t eligible for any sort of state or federal financial assistance because of their lack of legal status.
But based on a clear reading of the 2006 law, those dreamers should never have received the lower in-state tuition rates from colleges in the first place.
As Brnovich stated, “It’s about time someone held (the colleges) accountable, and that’s my job. My role as AG is to make sure you’re following the law.”
Though Brnovich did express some sympathy for the plight of the dreamers, he nevertheless pointed out that the law is the law. “What makes this country unique and great … is because the rule of law means something,”the attorney general said.
However, the Arizona Daily Sun reported that some college-aged dreamers may not ultimately find themselves having to pay the substantially higher out-of-state tuition rates thanks to something of a middle-ground solution worked out by the state university system’s Board of Regents.
That policy, put in place years ago by Regent Jay Heiler, “sets charges at 150 percent of the in-state rate for any student who graduated from an Arizona high school after attending school” in the state for at least three years, the Sun reported.
While that policy could very well be challenged through litigation, Heiler and others believe it will survive because the special rate would actually cover the costs of tuition, meaning state taxpayers would not be subsidizing or offering a “benefit” to illegal immigrants.
The Republic noted that the Arizona supreme court has only released a three-page order at this point, and won’t make the full opinion explaining the ruling public until May 14.
Whatever one may think about the state law or this court ruling, one thing that’s patently obvious is that the hap-hazard manner by which Obama devised and implemented the DACA program has once again hurt those individuals it purported to help by leaving them in a legal limbo.
The only way to truly solve the problems created by DACA is for Congress to finally agree on a permanent solution to the legal status question for DACA recipients, as President Donald Trump has repeatedly called on legislators to do.
Conservatives who were angry with President Donald Trump and Republicans with some of the expenditures approved as part of the recently signed omnibus spending bill may soon be in a slightly better mood.
Joseph Lawler of the Washington Examiner reports congressional conservatives want Trump to use the 1974 Impoundment Actto rescind some spending authorized by the $1.3 trillion government appropriations bill, and White House officials are reportedly considering doing so.
The measure referred to by the Examiner is officially known as the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. For the most part, the act established the Congressional Budget Office and gave Congress more control over the budget process.
The Impoundment Control Act allows the president to ask Congress to rescind funds that have been allocated in the budget. Congress is not required to vote on the request, but if they do agree to vote, a simple majority in both chambers is all that is needed to approve cuts the president requests.
Congress has 45 days to approve any or all rescission requests from the president.
A congressional Republican aide told the Examiner that conservatives have been lobbying for Trump to use the Impoundment Act.
“It’s a good opportunity to take advantage of a law passed decades ago and that hasn’t been used recently,” the aide said.
A spokesman for House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., confirmed to The Washington Post that McCarthy’s office is working with the Trump administration on the idea. White House legislative director Marc Short also confirmed the president is looking into requesting cuts to the budget.
“The administration is certainly looking at a rescission package, and the president takes seriously his promise to be fiscally responsible.”
The Impoundment Control Act was put in place in 1974 in response to President Richard Nixon’s practice of withholding funds for programs he opposed. Instead, the act requires any requests to withhold funding to go through Congress.
The Impoundment Control Act is considered obscure because it hasn’t been used often in recent years. The Examiner report says it was never used by Presidents Barack Obama or George W. Bush, but was used frequently during the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
After signing the omnibus spending bill that he originally threatened to veto, Trump called on Congress to give him line-item veto authority on spending bills. However, the Supreme Court ruled in 1998 that such authority was unconstitutional.
These measures could pass with just a majority vote,meaning Democrats could do nothing to stop them — unless, of course, they can convince enough Republicans not to support the president’s wishes. Considering the slim 51-to-49 majority Republicans hold in the Senate, it wouldn’t take many left-leaning Republicans to foil the president’s plans.But a chance to rescind some of the budget programs gives conservatives reason for hope — and if Republicans throw away that chance, it will make conservatives angry all over again.
Rep Debbie Dingell, the wife of former Rep John Dingell, has announced that she is busy writing a gun confiscation bill. She claims that the bill would include due process, but that’s impossible.
The only way you satisfy both would be to have a court appearance before the guns are confiscated. That’s not what this bill does. This bill confiscates the guns first. Since she says she’s modeling it after the Indiana law, that means you have fourteen days to go to court and show that there was a reason to confiscate the guns in the first place.
