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Jack Smith’s Anti-Trump Deputy Excoriated for Inappropriate Behavior At DOJ

BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY | JULY 26, 2024

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MOLLIE HEMINGWAY

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Former Attorney General Bill Barr did not improperly pressure prosecutors to reduce sentencing recommendations for political activist Roger Stone, according to a new government watchdog report. The exoneration of Barr came more than four years after a deluge of media reports alleging wrongdoing.

However, J.P. Cooney, a Justice Department official now serving as Special Counsel Jack Smith’s top deputy, cultivated a politically toxic environment, disseminated baseless conspiracy theories about Trump and his political appointees, and engaged in unprofessional conduct as he oversaw the team making sentencing recommendations, according to the same report.

Cooney is mentioned (as the “Fraud and Public Corruption Section Chief”) a whopping 394 times in the 85-page report released from the Justice Department’s inspector general on July 24. Cooney supervised a team of four attorneys who prosecuted Stone for what the government successfully argued in front of a Washington, D.C., jury were lies and obstruction during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump campaign officials. Mueller’s two-year, $32 million investigation was itself spun up by anti-Trump officials in the Justice Department after the Democrat National Committee and Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton bought and paid for an information operation falsely alleging the Trump campaign was in cahoots with Russia to steal the 2016 election. Two members of Cooney’s team also worked on the Mueller investigation.

The Fraud and Public Corruption (FPC) team sought an unprecedented sentence of seven to nine years in prison for Stone, dramatically beyond what others convicted of similar crimes faced. When developing that sentencing goal, the team by its own admission thought the “closest analogue” to the Stone conviction was that of Scooter Libby, a target of a previous special counsel in a highly controversial prosecution. Libby’s proposed sentencing range was 30-37 months and he was sentenced to 30 months, which was derided as “excessive” by former President George W. Bush.

Yet the Cooney team larded up the Stone sentencing memo with every escalatory adjustment it could find, however disputable, to achieve a much harsher sentence and treat Stone differently than the Justice Department treats other defendants.

As soon as Cooney’s supervisors saw what he and his team had planned, “they all agreed that the sentencing recommendation was too high” and expressed grave concern about the situation. Interim U.S. Attorney Timothy Shea, who had started on the job just that week, said he “had never seen [perjury] cases produce a sentence that high, and that he was aware of many violent crimes that did not result in sentences ‘anywhere near’ the sentence the team was recommending for Stone,” according to the report. He noted that the escalatory adjustments were arguably made in error, in at least one case, and that the guidance was completely “out of whack” relative to other cases. Further, Stone was a “first-time offender, older than most offenders, and convicted of a nonviolent crime,” and “comparable cases” were sentenced around two to three years.

Cooney responded to the criticism of his extreme sentencing proposal by spreading an elaborate conspiracy theory with no supporting evidence that Trump, Barr, and Shea were being improperly political. Cooney admitted to investigators that “he had no information suggesting that anyone from Main Justice (i.e., DOJ leadership offices) was involved in the Stone sentencing at this time and no evidence pointing to improper motivations influencing these discussions” when he spread the conspiracy theory with his underlings.

In phone calls and other conversations with his prosecution team, Cooney spread his evidence-free conspiracy theory that “Shea was acting out of fear of then President Trump and, more particularly, fear of the consequences of not seeking a lower sentence for an influential friend of then President Trump.” He continued his conspiracy theories in other conversations. “Prosecutor 1 said that when he asked [Cooney] what was going on, [Cooney] replied that ‘this is coming from Main Justice. Tim Shea is getting pressure from Main Justice about the Stone sentencing recommendation, and Tim Shea is terrified of the President,’” according to the report. Cooney acknowledged he had no evidence to support these statements.

Another prosecutor said Cooney told him that “Shea did not care about Stone or the Stone case, but that Shea was ‘afraid of the President’ and that this fear was driving Shea’s actions,” according to the report. That same prosecutor said Cooney said multiple times that “Shea was afraid of the President and said it ‘with substantial conviction.’” Cooney later acknowledged he had no evidence to support his false claim.

At the same time, reporters began calling the Department of Justice to ask about the sentencing guideline dispute. That meant that at least one person within the department was getting information to reporters at left-wing media outlets to bully Trump appointees to acquiesce to their demands. Partisan bureaucrats had commonly used that tactic throughout the Trump presidency. While strict guidelines opposed unauthorized disclosures to the press, DOJ and FBI officials rarely bothered to investigate such leaks, much less hold employees accountable for them. In many cases, they were the worst offenders. For example, former FBI Director James Comey leaked to the media by disclosing information to an attorney who then passed the information on to The New York Times. The investigative report on the sentencing memos discusses how various DOJ employees denied leaking to the media while also noting they spoke about the sentencing controversy with other attorneys.

Unsurprisingly, the sentencing dispute became a major news story, with the perspective of Cooney’s team adopted by the recipients of the leaks. After the Justice Department issued a second sentencing guideline memo, the four prosecutors all removed themselves from the case and were lavished with praise by left-wing media outlets. Prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky went on to testify in front of Congress about the situation. His claims that the sentencing dispute was guided by politics were untrue, but investigators blamed Cooney for spreading the falsehoods.

The second sentencing memo did not call for a specific jail time but left it to the judge’s discretion. Judge Amy Berman Jackson agreed with the second sentencing memo and ordered Stone to serve 40 months in prison, many years fewer than Cooney’s team had aimed for. Trump commuted Stone’s sentence before he was taken into custody.

In its report, the Justice Department IG said that Cooney’s “speculative comments in meetings with the trial team about the political motivations” of Trump officials “in connection with their handling of the Stone sentencing contributed to an atmosphere of mistrust” that “unnecessarily further complicated an important decision in the case.” It further determined that his baseless comments to the trial team formed a substantial basis for Zelinsky’s explosive but wrong testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on June 24, 2020.

Cooney’s Checkered DOJ Record

Cooney’s track record at DOJ includes many other controversial political actions.

For example, one of the primary instigators of the Russia-collusion hoax was FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, now a CNN contributor. In April 2018, federal investigators issued a criminal referral for just some of the criminal leaks and lies he had engaged in while at the FBI. After sitting on a criminal referral for nearly two years, Cooney announced on Feb. 14, days after the Stone sentencing memo situation, that he had decided to let McCabe get away with the lies and the leaks.

Those who aren’t political allies of Cooney’s receive different treatment. Cooney prosecuted Steve Bannon in 2022 for a contempt of Congress charge related to him not complying with a subpoena from the controversial Jan. 6 Committee comprised exclusively of members hand-selected by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Bannon, who hosts the popular alternate media program “War Room,” is currently serving his four-month prison sentence. Civil libertarians are concerned about the Biden administration’s imprisonment of powerful media voices during the election season.

Incidentally, Attorney General Merrick Garland was found in contempt of Congress earlier this year for failing to comply with a subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee, which unlike the Jan. 6 Committee is a real committee with members appointed by both Republicans and Democrats, but the Department of Justice has not charged him.

Thwarting Election Integrity

After the extremely controversial 2020 election, Attorney General Barr issued a memorandum allowing the Department of Justice to investigate election irregularities if they were serious and substantiated. “While it is imperative that credible allegations be addressed in a timely and effective manner, it is equally imperative that Department personnel exercise appropriate caution and maintain the Department’s absolute commitment to fairness, neutrality and non-partisanship,” Barr wrote.

While many Americans would hope the Justice Department would investigate election irregularities in a timely fashion, particularly in an election as unprecedented as 2020, Democrat activists were livid. In response, Cooney cooked up a letter of outrage that quickly leaked to the media and helped shut down any meaningful investigations into the election. When The New York Times wrote about the letter, it was clear that Trump officials had already figured out Cooney’s mode of operating.

“On Thursday, [Cooney] said in an email sent to Mr. Barr via Richard P. Donoghue, an official in the deputy attorney general’s office, that the memo should be rescinded because it went against longstanding practices, according to two people with knowledge of the email,” The New York Times wrote. “In response, Mr. Donoghue told Mr. Cooney that he would pass on his complaint but that if it leaked to reporters, he would note that as well. Given that the email was born out of a concern for integrity, Mr. Donoghue said in his reply that he would assure officials ‘that I have a high degree of confidence that it will not be improperly leaked to the media.’”

Somehow the letter simultaneously made it to Cooney’s political allies at left-wing media outlets.

Rabid Pursuit of Trump

Weeks after President Joe Biden was inaugurated, Cooney was still stinging over not being able to put Stone in prison for nearly 10 years. He cooked up a plan, which appeared in The Washington Post and New York Times, to once again go after Roger Stone and other Trump associates in a new Jan. 6-related investigation.

His supervisors noted, “Cooney did not provide evidence that Stone had likely committed a crime — the standard they considered appropriate for looking at a political figure.” Further, his investigative plans were “treading on First Amendment-protected activities.” Nevertheless, he continued pursuing various plans to target Trump affiliates, and the U.S. attorney’s office began pursuing investigations along the lines of what Cooney had proposed, according to reporting.

President Biden and corporate media continued to pressure the Department of Justice and Garland to go after former President Donald Trump, who was widely expected to become Biden’s 2024 opponent. The famously conflict-averse Garland finally relented and put together a special counsel team heavily focused on Cooney and his extreme theories.

Democrat activists have cheered the special counsel for its aggressive actions against Trump, including a shocking raid on his Mar-a-Lago home, exhaustive investigations into communications and finances of Trump and many of his associates, and relentless pushes for courts to rush judgments ahead of the November elections.

Cooney and Smith’s approach has been less successful outside Democrat conversations. “It’s almost hard to believe how comprehensively the hubris and zealotry of anti-Donald Trump lawfare have blown up in their practitioners’ faces,” wrote The Washington Post’s Jason Willick after one major defeat. “Not only did the Supreme Court’s Monday ruling in Trump v. United States create new and enduring presidential immunities against criminal prosecution, but it also eviscerated the fiction of an ‘independent’ Justice Department and even inadvertently threw the validity of Trump’s New York hush money conviction into question.”

Left-wing media outlets such as Talking Points Memo have praised Cooney, noting that he was a partisan activist in college. Cooney, who was president of the College Democrats at Notre Dame University, wrote a column in the school newspaper that regularly praised President Bill Clinton and criticized Independent Counsel Ken Starr and his investigation of Clinton. Cooney once wrote of Starr as a “partisan political hit-man” for investigating Clinton and complained about the $30 million price tag of the investigation. He lamented the country’s “insatiable craving for controversy and scandal” regarding Clinton and worried it would destroy the country.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College and a Fox News contributor. 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

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15 Secretaries Blow Off Congressional Subpoenas While Subpoena Refusal Lands Trump Adviser in Jail

BY: M.D. KITTLE | JULY 01, 2024

Author M.D. Kittle profile

M.D. KITTLE

The New York Times headline seemed to gloat: “Stephen Bannon Reports to Prison After One Final Podcast Episode.”

“The show will be his last for four months, but the longtime adviser to Donald J. Trump has no intention of surrendering his influence,” the newspaper of record for the Democratic Party and the American left declared in its online subhead on Monday.

And so, the corporate media stories went, reporting on Bannon’s failed attempt to secure an 11th-hour reprieve from the U.S. Supreme Court. Bannon surrendered to federal authorities at a Connecticut federal prison to begin serving his time on contempt charges for defying a congressional subpoena. Loathed by the left and ruling-class Republicans, the conservative firebrand became the latest casualty of a two-tiered system of justice in America.

As Bannon begins his term, 15 cabinet officials in the Biden administration continue to defy congressional subpoenas, and Merrick Garland, the attorney general of the United States, continues to insist he’s above Congress. On June 13, U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, chairman of the Committee on House Administration, issued subpoenas to 15 administration cabinet members seeking documents related to Biden’s constitutionally suspect executive order commanding federal agencies to assist in voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns. The agency chiefs failed to comply by Steil’s deadline of June 26.

“Not a single agency has responded with their strategic plan or with any details about the implementation of the EO,” the Wisconsin Republican said in a statement to The Federalist. “Additionally, we know that as many as 40 outside groups assisted and advised the agencies on implementation – we have received nothing on the role these groups played in the design of the strategic plans.”

Seems like contempt of Congress. Will the cabinet secretaries be bunking with Bannon anytime soon? Don’t count on it.

What about Garland?

On Monday, House Republicans sued Garland, who has refused to turn over the audio recordings of a “confused” President Joe Biden’s interview with Department of Justice Special Counsel Robert Hur about the president’s mishandling of classified documents. Republicans want a federal court to compel Garland to follow their subpoena. The attorney general effectively told Republicans to go pound sand, citing executive privilege in refusing to release the audio — audio that could be particularly damaging to Biden after his disastrous debate performance last week.

“The congressional inquiry began with the release of Hur’s report in February, which found evidence that Biden, a Democrat, willfully retained and shared highly classified information when he was a private citizen. Yet the special counsel concluded that criminal charges were not warranted,” the Associated Press reported. What the story failed to note is that the special prosecutor deemed charges unwarranted because the octogenarian president “would likely present himself to the jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Hur told the House Judiciary Committee in March that the White House pushed him to change portions of his report thought to be particularly damaging to the false narrative that Biden’s mental acuity remained sharp.

Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro has been in jail since March for likewise ignoring a congressional subpoena. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear either man’s emergency appeal.

Before beginning his sentence, Bannon told reporters that he is a “political prisoner.”

Now, who will hold Garland and his colleagues in the Biden cabinet accountable for their contemptible conduct?

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

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Merrick Garland Shouldn’t Be Praised. He Should Be Impeached

BY: DAVID HARSANYI | JUNE 04, 2024

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DAVID HARSANYI

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It’s no accident that The Wall Street Journal ran an “exclusive” hagiographic piece on Merrick Garland’s “by-the-book, play-no-favorites approach” the day the attorney general is set to be grilled by Congress. The administration wants to paint the AG as a fair-minded dispenser of justice.

In truth, while Garland might occasionally — only when faced with no real options — put the Biden administration in an uncomfortable political position, he has regularly weaponized the agency to target the president’s political enemies, from pro-life protesters to concerned parents to presidential candidates.

Even as I write this, Garland is refusing to hand over audio recordings of Joe Biden’s interviews with former Special Counsel Robert Hur, despite a congressional subpoena. Even as the DOJ stonewalls Congress, it is prosecuting the Republican Party’s presidential candidate for crimes for which the Hur tape supposedly “exonerates” Biden.

Garland’s claims of executive privilege are risible. If Biden’s audio can be withheld from the public simply because someone somewhere might manipulate the tape using AI, then any audio of any president can be denied the public.

Also, why is this DOJ’s concern? Considering the Hur transcript has already been released — and we know that Biden lied about it — there is even less justification for withholding the audio. And considering the DOJ has apparently cleaned up all the “uhs” and “ohs” and garbled words in the transcript, the tape would likely further cement the president as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”

So, the real problem here isn’t the deep fake; it’s the unedited tape. Withholding the audio is obviously politically motivated. Which is unsurprising, since Garland has been one of the most partisan AGs in memory.

While Garland was raiding the home of the former president over a classified document dispute, he was letting the statute of limitations on the foreign influence-peddling by the president’s family run out.

While left-wing pro-Hamas protesters were rioting and targeting Jews, Garland was still fearmongering over the coming MAGA extremist revolution, inflating the threat with bogus statistics.

While Garland did nothing about those (likely) illegally picketing the homes of federal judges and attempting to intimidate them and influence cases — even after an assassin tried to kill Brett Kavanaugh — the DOJ was deploying armed teams to raid the homes of pro-life families and prosecuting elderly anti-abortion protesters for praying in front of “clinics.”

Even as Democrats are yammering about saving democracy, the DOJ has been working to undermine the electoral choices of voters in red states like Texas. Abortion is not a (pretend) constitutional right anymore. The DOJ does not care.

The DOJ is restarting censorship efforts under the guise of stopping foreign interference, and also targeting X owner Elon Musk, who has opened his platform to more neutral speech. It’s quite the happenstance, right?

Not only did Garland form a “task force” to investigate local parents who were protesting authoritarian Covid restrictions and racist curriculums, but he refused to dissolve the effort even after the National School Boards Association apologized for the letter that sparked it.

Of course, it was the Biden administration that prompted the organization to use the term “domestic terrorism” to give the DOJ justification to get involved in the first place. Even The New York Times acknowledged that “Garland did not detail any specific threats of violence or offer reasons for the increase in harassment and threats.” The only reason to get involved was to chill speech and intimidate parents.

No matter.

Even the case against Hunter Biden, used most often by the left to brandish Garland’s alleged Solomonic credentials, is a farce.

Let’s not forget if the Justice Department had its way, the case would have disappeared. To begin with, Garland ignored the law and appointed a counsel from within the government. David Weiss, whose office was filled with Biden allies, was prepared to give Hunter an astonishing immunity deal, not only on felony gun and tax charges, but for a slew of unrelated serious potential offenses, including failure to register as a foreign agent, bribery, and corruption.

It was only because of the whistleblower testimony of Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler that Weiss was forced to ask Hunter to plead guilty to two piddling misdemeanor counts. And the immunity deal was only quashed because Judge Maryellen Noreika, who pointed out there was not a single precedent in which immunity was offered for “crimes in a different case,” rejected it.

In his remarks to Congress today, Garland promised that he “will not back down from defending our democracy,” despite the “repeated attacks” and “conspiracy theor[ies]” regarding the DOJ. Some conspiracy theories exist, no doubt, but most criticisms of Garland’s work are legitimate. Treating criticism of his corrupt tenure as an attack on the “judicial process itself” has it backward. Demanding no one question the actions of state institutions is authoritarian. If the system were working properly, Garland would be impeached.

But in their efforts to save “democracy” — a concept that’s been stripped of any meaning — Democrats have justified deploying the state to punish and destroy political enemies. For many progressives, the legal system isn’t merely a tool for criminal justice but a way to exact political justice.

Garland is one of the leaders in this fight. Whether it’s because he is a weak man willing to do what’s expected of him or because he is corrupt makes little difference.

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.

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Democrats, Not Trump, Are The Real Crooked Record-Keepers

BY: JOSEPH LOBUE | MAY 29, 2024

Donald Trump speaking about manhattan trial

JOSEPH LOBUE

President Trump is on trial in New York for allegedly falsifying business records because the bookkeepers in his organization recorded certain legal expenses — specifically, a legal settlement — as “legal expenses.” According to Democrat prosecutors, the bookkeepers should have recorded these payments as campaign contributions and expenditures because, they say, the payments were “intended” to “influence” the 2016 election “unlawfully” by concealing a purported sexual encounter with a pornographer.

Convoluted and bizarre enough for you yet? It should be. Because there is absolutely nothing “unlawful” about concealing a purported sexual encounter with a pornographer.

There is, nevertheless, a good deal of crooked record-keeping going on these days. But Democrats are the ones doing it.

False Characterization of Record-Keeping Requirements

Federal campaign finance law actually prohibits candidates from characterizing the payments at issue in the Trump case as campaign contributions and expenditures.

Brad Smith, a leading expert on campaign finance law and former member of the Federal Election Commission, was set to testify to that very thing in open court in the Trump case. Except Juan Merchan, the partisan Democrat Biden-donor judge presiding over the case, barred him from doing so.

To accept the prosecution’s case, one must conclude that New York law requires candidates to make business records that violate federal law. The supremacy clause of the Constitution does not allow that. So, it is Democrat prosecutors, not the Trump organization, that conspired to falsely characterize the record-keeping issues in the case.

Judge Merchan’s Manipulation of the Trial Record

Judge Merchan’s rationale for excluding Smith’s testimony is that judges traditionally instruct the jury on the law. The problem is that Merchan already allowed prosecution witnesses, and prosecutors themselves, to opine on their understanding of campaign finance laws. Once he allowed that, Merchan was constitutionally required to allow Trump to mount a defense on the same point.