I could be wrong but get the wrong cop or judge and you can lose a constitutional right.
Also, in my humble opinion, you would be reversing due process. If they took you to court first, then the burden of proof is on them but if you have to go to court to get your guns back, the burden of proof then shifts to you. It also makes you vulnerable to vengeful relatives and neighbors. Your brother or your sister could call the police and falsely claim you threatened them with your gun. How could you possibly prove you didn’t. It’s their word against yours and you have the burden of proof.
The Salt Lake Tribunesummed up the Indiana law, “In Indiana, law enforcement can confiscate weapons without a judge’s order. The gun owner must ask the court to get the weapons returned.”
Extreme Risk Protection Orders have proved a popular gun control response to the February 14 Parkland school shooting. However, it is difficult to believe such orders would have prevented that attack.
On February 23, 2018, Breitbart News reported,“The family with which [Cruz] was staying repeatedly called the police on him in November 2017 but refused to file charges when sheriff’s deputies arrived.
A member of the family with which Cruz was staying explained away Cruz’s erratic behavior by saying he ‘had been suffering significantly from the loss of his mother’ earlier in the month.”
I think we can all agree that crazy and extremely violent people do not need to have guns, but on the other hand, I don’t want someone innocent to have to face accusations that he or she can’t win. Maybe they could amend the bill to mete out mandatory jail sentences for making a knowingly false claim?
Mike Huckabee is well known for his calm, warm approach to politics and life — and the former pastor and Arkansas governor just became the voice of reason during the “March For Our Lives” protests.
While appearing on “Fox and Friends,” the politician-turned-commentator addressed the recent demonstrations that are supposedly about stopping violence, but have become essentially anti-Second Amendment rallies where law-abiding gun owners are vilified for the actions of one criminal.
“I salute these students for their passion and their energy, and for their interest in helping to shape public policy,” Huckabee began, extending an olive branch to the young people protesting. “But I would say this to them: Emotion is a terrible substitute for truth.“ March 25, 2018
“It is a terrible substitute for facts,” Huck continued. “And they’ve been used, by believing that if they just ban a certain type of firearm, that things are going to be better.”
That wasn’t just the former governor’s opinion. A vast amount of evidence backs up the view that the left’s “solutions” — many of which have already been tried — would do nothing to actually stop criminals.
“Here’s the facts: Five times more people are killed in America by knives… than they are by rifles,” Huckabee explained.
The most recent FBI data shows that in 2016, there were 374 murders committed using rifles in the entire United States. That includes so-called “assault rifles.” However, a stunning 1,604 murders were committed using “knives or cutting weapons.”
Even hands, fists, and feet were used to kill more often than rifles: Criminals committed 656 murders using just their body.
“It’s also true that over 86 percent of the 20,000 police chiefs and sheriffs in America do not support repealing concealed carry, but rather rather support (gun ownership),” Mike Huckabee went on. “And they don’t support more gun control methods.”
There’s a good reason for that: As concealed carry has become more common in America, the country has become more safe.
As we’ve previously reported, there was an amazing 215 percent increase in concealed carry permits between 2007 and 2015. During the same time period, there was a 14 percent decrease in the murder rate.In fact, violent crime has been cut in half since about 1990, yet the media constantly acts as if violence is spiraling out of control.
Mike Huckabee’s primary point is so good, it must be repeated: “Emotion is a terrible substitute for truth.”
The left and the mainstream media seem to be purposely burying facts or even outright lying about statistics in order to promote an agenda.
American schools are actually some of the safest places in the country. Contrary to the narrative, mass shootings in schools have not be dramatically increasing in recent years. Students have a higher probability of being killed riding their bikes or walking to school than by a school shooter.
Huck’s line about emotion over truth is an apt summary of not only the current push against lawful gun ownership, but also almost all of liberalism. One of the hallmarks of being responsible adults is using logic and critical thinking over fear-based reaction and hysteria.
The next time you see a news headline or hear a statement from a protester, ask yourself: “Is this based on reasoned logic and truth, or all emotion?” That’s an incredibly useful tool to decide which side of an issue to stand on… and in today’s world, detecting the truth is more important than ever.
A professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School has been removed from her primary teaching duties after making observations about the academic disparity black and white students on campus.