Merchan also overlooked the fact that how people align their behavior with the law is based as much on the policies of the administrators who enforce the law as on the words of the statute itself. Smith, a former member of the regulatory body that enforces federal campaign law, was prepared to testify that the agency’s policy precludes candidates from treating payments like these as campaign contributions and expenditures.

This leads to the obvious conclusion that the Trump organization booked the payments in the manner that they did, not to “unlawfully” influence the 2016 election, but because they were (or at least thought they were) required to do so in that manner by federal law, completely negating the factual element of unlawful intent.

In fact, had Trump “intended” to “influence” the 2016 election by covering up the Stormy Daniels’ NDA payments, the easiest way to do so would have been to characterize the late October 2016 payments as campaign contributions and expenditures. This is because, under federal campaign finance law, contributions and expenditures made in late October of an election year do not need to be reported until after the election.

Unfortunately (and unjustly), the jurors in the New York case will not hear any of this exculpatory information because the partisan Democrat judge has excluded it from the record. Like I said, it’s the Democrats who have the record-keeping problem.

Talk About Falsifying Business Records to Influence an Election

Joe Biden is old. As Bill Maher puts it, Joe Biden is “cadaver-like” old. Polls show that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe Biden does not possess the mental fitness to serve another term as president. Do you think that might incentivize the White House to alter records to mitigate the political effects of Biden’s mental deterioration?

The White House is doing just that. It recently released the official transcript of Biden’s May 19 speech to the NAACP in Detroit. It was official. Except it wasn’t a transcript. It was a political circular designed to clean up the incoherent mess left by a mentally diminished man selfishly trying to hold onto the most difficult, demanding, and consequential job in the world.

The so-called “transcript” substantively corrected numerous significant instances of mental lapses or gibberish uttered by Biden, including the claim that he was vice president during the Covid “pandemic,” and that President Obama told him to go to Detroit and “fix it.”

Records? We Don’t Have to Show You Any Stinking Records!

There’s no need to falsify records if you improperly refuse to let the public see them at all. That’s what the White House did last week by claiming “executive privilege” over the audio recordings of Biden’s interviews with the special counsel investigating Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.

That’s the case where Biden took highly classified documents from the government while he was a senator and vice president, “willfully” retained them openly in dilapidated boxes in his garage, and then “willfully” disclosed the classified information to his ghostwriter as part of a lucrative $8 million book deal. Biden’s Justice Department declined to prosecute Biden, concluding that he would present himself to a jury like he did in his interviews — “as a sympathetic elderly man with a poor memory” — making it difficult to prove a felony “that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

In an effort to control the damage from the special counsel’s report, the White House and its allies released redacted transcripts of Biden’s interviews with investigators, apparently hoping that presenting the cold, written version of Biden’s testimony might minimize public fears about his declining mental state. It did not. Yet, it did open the door for Congress to subpoena the audio tapes of the interviews.

Last week, the White House barred the Justice Department from releasing those audio tapes to Congress on the grounds of “executive privilege.” However, the White House has already voluntarily released the transcripts of the interviews, so any privilege that may have existed has been waived. It is a basic principle of law that a party waives confidentiality privileges once the party voluntarily discloses any significant portion of the information. In fact, in these circumstances, the White House’s claim of executive privilege is not merely wrong, it is ludicrous.

The White House’s assertion of “executive privilege” is not really a legal one — it knows it has no chance of prevailing in court. Rather, the assertion of privilege is purely political. The White House believes it can conceal the audio tapes until after the election while the issue is litigated.

The audio tapes must be really, really bad for Biden. How do we know this? Because not releasing the tapes is really bad for Biden. The special counsel essentially reported that Biden appeared mentally diminished in his interviews. By refusing to release the audio tapes, Biden just confirms that perception.

There were no good options for the White House on the audio tape issue. Because the White House chose a bad option (withholding the tapes), one can only assume that the other option (releasing the tapes) was substantially worse.

Why Withhold Records if You Can Just Hide or Destroy Them Instead?

That, apparently, was the credo of one of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s top advisers — and possibly Fauci as well — during the Covid panic in relation to their dealings with EcoHealth Alliance and the now-admitted use of federal funding to perform gain-of-function research at the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology.

This month, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released shocking emails sent from the private Gmail account of David Morens, an adviser to Fauci, detailing an apparent effort by administrators to evade public open records laws — commonly referred to as “FOIA” — by improperly performing government work through private Gmail accounts or by deleting records altogether.

In one such email, Morens tells Peter Daszak, president of EchoHealth Alliance, that “there is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work or at his home. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

In another email, Morens confesses, “I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d, but before the search starts, so i think we’re all safe. Plus, i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”

Wow, that’s bad. But you have to understand, to Democrats, booking legal expenses as “legal expenses” is the real threat to democracy.

Joseph LoBue is a retired Naval officer and attorney.

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Sen. Josh Hawley Demands DOJ Probe Anti-Israel ‘Dark Money’

By Nicole Wells | Tuesday, 07 May 2024 02:13 PM EDT

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., called on the Department of Justice to investigate the third-party funding behind the antisemitic protests that have taken college campuses by storm in recent weeks. The Missouri Republican sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday, demanding he open a probe into the funding. Alleging the demonstrations are “not just spontaneous student unrest,” Hawley reminded Garland that he sent a similar letter seeking information on “how many pro-terrorist student organizations … received significant funding from third-party groups” in October.

“Now, we have answers — just not from your Department,” Hawley wrote. “Earlier this week, Politico detailed the vast amounts of dark money subsidizing this mayhem. Their report found that key groups backing the campus protests — like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow — received financial support from George Soros’ Tides Foundation, David Rockefeller’s Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and Democrat megadonors Susan and Nick Pritzker were also cited in the report.”

Hawley said the “pattern is disturbing” and “almost certainly illegal,” given that IRS Revenue Ruling 75-384 established that “no organization may retain its tax exemption if it backs protests at which members are urged to commit acts of civil disobedience.”

He said the IRS “explained at length that illegal acts are ‘inconsistent with charitable ends'” and “stressed that ‘illegal activities … are contrary to the common good and the general welfare’ and are therefore not approved methods of ‘promoting the social welfare.'”

“In short, by supporting illegal acts while enjoying tax-exempt status, dark-money groups and foundations are defrauding the American people and putting Jewish students and faculty at risk,” Hawley said.

In the letter, the GOP senator told the attorney general he must “immediately provide answers” as to how many anti-Israel protests are currently receiving funds from third-party groups and which groups are providing such support.

Hawley also wanted to know what steps the Justice Department will take to “immediately enforce” IRS Revenue Ruling 75-384 against the groups that are sponsoring or funding the ongoing violent protests at universities nationwide.

Nicole Wells ✉

Nicole Wells, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.

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5 Times the Biden Admin Persecuted Christians for Living Their Faith

BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | FEBRUARY 23, 2024

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TRISTAN JUSTICE

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Former President Donald Trump charged the incumbent administration of targeting Christians Thursday night with a speech at the National Religious Broadcasters International Christian Media Convention.

“Remember, every communist regime throughout history has tried to stamp out churches, just like every fascist regime has tried to co-opt them and control them. And in America, the radical left is trying to do both,” Trump said in Nashville. “They want to tear down crosses where they can, and cover them up with social justice flags.”

President Joe Biden, himself, is the second Catholic to hold the Oval Office. The far-left administration, however, has pioneered avenues of religious persecution against political opponents, primarily through the Department of Justice (DOJ).

1. Investigating Catholics as Terrorists

The FBI, under the Biden administration, infiltrated traditional Catholic parishes to investigate “white supremacy.”

In January last year, a leaked memo from the Bureau’s offices in Richmond, Virginia revealed the federal intelligence agency targeted “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics” as “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists” (RMVE). The FBI rescinded the memo once public discovery made headlines. But a new memo in August obtained by House Republicans shows the FBI’s surveillance of Catholics involved multiple field offices across the country.

“The document assesses with ‘high confidence’ the FBI can mitigate the threat of Radical-Traditionalist Catholics by recruiting sources within the Catholic Church,” reported former special agent-turned-whistleblower Kyle Seraphin.

The FBI rescinded the memo once public discovery made headlines. But a new memo in August obtained by House Republicans shows the FBI’s surveillance of Catholics included multiple field offices across the country.

2. Pro-Lifers Prosecuted for Prayer

The Department of Justice indicted 22 pro-life activists in 2022 while neglecting to go after pro-abortion extremists who firebombed pregnancy centers, according to a Federalist review. Among them include Paul Vaughn, one of a handful who was convicted for the crime of praying at an abortion facility in Tennessee. If his appeal fails, Vaughn, a father of 11, faces 11 years in prison and fines of up to $260,000.

The DOJ claims the pro-life activists “aided and abetted by one another, used force and physical obstruction to injure, intimidate and interfere with employees of the clinic and a patient who was seeking reproductive health services” when they spent most of their time praying.

3. Biden DHS ‘Dirty Tricks’ Operation Attacked Christians

An internal memo published in May last year revealed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) used federal funds to launch a smear campaign against dissident groups, including Christian organizations.

Dan Schneider, the vice president of the Media Research Center’s Free Speech America, repo r ted on the DHS operations in Fox News. According to the memo, the DHS funneled “$40 million taxpayer dollars away from bona fide anti-terrorism programs and into a weaponized operation deceptively known as the Targeted Violence & Terrorism Prevention Grant Program (TVTP).”

Groups investigated under the federal program include the Christian Broadcasting Network, founded by Pat Robertson in 1960.

4. Repeal of ‘Conscience’ Rule

In 2019, Trump issued the “conscience” rule to protect health care workers from administering treatments violating practitioners’ moral convictions on procedures such as abortion. Politico reported in the spring of 2022 that Biden was preparing to dismantle the Republican-era regulation. The final rule came last month rescinding protections.

“Some doctors, nurses, and hospitals, for example, object for religious or moral reasons to providing or referring for abortions or assisted suicide, among other procedures. Respecting such objections honors liberty and human dignity,” said the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). But, the agency added, “patients also have rights and health needs, sometimes urgent ones. The Department will continue to respect the balance Congress struck, work to ensure individuals understand their conscience rights, and enforce the law.”

5. Biden Admin Targets Largest Christian University

Last year, the Department of Education levied a nearly $38 million fine against Grand Canyon University, claiming the school engaged in deceptive advertising campaigns. The department said the school “lied to more than 7,500 former and current students about the cost of its doctoral programs over several years.”

The university appealed the record fine in November.

“I have spoken to thousands of students, parents, employees, alumni and community stakeholders in Arizona and they all tell me the same thing: We need to fight this tyranny from federal government agencies not only to stand up for ourselves but to ensure this type of ideological government overreach and weaponization of federal agencies does not happen to others,” Grand Canyon University President Brian Mueller said in a statement. “American people are losing confidence in the federal government to be fair and objective in their operations and there are clearly no checks and balances to prevent this type of behavior from the Department of Education, which is out of control and continues to broaden its authority and selective enforcement powers.”

Mueller told The Federalist one month prior that the federal government’s efforts to target the university were “obviously political.”

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.

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Willfully Blind David Weiss Pinky Promises Political Favoritism Didn’t Affect Hunter Biden Probe

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | NOVEMBER 13, 2023

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Politics absolutely, positively had no bearing on the Hunter Biden investigation, Delaware U.S. Attorney-turned-Special Counsel David Weiss assured the House Judiciary Committee last week. Yet Weiss also acknowledged it would be a “problem” if someone had warned Joe Biden’s transition team of FBI agents’ impending plan to interview the president-elect’s son, as whistleblowers say occurred. Weiss just didn’t bother to ask anyone about the leak or any other concerns of political favoritism, showing the federal prosecutor has opted for willful blindness over oversight of the Hunter Biden criminal probe — even after his appointment as special counsel.

On Tuesday, Weiss sat for an interview before the House Judiciary Committee. A transcript of Weiss’s testimony, which The Federalist has reviewed, shows the special counsel faced several questions about claims that political favoritism infected the Hunter Biden investigation.

But even before the questioning began, in a brief opening statement, Weiss declared that “political considerations played no part in our decision making.” Rather, the Delaware U.S. attorney, doing double duty as special counsel, assured the committee that “throughout this investigation, career prosecutors on my team and I have made decisions based on the facts and the law.”

Weiss repeated that mantra several times during questioning about specific steps his team took — or didn’t take — in the Hunter Biden investigation. “Again, I’m not going to comment on any aspect of the investigation or a prosecution, and from my perspective, the prosecutors who participated in this case followed the law and the facts. That was the motivation.”

Of course, that was Weiss’s “perspective” because, even after the IRS whistleblowers provided concrete examples of the politicization of the Hunter Biden investigation, the U.S. attorney buried his head in the sand rather than inquire about the veracity of the claims. The totality of Weiss’s testimony confirms this reality, but it is best exemplified in an exchange about the warning given to President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team that agents intended to interview Hunter Biden.

IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley had previously testified that the day before their Dec. 8, 2020 “day of action,” when agents planned to interview a host of relevant witnesses, he learned someone had tipped off Joe Biden’s transition team of the plans to interview Hunter Biden and another 10-plus witnesses. “This essentially tipped off a group of people very close to President Biden and Hunter Biden and gave this group an opportunity to obstruct the approach on the witnesses,” Shapley told the House Ways and Means Committee.

The House Judiciary Committee asked Weiss if he knew “who made the decision to tip off the presidential transition team about the day of action, and that the investigators wanted to try to speak with Hunter Biden.” Weiss initially responded that it wouldn’t be appropriate for him to comment on the matter but that he would address the question in his special counsel report.

A Concerning Connection

However, additional questioning soon reviewed a concerning connection between the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office and the Biden transition team, in the person of Alexander Mackler, whom Weiss acknowledged had been one of his assistant U.S. attorneys from 2016 through about mid-2019. According to the committee’s questioning, Mackler had at one point served as Joe Biden’s press secretary, had been Beau Biden’s campaign manager during his reelection campaign, and from 2014-2016 served as deputy counsel to then-Vice President Biden. While Weiss testified, he knew Mackler had worked for Biden, he said he didn’t know many of those specifics. However, Weiss acknowledged learning that Mackler had been named to Biden’s transition team, although he said he couldn’t remember when or how he had learned of that fact.

The House Judiciary Committee then pushed Weiss on whether he or anyone else from his office had any communications with Mackler while he was working with the transition team. While Weiss stated he was “very confident” he “had no conversations” with Mackler about the latter’s work on the transition team or about the Hunter Biden case, Weiss said he had “no idea whether anyone else has spoken to Alex Mackler period or about the case.”

Weiss further testified that he was actually unaware of whether the transition team had been tipped off, as IRS whistleblowers claimed. But if so, Weiss confirmed it would be “a concern” and “a problem” and that “it shouldn’t happen.” Yet when pushed on what he would do to address the problem if he “found out that something like that did occur,” Weiss refused to answer the question, saying it was “a hypothetical” that he would not “speculate on” other than saying that “as a general matter, it’s problematic.”

Willful Blindness

On first blush, Weiss’s non-answers about the tip-off to the transition team seem like inconsequential, unhelpful responses that merely lead to a dead end. But Weiss’s acknowledged ignorance is explosive news: The man that Attorney General Merrick Garland named as special counsel to supposedly ensure independence in the investigation and prosecution of the president’s son failed to inquire of his team about whether someone had leaked to the transition team details about the impending questioning of Hunter Biden. In fact, according to Weiss, he didn’t even bother to confirm the tip-off had occurred — much less seek to determine who bore responsibility for the leak — even though he knew that a former Delaware assistant U.S. attorney served on the Biden transition team.

Weiss’s failure in this regard was not an aberration. Rather, throughout his House Judiciary Committee testimony last week, Weiss confirmed he has ignored the whistleblowers’ claims of politicization. For instance, when asked whether “any of the attorneys on your team, whether it’s a Special Counsel team or before the Special Counsel team was stood up, have any ties which you would consider close to the Biden family,” Weiss said he doesn’t “delve into those kinds of things,” but that he is “unaware of any such thing.”

Weiss’s failure to inquire about his staff’s relationship with the Biden family may have made sense initially but given the two whistleblowers’ detailed allegations of political favoritism, not asking some basic questions to ensure an unbiased staff is inexcusable.

Weiss’s failures extend much further, however, with his Tuesday testimony confirming he has not reviewed his staff’s handling of the investigation in light of the whistleblowers’ testimony that there were “politically-motivated decisions made in the Hunter Biden case.” Specifically, while Weiss acknowledged the whistleblowers’ claims, his responses to questions show he disregarded the claims without any inquiry. For instance, when asked, “If an investigator or prosecutor makes what is believed to be a politically-motivated statement or decision, how is that reviewed in your office?” Weiss responded that he was “not aware of such a situation.”

The House committee pushed the special counsel more on this point, asking: “For example, on the Hunter Biden case, if one of your assistant United States attorneys was exhibiting favoritism towards the Biden family or towards Hunter Biden, and that was brought to your attention, what would be the process to sort that out?”

“My office has no process or protocol for dealing with something like that. It’s not something we have engaged in, participated in, or that I have experienced,” Weiss countered. Weiss held firm under additional questioning, stating he was “not aware of any such reviews.”

“I’ve told you. I have no such process. We haven’t experienced it in our office,” Weiss insisted.

Head in the Sand

This testimony establishes that Weiss has done nothing to review his team’s handling of the Hunter Biden investigation for possible political bias, notwithstanding the whistleblowers’ detailed claims of such favoritism. No wonder then that Weiss can say he has confidence in his prosecutors and believes they acted “in a professional and unbiased manner without partisan or political considerations.”

Ironically, if this were a criminal case in which federal prosecutors needed to establish the defendant’s knowledge of some sort of “shady dealings,” the U.S. attorney’s office would seek what is collegially called the “ostrich instruction.” The “ostrich instruction” informs the jury that a deliberate effort “to avoid guilty knowledge is all the guilty knowledge the law requires,” and that a defendant who knows or strongly suspects “he is involved in shady dealings” cannot avoid criminal liability by making sure “he does not acquire full or exact knowledge of the nature and extent of those dealings.”

While there is no suggestion that Weiss is a co-conspirator in some criminal enterprise, he is similarly burying his head in the sand when it comes to the politicization of the Biden investigation exposed by the IRS whistleblowers and congressional oversight committees. Thus, his assurances that “political considerations played no part in our decision making” are meaningless.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Grassley’s Bombshells Show House Investigators Exactly Where to Aim Their Next Biden Subpoenas

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | NOVEMBER 09, 2023

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The chair of the House Oversight Committee issued a slew of subpoenas on Wednesday, including to Hunter Biden and James Biden. Additional subpoenas, as well as requests for transcribed interviews, were served on other Biden family members and business associates. These investigative steps are solid, but the House committees charged with the Joe Biden impeachment inquiry need to issue subpoenas for the witnesses and documents Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, not-so-subtly suggested late last month.

“I’ve obtained the names of 25 DOJ and FBI personnel to interview at a future date,” Grassley wrote in a late-October letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray concerning the latest details the Iowa senator uncovered related to obstruction of the Biden-family corruption investigation. While the House Oversight Committee is understandably focused on unraveling the extent of foreign influence-peddling, the House should not ignore the second half of the scandal: the DOJ, FBI, and now the Biden administration’s cover-up of the scandal and their cover-up of the cover-up.

Grassley has been focused on that aspect of the scandal for several years, raising concerns “about political considerations infecting the decision-making process at the Justice Department and FBI.” Having heard from several whistleblowers about the scope of the obstruction, Grassley has said that if their allegations are true, it would establish the DOJ and FBI have been “institutionally corrupted to their very core.”

The House has followed several leads Grassley developed. The most significant was related to the FD-1023 summary of a “highly credible” confidential human source’s (CHS) reporting that Burisma paid Hunter and Joe Biden each $5 million in bribes, which Grassley released earlier this year.