The controversy for Prof. Amy Wax began last August when she co-wrote an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer titled, “Paying the price for the breakdown in the country’s bourgeois culture.”
“That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness,” she wrote.
Wax continued, “Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.”
The professor contended these values reigned supreme among people from different backgrounds and abilities in America until the mid-1960s. Wax conceded that the country of course was not perfect, but there was a nod to these values being good among the vast majority. However, by the late 1960s, this culture began to wane with the growth of the welfare state and the breakdown of the pro-marriage norm. The pathologies of poverty, crime, and addiction followed as more and more grew up in broken homes.
“All cultures are not equal,” Wax wrote. “Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.”
She concluded arguing for a return to bourgeois norms, which still exist in segments of society. To achieve this end, Wax wrote that will require the arbiters of culture in academia, the media and Hollywood “to relinquish multicultural grievance polemics and the preening pretense of defending the downtrodden”and re-embrace what was good in the American ethic.
A group of 54 Penn students and alumni responded to her piece with a column in the school’s newspaper — The Daily Pennsylvanian — describing her arguments as “steeped in anti-blackness”and called for school administrators to investigate Wax’s advocacy of “white supremacy.”
Weeks later, in Sept. 2017, Wax participated in a podcast with Brown University professor Glenn Loury titled, “The Downside of Social Uplift.” Among the topics they discussed was the “mismatch hypothesis”of affirmative action in relation to law schools, which is based on data published in a 2005 Stanford Law Review article. The hypothesis holds that affirmative action does more harm than good, by admitting students in schools for which they are not prepared.
During her interview, Wax said her own experience as a professor of first year civil procedure students at Ivy League Penn bore out the findings of the study.
“Here’s a very inconvenient fact, Glenn: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half,” Wax stated. “I can think of one or two students who scored in the top half of my required first-year course.”
“When Wax’s video surfaced earlier this month, it sparked outrage among student groups and faculty members, many of whom called her statements racist,” The Washington Post reported. A petition was circulated calling on law school Dean Ted Ruger to discipline her.
“Amy Wax insinuated demonstrably false and deeply offensive claims about black law students and alumni,” Nick Hall, a third-year law student and president of the school’s Black Law Students Association, told Philadelphia Magazine.
Ruger acquiesced to those demanding discipline of the tenured faculty member announcing Wax had been removed from teaching the mandatory civil procedure course, but would still teach electives.
The dean stated Wax spoke “disparagingly and inaccurately”about the performance of black students.
“Black students have graduated in the top of the class at Penn Law,” Ruger told the Daily Pennsylvanian. “And contrary to any suggestion otherwise, black students at Penn Law are extremely successful, both inside and outside the classroom, in the job market, and in their careers.”
Wax stood her ground amid the controversy commenting to the paper in an email, “I would emphasize that student performance is a matter of fact, not opinion. It is what it is.”
Loury came to Wax’s defense in a lengthy Facebook post, noting that no data from Penn contradicting his colleague’s claim has been forthcoming.
The indictments of Russian nationals for meddling with the election could “make the Clinton Campaign a potential target,” according to a California lawyer.
In an opinion piece for Law & Crime, Robert Barnes said that Robert Mueller indicted of 13 Russians and three Russian companies because they did not register as foreign agents or record financial expenditures to the Federal Elections Commissions.
“They were foreign citizens; they tried to influence an election; and they neither registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act nor reported their funding to the Federal Elections Commission,” he wrote.
Under this claim, there are three things that “make the Clinton Campaign a potential target,” according to Barnes.
The first one is that they knew Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous Russia-Trump dossier, was a foreign citizen.
According to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s press conference on the indictments, the Russians “used stolen or fictitious American identities, fraudulent bank accounts and false identification documents”to hide their activities.
The next potentially criminating thing is that the Clinton campaign “knew, and paid, Steele to influence an election.”
Similarly, the indictments showed that twelve defendants worked for a company called Internet Research Agency, LLC, based in St. Petersburg. It reportedly operated through Russian shell companies.
“It employed hundreds of people in its online operations, ranging from creators of fictitious personas, to technical and administrative support personnel, with an annual budget of millions of dollars,” Rosenstein said.