More recently, Grassley revealed that the Foreign Influence Task Force used an assessment opened by FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten to mine FBI field offices for derogatory information related to the Bidens. The FBI then falsely branded the derogatory information as Russian disinformation, closing out the sources. That revelation was but one of many contained in the seven-page letter the Iowa senator penned to the AG and FBI director on Oct. 24, noting he had a list of some 20-plus agents to interview.

The House committees charged with overseeing the impeachment inquiry need to dissect that letter for leads relevant to the investigation into Biden-family corruption and also to unravel the DOJ and FBI’s corruption.

Foreign Influence Task Force

Among other things, that letter revealed the complicity of the Foreign Influence Task Force in falsely branding the reporting of confidential human sources from several different field offices as Russian disinformation. As Grassley noted, it was also the Foreign Influence Task Force that “improperly briefed” him and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., about their investigation into the Biden family. That briefing served solely as a precursor to a media leak to spin the Republican senators’ investigation as contaminated by foreign disinformation.

Every member of the Foreign Influence Task Force should be questioned by the House, and every communication between the Foreign Influence Task Force, Brian Auten, and the various FBI offices involved in wrongly closing out sources should be subpoenaed. The House should likewise subpoena the materials made part of that assessment and especially any sources or reporting closed out as Russian disinformation.

FBI Field Offices

Here, Grassley helpfully highlighted in his letter several relevant field offices. In noting that the FBI tried to improperly shut down the FD-1023, Grassley emphasized that the claim that the CHS’s bribery report was Russian disinformation was “highly suspect and is contradicted by other documents my office has been told exist within the Foreign Influence Task Force, FBI Seattle Field Office, FBI Baltimore Field Office, and FBI HQ holdings.”

The House should focus its investigative efforts there first. The FBI Seattle field office is a new thread to pull, as it has not been previously raised as relevant to the Biden investigation. A review of the underlying FD-1023 also suggests the Cleveland FBI field office merits attention, as the CHS who reported on the alleged bribes to the Bidens noted that he was introduced to the Burisma executives by Alexander Ostapenko. And the FD-1023 included a notation that the CHS’s reporting on Ostapenko was maintained at the Cleveland field office.

In seeking materials from these field offices and the Foreign Influence Task Force, the House should ask for all records using the terms “Russian disinformation” or “foreign disinformation” from January 2019 to the present. Why? Because that is what Grassley asked the AG and FBI director to provide. And when the Iowa Republican asks for something, he usually knows precisely what the DOJ has secreted away.

DOJ and FBI Documents

Likewise, the House should seek the other documents Grassley identified in his October 2023 letter because the Republican-led House can follow up with subpoenas if the DOJ refuses to comply, whereas Grassley can’t. In total, the Iowa senator named 15 different categories of materials he sought from the DOJ and FBI, and the House should mirror those requests.

Of particular importance are the communications between the U.S. attorneys’ offices for the Western District of Pennsylvania and the Eastern District of New York relating to Hunter Biden, James Biden, Joe Biden, and the FD-1023, as the Eastern District of New York had apparently concluded the FD-1023 did not match any known Russian disinformation. Subpoenaing FBI reports dating to Jan. 1, 2014, and referencing Mykola Zlochevsky, Hunter Biden, James Biden, or Joe Biden will likely also turn up relevant information.

Naming Names

In addition to subpoenaing these witnesses and the related documents, Grassley’s letter provides the names of several other individuals deserving of questioning. Significantly, the letter indicates that the individuals named had knowledge of Joe Biden’s potential complicity in his son’s money-laundering scheme. But Grassley also named individuals from FBI headquarters, the Washington field office, the Baltimore field office, Delaware FBI agents, and FBI management personnel.

Finally, the House should take note of Grassley’s repeated references to Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy Thibault and the various documents he requested that connect to Thibault. Those references should give House investigators pause because Grassley’s apparent focus on Thibault strikes an odd note given the tune Thibault played in his transcribed interview: that he was new to the job and was only on the periphery of decisions to close out sources.

Why then, would Grassley seek “[a]ll records derived from reporting on derogatory information linked to Hunter Biden, James Biden, Joe Biden, and their foreign business relationships that was overseen under the approval, guidance, and purview of ASAC Thibault from January 1, 2020, to his last day at the FBI”? And why would Grassley ask for a copy of “[a]ll opened and closed cases initiated by the Washington Field Office under the purview of ASAC Thibault that were ordered closed by ASAC Thibault and/or denied for opening by the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, and/or the United States Attorney Offices in the District of Columbia and Eastern District of Virginia”?

Grassley may not be able to force the DOJ and FBI to provide answers or those documents, but the House can — and it should, stat.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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EXCLUSIVE: Email Shows Weiss Violated DOJ Policy By Sending Letters To Cover For Garland

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | OCTOBER 03, 2023

Merrick Garland sitting at a desk with a binder

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The Department of Justice directed Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss not to respond to congressional inquiries, according to an email provided exclusively to The Federalist. That same email stressed that under DOJ policy, only its Office of Legislative Affairs, or OLA, can respond to requests from the legislative branch.

Yet Weiss would later sign and dispatch a letter to the House Judiciary Committee in response to an inquiry sent directly to Attorney General Merrick Garland. And in that letter, Weiss misleadingly claimed he had “been granted ultimate authority over” the Hunter Biden investigation. The DOJ’s disregard of its own policy provides further proof that both Garland and Weiss intended to obfuscate the reality that Weiss never held the reins of the Hunter Biden investigation.

On May 9, 2022, Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin wrote to Delaware U.S. Attorney Weiss inquiring about several aspects of the Hunter Biden investigation. After the senators sent a follow-up email to the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office requesting a response by week’s end, Delaware’s First Assistant U.S. Attorney Shannon Hanson asked the DOJ about protocol and then updated Weiss, stating in an email:

Consistent with my conversation with [redacted] last night, we are supposed to forward this and any other correspondence to OLA. Per DOJ policy, only OLA can respond on behalf of the Department to a request from the legislative branch.

On June 9, 2022, the OLA, as provided for in the DOJ’s policy, responded to Grassley and Johnson’s letter. The following month, Grassley and Johnson dispatched a second letter to Weiss, as well as Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray. In an email reviewed by The Federalist, the Office of Legislative Affairs told Weiss’s office it would “take the lead on drafting a response” to Grassley and Johnson’s letter.

The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project obtained these emails and the most recent one revealing the DOJ’s policy that only the “OLA can respond on behalf of the Department to a request from the legislative branch,” after its Director Mike Howell filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the DOJ. The email to Weiss summarizing the DOJ policy contained in this latest batch of court-ordered disclosures proves huge given the sequence of events that occurred earlier this year.

On May 25, 2023, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland questioning him about the removal of the IRS whistleblowers from the Hunter Biden investigation. Although Jordan directed his inquiry to Garland, on June 7, 2023, Weiss dispatched a letter to the House Judiciary chair, noting in his opening: “Your May 25th letter to Attorney General Garland was forwarded to me, with a request that I respond on behalf of the Department.”

Weiss then stated, as Garland had previously indicated, that he (Weiss) had “been granted ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility for deciding where, when, and whether to file charges and for making decisions necessary to preserve the integrity of the prosecution…”

That Weiss would respond on behalf of Garland raised eyebrows at the time. Jordan noted “the unusual nature of your response on behalf of Attorney General Garland,” and asked for information concerning the names of individuals who drafted or assisted in drafting the June 7 letter, as well as details concerning the drafting and dispatching of the letter.

But now we know it wasn’t merely “unusual” for Weiss to respond on behalf of the attorney general — it was in apparent violation of the DOJ policy that only the OLA would respond to legislative inquiries. And it was that same policy that prevented Weiss from responding to the earlier questions posed by Johnson and Grassley directly to the Delaware U.S. attorney.

The content of Weiss’s June 7 letter provides a pretty clear answer for why the DOJ ignored its own policy and enlisted the Delaware U.S. attorney to respond to Jordan: Garland needed Weiss to verify what the attorney general had previously told Grassley during a March 1, 2023, hearing. During that hearing, Garland expressly stated that “the U.S. attorney in Delaware has been advised that he has full authority … to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it’s necessary.” Weiss’s assertion in the June 7 letter that he had “been granted ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility for deciding where, when, and whether to file charges and for making decisions necessary to preserve the integrity of the prosecution…” seemingly confirmed Garland’s testimony.

Of course, as informed Americans now know, the release of the IRS whistleblower’s testimony — that Weiss claimed he was not the ultimate decisionmaker — forced the Delaware U.S. attorney to pen a follow-up letter to Jordan. In that June 30, 2023 sequel, Weiss, while purporting to stand by what he had previously written, contradicted his earlier representation that he had “been granted ultimate authority.” Instead, Weiss explained he had “been assured” that “if necessary,” he would be granted authority to charge Hunter Biden in any other district.

Having ultimate authority and being assured that you would be given ultimate authority if necessary are clearly two different things, yet Weiss gave cover for Garland in his June letters. Now we have further proof that the DOJ was behind those letters — otherwise, Weiss would be in violation of the department’s policy.

The DOJ did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment on Weiss’s apparent violation of the department’s policy.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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It’s Looking Ever More Likely That Jan. 6 Was A Fedsurrection

BY: AUGUSTE MEYRAT | SEPTEMBER 29, 2023

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AUGUSTE MEYRAT

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Few incidents in recent history are as poorly understood as the riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Ever since it happened, the Biden administration and the corporate media have pushed the narrative that this was an insurrection by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election and destroy American democracy. They have compared this event to 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and even the Civil War. Accordingly, the Department of Justice has spared no expense to bring in each and every offender (there are now more than a thousand of them awaiting trial) and indict and convict their ringleader Trump.

However, several cracks in this story have started to appear. In last week’s hearing with the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Merrick Garland admitted his ignorance on whether there were federal agents in the crowds on Jan. 6. In a closed-door session with the same committee, Steven D’Antuono, former assistant director-in-charge of the FBI’s Washington field office, allegedly conceded that he lost count of the number of confidential human sources who joined the protest.