Lastly, the Clinton campaign “knew, and facilitated, Steele” not registering as a foreign agent or reporting that he was being funded by the Clinton campaign to the Federal Election Commissions. He instead disguised the payments as a “legal expense.”
Steele himself, based on Mueller’s theory, is a criminal under the same guidelines as the Russian indictments. He is a foreign citizen, was paid to influence an election, and never registered as a foreign agent or listed his expenditures.
The Clinton campaign is not the only potential target under Mueller’s theory. The DNC, Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS could also be targeted for indictment, according to Barnes. However, Barnes said not to expect an indictment of any of these people or organizations.
“Mueller chose his targets because he knows they will never appear in court, never contest the charges, and cannot be arrested or extradited as Russian citizens,” he wrote.
Barnes is a California-based trial attorney who focuses on Constitutional, criminal and civil rights law.
“I’m going to be a professional school shooter.”These were the words written by 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz months before he opened fire in a Parkland, Florida high school Wednesday.
Grieving family and friends are now reeling in the aftermath of the tragedy as reports state the FBI was aware of Cruz’s erratic and hostile behavior before it truly surfaced.
Last fall, YouTube vlogger Ben Bennight, 36, noticed the alarming declaration from Cruz had been left on one of his videos and sought out FBI officials, taking a screenshot of the comment before removing it from the video entirely.
According to BuzzFeed News, officials responded “immediately” and requested an in-person interview with Bennight the next day.
“They came to my office the next morning and asked me if I knew anything about the person,” Bennight told BuzzFeed News. “I didn’t. They took a copy of the screenshot and that was the last I heard from them.”
However, as more is uncovered about the FBI’s mishaps in handling persons of interest — such as Cruz — a list has been compiled by Grabien News that suggests the Valentine’s Day shooting isn’t the only one they’ve been tipped off about.
This is the current list:
1. Boston. According to reports, the FBI and U.S. law enforcement were sent, via Russia, a warning about bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The FBI allegedly interviewed the suspect and let him go, even opting against investigating him later after a second warning swept through the department from Russian officials. The bombing left three dead and 16 injured.
2. Fort Hood. In a string of emails sent to the FBI, soldier Nidal Hasan openly admitted that he wanted his fellow soldiers dead in order to protect the Taliban. Officials failed to intervene, leading to a tragedy that resulted in the death of 31 Americans.
3. NYC Bomber. Third on this list is NYC bomber Ahmad Khan Rahami, whose own father alerted officials of the radicalization of his son. After a brief interview, Rahami was cleared by FBI officials, though he eventually injured 31 people between New Jersey and New York.
4. Pulse Nightclub. In yet another attack on American soil, 49 people were killed and another 53 wounded after Omar Mateen opened fire through its doors. Despite a 10-month investigation of the would-be shooter — during which he admitted to lying to officials — the FBI decided against taking further action.
5. Garland, Texas. In a recent report from CBS, the FBI had an undercover agent traveling with Islamists Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi for intel on a pending attack during a “Draw Muhammad” event in Garland, Texas. Not only did officials know of a pending attack, but have refused to comment on why their agent didn’t intervene when the attack took place. Though a security officer was shot, the attackers were killed before they could harm any others.
7. 9/11. In a report by FBI agent Coleen Rowley, allegations were made stating that the FBI mishandled leads within its Minneapolis office during the investigation into the alleged 9/11 mastermind Zacarias Moussaoui. Rowley chronicles the early aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers as she and other agents scoured through pre-attack events concerning Moussaoui’s investigation.
“Everyone’s first question was ‘Why?—Why would an FBI agent(s) deliberately sabotage a case?’” Rowley wrote. “I know I shouldn’t be flippant about this, but jokes were actually made that the key FBI HQ personnel had to be spies or moles like Robert Hanssen who were actually working for Osama Bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis’s effort.”
“I feel that certain facts, including the following, have, up to now, been omitted, downplayed, glossed over and/or mis-characterized,”Rowley said. “In an effort to avoid or minimize personal and/or institutional embarrassment on the part of the FBI and/or perhaps even for improper political reasons.”
An honorable mention may also be had with the South Carolina massacre at the hands of Dylann Roof, who was allegedly cleared by the FBI to buy firearms. Then-director of the FBI James Comey admitted that it was merely an error in the background check system that eventually allowed Roof to kill nine parishioners in cold blood.