One of those informants was almost certainly Ray Epps, a man who was caught on camera urging other protesters to storm the Capitol. While Garland and D’Antuono played dumb in their testimony, Epps was finally charged with a mere misdemeanor despite his prominent role in provoking the riot. This stood in stark contrast to Enrique Torrio, someone who wasn’t even in Washington, D.C., that day who was sentenced to 22 years in prison just a few weeks earlier, or the hundreds of other protesters with similar sentences.

Added to this is the incoherent response of the Capitol Police. On one hand, they were happily ushering certain protesters into the building, even giving some of them a tour, including “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley. On the other hand, they used excessive force against other protesters, hitting them with rubber bullets and tear gas and beating them down with riot sticks— and in the case of Ashli Babbit, shooting them dead at point-blank range.

The implications of these reports are massive. Altogether, they strongly suggest that the federal government deliberately egged on a riot to silence any discussions about the 2020 election, crush Trump’s populist movement, and cast Trump as a dangerous tyrant. Along with the police, at least “a handful,” but probably more like dozens of (or possibly many more) informants and undercover agents from various government agencies were in the crowd goading otherwise innocent Americans to become violent and breach the Capitol. And now, these protesters are being denied due process rights and sentenced by psychopath judges to ridiculously long prison sentences in kangaroo courts.

[READ: J6 Prosecutor Charged In Road Rage Stabbing Incident]

In other words, much like the plan to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has been labeled a “Fednapping plot” since the whole scheme was directed by FBI agents entrapping unsuspecting civilians, the Jan. 6 Capitol attack can fairly be considered a “Fedsurrection” for the same reason. How would events have unfolded if government agencies had not inserted themselves in the protest? Or if certain high-level politicians like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi actually allowed extra security instead of denying it multiple times?

It’s not hard to see why journalists and writers avoid entertaining this possibility. Beyond exposing the unfathomable depths of government corruption, the story itself is so vast and hopelessly complicated that no one can find an end to it. Julie Kelly, the premier expert of the Jan. 6 riot, has devoted a whole book and hundreds of articles (and now a Substack) to the event and is still going strong detailing the innumerable injustices being inflicted on the protesters. Although a few other journalists have joined in the effort to investigate Jan. 6, almost everyone else has understandably distanced themselves from the story — it’s just too much.

Added to this is the preference of many Americans, both on the left and right, to believe a narrative that reinforces a certain classist prejudice. Somehow, it makes perfect sense to them that a raucous crowd of uneducated rednecks would storm the Capitol in the hopes of making their cult-leader Donald Trump a supreme dictator of the country. Sure, these same people were unarmed and the great majority of them had no criminal record. And true, it’s unclear how walking around a building and waving flags would overturn the election, let alone impose an antidemocratic Trumpocracy. One might even say this story makes about as much sense as Trump being a Russian agent who stole the election with some Facebook ads. Then again, many people continue to believe this hoax despite all evidence to the contrary.

However one feels about it, the Jan. 6 riot happened and the prosecutions continue to happen. For any American who still believes in the system it is well past time to come to terms with this reality for a few reasons. First, there are hundreds of innocent Americans wasting away in prison (also known as the “DC Gulag”) who are subjected to terrible living conditions, all because they dared to speak against the regime.

Second, the federal agencies and departments responsible for putting those people there have faced no scrutiny or any check on their power — on the contrary, most politicians seem happy giving them more money.

Third, the Biden administration is still using the narrative of Jan. 6 to shut down his political opponents. Fourth, because most news media and Big Tech platforms are allowed to gaslight people on this issue, there is nothing to stop them from doing the same for every other matter.

Beyond this, all Americans should worry about the tyranny at work and what this means for the country. If the government can stoke a riot to target dissidents and fabricate a bogeyman (e.g., MAGA Republicans, white supremacists, Christian nationalists, etc.) to distract the population, then no American citizen is truly free. They have no choice except to parrot the party line, submit to an oppressive government, and desperately hope that the leviathan takes care of them.

In some ways, this outcome has already materialized, putting the country in a precarious position. It will only become worse until Americans of all political stripes (not just conservatives) speak up for the Jan. 6 protesters. What’s happening to them is not just wrong, but egregious. Whatever one thinks about what they were protesting, it cannot be denied that they have given up everything for their cause. The least we can do is give them our sympathy and uncover the truth about what happened.

Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an MA in humanities and an MEd in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for The Federalist, The American Conservative, and The Imaginative Conservative, as well as the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter.

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Democrats Have Become the Party of Authoritarianism. They Only Understand Power

BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | SEPTEMBER 27, 2023

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Perhaps you saw the news last week that two women in their 70s, Jean Marshall and Joan Bell, are each facing up to 11 years in federal prison for blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic in 2020. Federal prosecutors charged the pair for violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which Biden’s Justice Department has been aggressively enforcing against pro-life activists, convicting 26 people last year alone.

You might have also seen, a few weeks earlier, that a 42-year-old North Dakota man who ran over and killed an 18-year-old kid for being a Republican was sentenced to just five years in prison on a manslaughter charge, and with credit for time already served on house arrest, will spend only about four years behind bars.

Seeing these two things, maybe you wondered how it could be that two grandmothers might well spend twice as many years in prison for the nonviolent offence of sitting in front of an abortion clinic as a man who intentionally killed another man for his political beliefs. Maybe you thought, as @politicalmath put it on X (formerly Twitter), that the left needs “to start looking at this situation and admitting that this is not justice. They need to shake themselves awake and realize that their team is utilizing the justice system for political punishment and that this is destabilizing our entire culture.”

You might have thought the same thing recently about the Trump indictments. The hypocrisy is after all outrageous. Questioning an election is okay if Hillary Clinton and Democrats do it (as they did in 2016, 2004, and 2000) but it’s a “criminal conspiracy” if Trump and Republicans do it.

Or consider the draconian prison sentences for Jan. 6 rioters (22 years in one case) compared to the leniency shown to Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters, one of whom was sentenced to just 10 years despite setting a deadly fire in a Minneapolis pawn shop during the 2020 George Floyd riots — and this only after federal prosecutors invoked Martin Luther King Jr. and asked the judge to show leniency.

Or again consider the role of Biden’s Justice Department and FBI in protecting Hunter Biden and the president from congressional investigations that are, as of this writing, still uncovering damning evidence of corruption connected to Hunter’s overseas business schemes. Just this week we learned that two payments totaling more than a quarter-million dollars were wired to Hunter Biden from China, and the beneficiary address listed on the wires was Joe Biden’s home address in Delaware. (At the time the wires were sent, Hunter was living in California.)

Surely, you might be thinking, not even the most rabid partisans on the left can think that this is justice, or that this will end well for the country. Surely they see the danger of supporting a politicized federal law enforcement bureaucracy that criminalizes the opposition and uses the justice system as a weapon. Even if they don’t denounce it publicly, certainly they’re talking amongst themselves about how terrible this is and how to stop it. Right?

Wrong. To think this way is to misunderstand Democrats and the left completely. No, they’re not worried about any of this. No, they don’t want it to stop, they want it to continue and intensify. They don’t want justice, they want power.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Increasingly, Democrats will readily admit as much. For example, nearly half of them don’t believe in freedom of speech. A recent RealClear Opinion Research poll found that while solid majorities of Republicans (74 percent) and Independents (61 percent) believe speech should be legal “under any circumstances,” only 55 percent of Democrats agreed.

The same survey found that a third of Democrats think Americans “have too much freedom,” and a majority of them “approve of the government censoring social media content under the rubric of protecting national security.” Worse, about three-quarters of surveyed Democrats think the government has a responsibility to limit “hateful” posts on social media, and they are far more likely than Republicans or Independents to support censorship of political views.

That’s just one survey of course, but it captures a growing trend of authoritarianism on the left. We see it in polls, on college campuses and corporate boardrooms, on social media, and in how the left wields the power of the institutions it has captured, like the FBI and DOJ.

When you see these glaring disparities in how opponents of the Biden regime are treated by the Justice Department and the courts, when you see how corporate media cover the Trump indictments versus how they refuse to cover the Biden corruption scandal, when you see them calling for government censorship of “misinformation” on social media, understand that they are never going to take a step back and consider whether all of this is justice or injustice.

Despite the outdated moniker of “social justice warrior,” leftist Democrats aren’t interested in real justice. They’re interested in gaining and using power. Once they have it, they’ll use it against their enemies. Appealing to their desire for civil comity is futile. They have no use for comity so long as they have power.

This is to say, they won’t stop this until what they are doing to their enemies is in turn done to them. You don’t like left-wing district attorneys indicting the Republican frontrunner ahead of election season? Better find some GOP state attorneys general to indict Hunter and Joe Biden.

You don’t like Attorney General Merrick Garland using the Justice Department to protect a corrupt Biden administration? Better impeach him along with Biden. Don’t like a woke U.S. military funding abortions and gender surgeries on the defense secretary’s say-so? Better do as Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama has done and use all available leverage to stop them.

Power is the only language the left understands. So, if Americans on the right want to be anything more than a managed opposition — and let’s be honest, plenty of elected Republicans are happy to be exactly that — they had better figure out how to wield the limited power they do have. And they had better hurry.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come, to be published in March 2024. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Garland Accidentally Admitted Biden DOJ Thwarted Weiss’s Hunter Investigation

BY: JORDAN BOYD | SEPTEMBER 20, 2023

Merrick Garland testifies to House Judiciary Committee on Sept. 20, 2023

Author Jordan Boyd profile

JORDAN BOYD

VISIT ON TWITTER@JORDANBOYDTX

U.S. Attorney, now Special Counsel, David Weiss did not have full charging authority during the bulk of his federal investigation into Hunter Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland slyly admitted in his testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.

Garland’s confession contradicts his previous under-oath insistence that Weiss possessed all of the authority he needed to properly charge President Joe Biden’s youngest son with various tax and gun crimes, some of which extended to other jurisdictions.

“You said [Weiss] had complete authority but he’d already been turned down. He wanted to bring an action in the District of Columbia and the U.S. attorney there said ‘no, you can’t.’ And then you go tell the United States Senate under oath that he has complete authority,” Chairman Jim Jordan explained during the hearing.