“We are all sick this happened,”Comey said of the mishaps that enmeshed his department with the fatal shooting — and that of too many others.
A Wall Street Journal story says the FBI failed to follow up on a tip that Nikolas Cruz was a dangerous threat to others.
On Jan. 5, the FBI received a call on a tip line from a person close to Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old charged in this week’s shooting, the bureau said in a statement on Friday. The caller provided information on “Cruz’s gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior and disturbing social-media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting,” the FBI said.
The FBI said the information should have been assessed as a possible “threat to life” but “no further investigation was conducted.”
Professional School Shooter
BuzzFeed reports that last September a Mississippi bail bondsman named Ben Bennight tipped the FBI to a disturbing YouTube post by a Nikolas Cruz. The post said “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.” The FBI followed up with a visit to Bennight’s office but he had no further information. At a press conference after the shooting the Bureau said it “could not uncover any details from the account.”
Florida Governor Rick Scott called for FBI Director Christopher Ray to step down.
A California lawmaker has introduced a new bill that would make it illegal to distribute single-use straws to consumers at restaurants unless specifically requested.
Ian Calderon, the Democratic majority leader in California’s lower house, brought forth Assembly Bill 1884, citing environmental protection as a reason to discourage the use of “single use straws,”typically distributed with soft drinks, smoothies, and coffee, which are then disposed of after being used.
“We need to create awareness around the issue of one-time use plastic straws and its detrimental effects on our landfills, waterways, and oceans,” Calderon stated in a media release.
“AB 1884 is not a ban on plastic straws,” he added. “It is a small step towards curbing our reliance on these convenience products, which will hopefully contribute to a change in consumer attitudes and usage.”
Assembly Bill 1884 aims to update the California Retail Food Code.
The bill notes that the current code “… establishes uniform health and sanitation standards for, and provides for regulation by the State Department of Public Health of, retail food facilities, as defined, and requires local health agencies to enforce these provisions.”
As the law currently stands, punishment for violating the Retail Food Code ranges from paying a fine between $25 – $1,000 or jail time.
“Existing law requires, except as otherwise provided, a person who violates any provision of the code to be guilty of a misdemeanor with each offense punishable by a fine of not less than $25 or more than $1,000, or by imprisonment in the county jail for a term not exceeding 6 months, or by both.”
If passed, the law would modify the code to mark the provision of “single-use plastic straws to consumers unless requested by the consumer,” as a crime.
According to CNN, Americans dispose of 500 million plastic straws each day.
“Conservatively, you can guess that Americans will use on average two plastic straws a day, so 500 million is an accurate estimate. But I challenge you to start paying attention to the straws you get in your iced coffee, smoothies, soda, and cocktails,” said Adrian Grenier of the non-profit Lonely Whale to CNN.
“When I’m in New York or LA the number of plastic straws I receive is often closer to 10 a day,” Grenier added.
Disposable straws are made from fossil fuels, and according to the cable news outlet are rarely recycled due to their small size and the fact that they’re made from several different types of plastic. Straws and stirrers rank at number nine in the top 10 marine debris items, according to The Ocean Conservancy. Eliminating the use of plastic straws has been a growing movement for some time. The “Be Straw Free Campaign”was introduced by Milo Cress in 2011 when he was just 9 years old.
“I noticed that whenever I ordered a drink at a restaurant, it would usually come with a straw in it, and I don’t usually need a straw,” he told CNN.
“This seemed like a huge waste,” Cress continued. “Straws are made of oil, a precious and finite resource. Is making single-use plastic straws, which will be used for a matter of minutes before being tossed away, really what we want to do with this resource?”
Then a resident of Burlington, Vermont, the young activist asked establishments in his hometown to make straws and option for customers – and many complied. While some like Calderon, support changing legislation to modify people’s behavior, others believe that simply offering other options is a better alternative.
Besides not using a straw, reusable straws made from materials such as glass, steel, copper, and bamboo, are becoming popular.
Cress seemed to agree that encouraging consumers to make different choices is a more effective way to make a change.
“I am not out to ban straws,” he told CNN. “I think it’s much more effective to encourage people to make the choice not to use them. Voluntary participation encourages people to spread the word. Forcing people to do things is not always the most effective way to make a change.”
You Won’t Believe Some of the New California LAWS!!
Update today from Jeff Stone, Republican state senator on the further progressive destruction of California.
(Jeff Stone is an American politician currently serving in the California State Senate. He is a Republican representing the 28th district, encompassing parts of Riverside County.)
Hello my friends,
Friday will be the end of this legislative year. Here are some of the highlights of this session:
1. SB-1: increases your gas taxes by approximately 20 Cents (Nov. 1, 2017) and your vehicle license fees by an average of $100 (Jan. 1, 2018).
2. Passed Cap N Trade tax which will increase gas 0.63 to 0.93 cents a gallon change, and the taxes that go with it.
3. Proposed increase on a new tax every residence will pay for tap water in the State!
4. A $3.46B parks bond to pay for parks in “disadvantaged communities”, meaning Los Angeles. The debt service will be over $200 million a year. The good news is some money goes to help fix the Salton Sea which should have always been a State responsibility!
5. Law to release any lifer (murder, rape, child molestation, etc.) who is 60 years old and has already spent 25 years in prison! Charles Manson qualifies today and the Melendez brothers, that murdered their parents, could be released in about 12 years. What about victims?
6. A new $10 charge on all residents living in a mobile home parks to address living condition enforcement in those parks? Why does the left embrace these regressive taxes on the poor?
7. We picked an official dinosaur of the State of California. Really? Yes!
8. Blackmail Tesla to either unionize with the United Auto Workers Union or forfeit State incentives to buy their electric cars! Just another Union Grab!
9. Reduce from a felony to a misdemeanor the purposeful intent to transmit the AIDS virus to a unknowing partner.
10. Give preferential treatment to prisoners convicted of serious crimes that are less than 25 years old because their brains are not mature enough to understand right from wrong. Whaaat? If the brains of our kids don’t mature until 25, why do we allow them to vote?
11. A bill to require our true sex be omitted from drivers licenses? Whaaat?
12. Free legal services for illegal immigrants.
13. Establish safe “injection zones” run by government to oversee people injecting heroin! You have to be kidding me? Yep, it passed!
Former Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee broke the law in the way they handled their effort to dig up dirt on President Donald Trump, according to a complaint filed Wednesday with the Federal Election Commission.
On Tuesday, it was revealed that the Clinton campaign and the DNC funded development of a now-discredited dossier that claimed to document misbehavior by Trump while in Russia and also claimed Trump had close connections with Russian officials.
Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained the firm Fusion GPS to conduct the research into Trump. Fusion GPS then hired Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, to do the work.
Perkins Coie, the firm for which Elias works, was paid $12.4 million to represent the Clinton campaign and the DNC during the 2016 campaign.
The complaint from the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center said that by paying the firm of Perkins Coie to fund development of the dossier while not saying that’s what it was doing, the campaign and DNC broke the law.
The Clinton and campaign and the DNC “failed to accurately disclose the purpose and recipient of payments for the dossier of research alleging connections between then-candidate Donald Trump and Russia, effectively hiding these payments from public scrutiny, contrary to the requirements of federal law,”the Center said on its website.
According to FEC reports, Clinton’s campaign reported 37 payments to the law firm and reported each disbursement as “Legal Services.”
The DNC reported 345 payments to Perkins Coie during the election cycle and marked the payments as “legal and compliance consulting,” “administrative fees,” “data services subscription”and others.
“The purpose of at least some portion of the payments to Perkins Coie was not for legal services; instead, those payments were intended to fund opposition research,”the complaint said. “This false reporting clearly failed the Commission’s requirements for disclosing the purpose of a disbursement.”
The CLC said the campaign and DNC tried to end run the rules.
“By filing misleading reports, the DNC and Clinton campaign undermined the vital public information role of campaign disclosures,” said Adav Noti, senior director of trial litigation and strategy at CLC. “Voters need campaign disclosure laws to be enforced so they can hold candidates accountable for how they raise and spend money.
“The FEC must investigate this apparent violation and take appropriate action,” Noti added.
“Questions about who paid for this dossier are the subject of intense public interest, and this is precisely the information that FEC reports are supposed to provide,” said Brendan Fischer, director of federal and FEC reform at CLC.
“Payments by a campaign or party committee to an opposition research firm are legal, as long as those payments are accurately disclosed,”he said. “But describing payments for opposition research as ‘legal services’ is entirely misleading and subverts the reporting requirements.”