“No one had the authority to turn him down,” Garland claimed. One second later, Garland divulged that those U.S. attorneys in fact “could refuse to partner with him.”

AG Merrick Garland just admitted that David Weiss did NOT have full authority during the Hunter Biden investigation.

"They could refuse to partner with him."

This directly contradicts Garland's previous claims about Weiss' authority. pic.twitter.com/xZYJhz2PWG
— House Republicans (@HouseGOP) September 20, 2023

Even after acknowledging Weiss’s attempts to charge Hunter were hampered by a U.S. attorney acting on behalf of the DOJ, Garland doubled down on his claims that the attorney “has full authority to conduct his investigation however he wishes.” He repeatedly invoked Weiss’s position as a Donald Trump appointee as proof that he was acting independently of the AG.

Despite the potential penalty of perjury, Garland claimed during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on March 1, 2023, that “the U.S. Attorney in Delaware has been advised that he has full authority … to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it’s necessary.”

In a June 7 letter to Jordan, Weiss appeared to confirm that “I have been granted ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility for deciding where, when, and whether to file charges.” In a subsequent June 30 letter, however, Weiss reversed his claim and declared that his charging authority “is geographically limited to my home district.”

🚨 MUST WATCH ahead of today’s hearing with Attorney General Garland. pic.twitter.com/0j0qX7TxNm
— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) September 20, 2023

Weiss’s June 30 clarification is consistent with testimony from IRS whistleblowers, including email documentation they recorded in 2022, and testimony from FBI agents. During the hearing, Garland attempted to discredit the agents’ attestations that the DOJ’s “cumbersome bureaucratic process” made it difficult for Weiss to charge Hunter by claiming “their description of the process as cumbersome is an opinion, not a fact.” He also claimed that Weiss’s letters “reflect that he had never asked me to be special counsel and that he understood the process for asking for a signature on a Section 515 form,” the form which Garland needed to sign for Weiss to prosecute outside of Delaware.

Weiss’s lack of jurisdiction was further confirmed in August when Garland named Weiss special counsel, an authority that allows the prosecutor to charge Hunter outside of Delaware. If Weiss truly did possess full autonomy in the Hunter case, as Garland dubiously declared on numerous occasions, he wouldn’t have needed the special counsel appointment to prosecute the president’s son. Garland still claimed he had made it clear that Weiss could bring a case in any jurisdiction with the attorney general’s blessing via a Section 515 form.

For most of the hearing, Garland tried to appear as a hands-off department head who let Weiss independently conduct his investigation. Republicans quickly saw through that facade when Garland immediately refused to disclose whether he had communications with Weiss about Hunter’s case.

.@RepMikeJohnson: "Under oath…your testimony is – you have not had any discussions with Mr. Weiss about this matter?"

GARLAND: "I do not intend to discuss internal Justice Department deliberations, whether or not I had them."

JOHNSON: "So, your testimony today is you're not… pic.twitter.com/Rjmp0zl74U
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) September 20, 2023

He also claimed could not “recollect” whether he discussed the investigation with anyone at the FBI.

QUESTION: "Have you had personal contact with anyone at the FBI headquarters about the Hunter Biden investigation?"

[Long pause]

AG MERRICK GARLAND: "I don't recollect the answer to that question." pic.twitter.com/HSJoaksEJK
— House Republicans (@HouseGOP) September 20, 2023

“There is no question that he can answer whether such conversations occurred,” legal scholar Jonathan Turley noted on X, formerly known as Twitter. “When Bill Barr testified as Attorney General he confirmed subjects even in communications with the President while declining details on conversations.”

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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Here’s How the House Should Grill Attorney General Merrick Garland

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | SEPTEMBER 19, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

Attorney General Merrick Garland is scheduled to testify to the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, marking his first congressional appearance since an IRS whistleblower called into question his claim that U.S. Attorney David Weiss had ultimate charging authority over Hunter Biden. While Garland has much to answer for beyond the botched Hunter Biden investigation — such as the targeting of pro-life protesters — the Judiciary Committee should focus on getting answers to these questions.

The committee should start with a series of direct questions to the AG focused on aspects of the Hunter Biden investigation before confronting Garland with inconsistencies between his prior statements and Weiss and the whistleblowers’ claims. The committee and the country need to understand how the attorney general directed the handling of the Hunter Biden investigation.

Specifically, what if anything did Garland say to Weiss about how the investigation should be run?
Did Garland directly communicate with Weiss?
When and how often?
Did the AG instead assign an assistant attorney general to interact with Weiss?
Who?
When?
What specific authority or concerns did Weiss discuss with Garland or his assistant attorneys general?

Then the $5 million question:

Did Weiss ever discuss special attorney or special counsel status and, if so, when?
A follow-up $5 million question seems exceedingly appropriate in this situation: When did Garland first provide Weiss with authority to prosecute Hunter Biden in other districts?

Of course, we know the answer to that is when Garland named Weiss special counsel, but having the attorney general confirm that reality in sworn testimony provides a nice segue to drill Garland on his prior inconsistent statements:

General Garland, you told Sen. Chuck Grassley on March 1, 2023, quote ‘the U.S. Attorney in Delaware has been advised that he has full authority … to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it’s necessary,’ but that’s not true, is it?

Weiss didn’t have ‘full authority’ until after you named him special counsel, correct?

Beyond Weiss’s charging authority, it’s important to understand the investigative authority the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office held. Was Main Justice updated on the investigation?
Did Main Justice provide oversight to the investigation?
How much?
Did the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office need to seek approval from Main Justice on anything?
If so, on what?
And from whom?
Who decided that Main Justice would provide oversight for the Hunter Biden investigation?
Was Garland informed of Main Justice’s involvement in the investigation?
When?
And if Main Justice was involved in the oversight, didn’t that interfere in the supposed independence of Weiss?

The House Judiciary Committee should also ask Garland about what, if anything, he told other Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys.
Did Garland discuss the Hunter Biden investigation with Matthew Graves, the D.C. U.S. attorney, and Martin Estrada, the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California?
Did he direct those offices to partner with Weiss?
Did Garland know Weiss had wanted to partner with those offices?
Did he know those offices had denied Weiss’s request for them to bring charges against Hunter?
When and how did Garland first learn of Weiss’s interest in bringing charges in California and/or D.C.?

Likewise, Garland should be quizzed on his communications with FBI Director Christopher Wray concerning the role FBI headquarters should (or shouldn’t) have in the Hunter Biden investigation.

Did Garland and Wray discuss the Hunter Biden investigation?
Did Garland allow Wray to decide the propriety of involving FBI headquarters in the investigation?
Did Garland know Wray had permitted FBI headquarters to participate in the investigation and/or decision-making?

The House committee should connect this line of questioning with Garland’s prior testimony to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee in April 2022. Then, the attorney general, in response to a question by Sen. Bill Hagerty, claimed Weiss was “supervising the investigation” and was in “charge of that investigation.”

But if that’s true, why did Weiss’s office have to run things by Main Justice and FBI headquarters?
And for that matter, why did Main Justice and/or FBI headquarters seek the removal of the FBI whistleblowers?

Beyond uncovering the details of the investigation, the House Judiciary Committee should clarify three aspects of the continuing investigation.

First, Garland should be quizzed on the breadth or limits of Weiss’s authority as “special counsel.”
How can Weiss possibly serve in that role and continue as U.S. attorney?
Why did Garland not appoint an outsider, as the regulations require?
What resources has Weiss requested?
Is Weiss staffing up an entirely separate office?
And is that office investigating individuals beyond Hunter Biden?

Second, Garland should be questioned about Department of Justice policies and whether he maintained the policy former Attorney General William Barr put in place about the launching of an investigation against a presidential candidate. Under current regulations, would Special Counsel Weiss’s team need to obtain permission from Garland before running down leads that might implicate Joe Biden in criminal activity?
If not, when, if ever, would they need Garland’s permission to take investigative steps against Joe Biden?
Would Garland tell the country when such authority had been granted?
Has Weiss’s team been given authority to investigate President Biden?

Third, the Judiciary Committee should obtain assurances from Garland that the DOJ will cooperate in the House’s impeachment inquiry and not withhold information or evidence. Garland is unlikely to agree to such a request, however, hedging with claims of protecting an ongoing investigation. Ah, but that would mean there is an ongoing investigation into the president!

But even if there were such an investigation, that does not limit the House’s equal authority to conduct an impeachment inquiry into President Biden. That inquiry, however, can only answer half the scandal, concerning the current president’s potential criminal conduct while vice president. The second half of the scandal concerns the DOJ and FBI’s cover-up.

The House’s questioning of Garland on Wednesday should start to unravel portions of the protect-Biden plot, but if the attorney general continues to stonewall the probe, as he has done in the past, Garland should expect to face his own impeachment inquiry.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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Baltimore FBI Agent Agrees Weiss Didn’t Have Ultimate Authority to Charge Hunter Biden

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | SEPTEMBER 14, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

The assistant special agent in charge (ASAC) of the Baltimore FBI office sat for a transcribed interview on Monday with the House Judiciary Committee. The transcript from the closed-door session, which The Federalist has reviewed in full, reveals a rare find: an FBI agent still involved in the Hunter Biden investigation who will admit the obvious — that Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss did not have ultimate authority to charge the president’s son.

Monday’s interview of the Baltimore ASAC, whose name is being withheld by the House Judiciary Committee, followed the questioning last week of her boss, Thomas Sobocinski, the special agent in charge. Both Sobocinski and the ASAC attended the Oct. 7, 2022, meeting in which, according to IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, Weiss said he was not the final decisionmaker on whether to bring charges against Hunter Biden.

In questioning the ASAC, the Judiciary Committee asked about her understanding of Weiss’s authority. She initially testified that she understood Weiss had the authority “to move forward and bring charges if that was what the determination was and he would go forth in doing that.” But after several back-and-forths, which included the ASAC reviewing the statutory language that would allow Weiss to bring charges in another district, she acknowledged that Weiss did not have the ultimate authority to charge Hunter Biden.