Writing on LawNewz, Rachel Stockman said there is a fine line separating legal fro illegal activities.
“It is legal under current campaign finance law for the Hillary Clinton campaign to commission an opposition research company to dig up dirt on Donald Trump,” she wrote. “What is not legal, according to campaign legal experts, is for the campaign to pay a law firm who then hires other to perform campaign related activities without reporting the purpose of the expenditures.”
For pro-life news updated throughout the day, visit LifeNews.com.
Top Stories
• Mother Wishes She’d Had an Abortion, Says She Hates Her Son and Wants Him to Die in His Sleep
• Over 100,000 Americans Take to the Streets to Tell People “Abortion Kills Children”
• 40 Days for Life Pro-Life Prayer Campaign Saves 26 Babies From Abortion, So Far
. By 20 Weeks, Unborn Babies Have “All the Physical Structures Necessary” to Feel Pain During Abortions
More Pro-Life News • Why is Banning Late-Term Abortions on Babies After 20 Weeks So Controversial?
• CBS Executive “Not Sympathetic” for Las Vegas Shooting Victims Because “Country Music Fans are Republicans” • Ohio Abortions Hit 40-Year Record Low as More Babies are Saved From Abortion • Planned Parenthood Loses Bid to Stop Waiting Period Before It Can Kill Babies in Abortions • Abortion Clinic That Killed This Women in a Botched Legal Abortion Injures Another Woman • Brain Cancer Patient Given 6 Months to Live Planned to Kill Himself in an Assisted Suicide. That Was 2 Years Ago
• Cosmo Can’t Handle the Truth, Wants People to Stop Using the Phrase Late-Term Abortion
• Catholic Bishop: Governor Rauner Lied to Me, He Promised Not to Force Taxpayers to Fund Abortions
• ISIS Terrorists Rape and Impregnate Teen Girls and Force Them to Have Multiple Abortions
• Abortion Activists Want Unlimited Abortions Throughout Pregnancy: “We’re Not Looking for a Little Bit of Abortion”
• Even Partial Repeal of 8th Amendment in Ireland Would Allow Killing Unborn Babies in Abortions
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact LifeNews at news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact LifeNews at news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
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For pro-life news updated throughout the day, visit LifeNews.com.
Top Stories
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg: People Voted for Donald Trump Over Hillary Clinton Because They’re Sexist
• NFL Players Protest Racism, But What About the 270 Black Babies Planned Parenthood Kills Every Day?
• Illinois Governor Signs Bill to Force Taxpayers to Fund Abortions Through All 9 Months of Pregnancy
. Judge Lets Abortion Clinics Deny Women Ultrasound of Their Baby Before Abortion
More Pro-Life News • Cecile Richards: Pro-Lifers “Who Mischaracterize Planned Parenthood Have Never Had to Worry About Being Pregnant”
• MSNBC Host Claims Conservative Is Ignorant of the Constitution for Saying Rights Come from God • Congressman: “Abortionists Decapitate, Dismember and Chemically Poison Babies to Death Every Day” • Abortion Activist: We Need to “Normalize” Killing Babies in Abortions • Alabama Democrat Senate Candidate Doug Jones: Rights for an Unborn Baby Don’t Begin Until Birth • Congressional Resolution Slams Assisted Suicide: “It Puts the Most Vulnerable of Our Society at Risk”
• She Had an Abortion to Save Her Career: “I Don’t Regret the Decision”
• If Legalized Abortion is So Safe, Explain These Women Who Died in Botched Abortions
• Abortion Supporters Claim Abortions are Unsafe. Their Solution? Kill More Babies in Abortions
• Pro-Life Congressman Steve Scalise Returns for the First Time Since a Liberal Activist Shot Him
• Planned Parenthood Said Pro-Lifers Would “Go Back to Their Normal Lives” Once Abortion Clinic Opened. 10 Years Later…
• Court Allows Arkansas to Limit the Dangerous Abortion Pill That Kills Unborn Babies
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact LifeNews at news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact LifeNews at news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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Demonstrators rally outside the Pennsylvania Capitol Building to protest the continued closure of businesses due to the coronavirus pandemic on May 15, 2020, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. (Mark Makela / Getty Images)
By 
Former Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s 