“But based on what we just discussed, it’s true that Mr. Weiss alone was not the deciding person on whether charges are filed?” the House attorney queried.

“I would say, based on the statute, seeing that, as it reads here … yes, I would say that there is someone else, the Attorney General, as it’s noted here in the statute, that is involved in this process,” the ASAC replied.

The House attorney continued: “[I]s it your understanding today that there is another person involved in whether Mr. Weiss could bring charges in another jurisdiction?”

“Yes,” the ASAC concurred.

The ASAC’s answer has been obvious to everyone for months, yet Democrats, the legacy media, and Weiss and Merrick Garland apologists have refused to acknowledge the reality. Even the ASAC’s boss, throughout his interview with the House Judiciary Committee, maintained, “Weiss had the authority in the U.S. to bring the charges where venue presented itself,” wherever he wanted, whether it be in California or D.C. And even when pushed on the limitations of a U.S. attorney’s authority, Sobocinski said Weiss had the authority and it was merely a matter of administrative hoop-jumping for the Delaware U.S. attorney to charge Biden in another district.

In fact, that Sobocinski couldn’t admit the truth rendered his entire testimony not credible. That is precisely why no one should believe anything Weiss and AG Garland say about the Hunter Biden investigation either — because they first deceived Congress and the American public about Weiss’s authority and have since doubled down on their misrepresentations.

Garland, for his part, told Sen. Chuck Grassley under oath that “the U.S. attorney in Delaware has been advised that he has full authority … to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it’s necessary.” Weiss then covered for Garland, telling the House Judiciary Committee in a letter on June 7, 2023, that “as the Attorney General has stated, I have been granted ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility for deciding where, when, and whether to file charges and for making decisions necessary to preserve the integrity of the prosecution…”

Then after the transcript of Shapley’s congressional closed-door interview was released, revealing the whistleblower’s testimony that during the meeting on Oct. 7, 2022, Weiss had said he was not the ultimate decisionmaker on whether to charge Hunter Biden, Weiss clarified his statement. While saying he stood by what he had written in his June 7, 2023, letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Weiss wrote in an early July follow-up letter that he wished to expand on what he meant. He acknowledged that as the U.S. attorney for the District of Delaware, he lacked the authority to charge Hunter Biden in other districts. Yet, not to worry, Weiss assured the House oversight committee: Garland had promised him that, if necessary, the AG would grant Weiss special attorney status to allow him to prosecute Hunter Biden in D.C., California, or any other jurisdiction.

The most revealing fact from Monday’s interview is that it took this long and this ASAC to say openly what the attorney general, the U.S. attorney, and the special agent in charge of the Baltimore FBI field office continue to obfuscate about: Weiss’s pre-special counsel authority. The only real reason to hide the reality that Weiss lacked the authority to charge Hunter Biden in D.C. and California is that it means the failure to charge him for felony tax offenses falls on the U.S. attorneys and attorney general his father appointed.

Thus the ASAC’s testimony also confirmed that the Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in D.C. and California had refused to bring charges against Hunter Biden in their districts where they had proper venue for the alleged tax felonies.

On the question of what, precisely, Weiss had said during the Oct. 7, 2022, meeting, the ASAC was less helpful, however, not remembering many of the details. But not only didn’t she remember what Shapley claimed was said during the meeting. She also didn’t remember what her boss, Sobocinski, admitted to saying during the meeting. Her lack of recall thus doesn’t carry much of a punch, especially when she hadn’t taken notes during the meeting, as Shapley had.

Of course, during the interview, the DOJ and FBI’s attorneys tried to spin Shapley’s email notes as merely a summary of the meeting written later, but the IRS whistleblower has already destroyed that narrative. On Wednesday, his attorneys provided the House Judiciary Committee a copy of the handwritten notes he had taken during the meeting.

While those notes corroborate Shapley’s testimony, we are much beyond the question of what Weiss said during the meeting. We are now at the point that the House needs to launch additional impeachment inquiries of Garland, Weiss, and FBI Director Christopher Wray to uncover what the DOJ and FBI did (or didn’t do) to cover up for Hunter and Joe Biden and then cover up their cover-up.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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IRS Whistleblower Gives Congress More Documents, Boosting His Credibility and Busting the DOJ’s

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | SEPTEMBER 13, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

On Monday, IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley provided congressional oversight committees nine new documents related to the botched Hunter Biden investigation, according to a letter sent Wednesday morning to the House Judiciary Committee. The letter also contained a redacted 10th new document: the handwritten notes Shapley took during the Oct. 7, 2022, meeting in which Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss allegedly announced to his team that he was “not the deciding official on whether charges are filed” against Hunter Biden.

Those handwritten notes further bolster Shapley’s earlier testimony about the meeting and debunk counterclaims by the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Baltimore field office that Weiss had not said he lacked authority to charge Hunter Biden. What the other nine documents reveal, however, remains to be seen.

“Yesterday the Washington Post published a story reportedly based on a transcript it obtained of the Committee’s interview of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Special Agent in Charge Thomas J. Sobocinski,” the letter from Shapley’s Empower Oversight attorneys to the House Judiciary Committee opened. Sobocinski was one of seven attendees at the Oct. 7, 2022, meeting, in which — according to Shapley’s previous testimony, corroborated by an email he sent following the meeting — Weiss said he was “not the deciding official” on whether to charge Hunter Biden and that he had been denied special counsel authority to charge the president’s son in D.C. or California.

As The Federalist reported earlier Wednesday based on its review of the transcript of Sobocinski’s interview, “Sobocinski claimed he did not remember Weiss saying he had sought (and been denied) special counsel status or that Weiss had represented that he was ‘not the deciding official.’” Further, “according to Sobocinski, had Weiss said either of those things, he would have remembered it,” with the FBI agent implying Shapley’s claims were false.

According to the transcript, Sobocinski tried to discredit Shapley’s testimony and the email he had sent following the October meeting by stressing that Shapley had not drafted the email during the meeting and thus the notes were not really “contemporaneous” with Weiss’s supposed statements.

In its Wednesday letter to the Judiciary Committee, Shapley’s legal team responded to Sobocinski’s objections by providing the committee a redacted copy of Shapley’s “contemporaneous handwritten notes,” in order to let the committee “access the truthfulness and reliability of Mr. Sobocinski’s testimony.” Empower Oversight, which represents Shapley, further stressed in its letter that, unlike Shapley, Sobocinski took no notes during the meeting on Oct. 7, 2022.

Shapley’s handwritten notes taken during the meeting do indeed track the email summary he sent later that evening. In his notes, he wrote: “Weiss stated— He is not the deciding person.” This provides strong corroboration for Shapley’s email and his testimony.

Conversely, Sobocinski has nothing to corroborate his (lack of) recollection of the meeting. Sobocinski has also proven himself not credible by testifying that Weiss had ultimate authority to charge Hunter Biden anywhere, anytime — well, kinda, sort of, not really.

While Shapley’s credibility remains bars above Sobocinski’s, the bottom line is it doesn’t really matter what Weiss said during the October meeting. What matters is what happened and whether Biden’s Department of Justice refused to pursue tax felony charges in other venues and kept Weiss from doing so himself. What matters is whether the DOJ and FBI interfered in the Hunter Biden investigation.

On the first question, Americans may never get a clear answer, as Weiss continues to obfuscate and cover for Attorney General Merrick Garland. But on the DOJ and FBI’s interference in the Hunter Biden investigation, there is already overwhelming evidence establishing this scandal — and it isn’t merely coming from Shapley or his fellow IRS whistleblower. Rather, another whistleblower exposed the burying of the FD-1023 form, which implicated both Hunter and Joe Biden in a Burisma bribery scandal. That whistleblower also revealed to Sen. Chuck Grassley that FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten opened an “assessment” in August 2020 to improperly discredit “verified and verifiable” derogatory intel about Hunter Biden.

The nine new documents Shapley provided to the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee may add even more evidence of the DOJ and FBI’s interference in the investigation of the president’s son. But unless and until the committees vote to release that information publicly, they will remain secreted from the American public. Likewise, the redacted portions of Shapley’s handwritten notes will remain confidential as potentially protected taxpayer information until the relevant congressional committees authorize their release.

That may happen sooner than originally planned, however, now that the White House is attempting to spin the impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden as misinformation, with an assist from the DOJ and FBI lawyers representing Sobocinski.

2023-09-13 Letter to House Judiciary – 10-7-22 Notes by The Federalist on Scribdhttps://www.scribd.com/embeds/671047106/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key-eqkS2VXSh3XTA40s9ZCt

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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EXCLUSIVE: FOIA Turns Up Zilch on The ‘Full Authority’ Garland Claims He Gave Weiss Over Hunter Biden

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | SEPTEMBER 07, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

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Emails obtained by the Heritage Foundation following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, and shared exclusively with The Federalist, reveal a glaring gap in the documentation maintained by the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office: There is nothing memorializing the authority Attorney General Merrick Garland claims he gave U.S. Attorney David Weiss for the Hunter Biden investigation.

For more than a year, Garland represented to Congress that Weiss held ultimate authority over the Hunter Biden investigation — which the eventual appointment of Weiss as special counsel contradicted. But now there is more evidence — or rather a lack of evidence — indicating the claimed authority was always a charade.

The Friday before the long holiday weekend, the DOJ provided the Heritage Foundation with the second batch of documents it was ordered by a federal court to produce in response to Heritage’s FOIA lawsuit. This installment concluded the DOJ’s production of the non-exempt documents in Weiss’s custody which concerned his authority for investigating Hunter Biden. But none of the documents produced addressed Weiss’s authority or any authority promised by Garland.

Mike Howell, the director of the Heritage Oversight Project and a co-plaintiff in the FOIA lawsuit against the DOJ, stressed the significance of this omission to The Federalist.

“The DOJ lives on paper.” Anything as important as granting Weiss ultimate authority over an investigation or promising to give him authority to bring charges in another venue, if necessary, “would have been written down,” Howell explained. To Howell, this last batch of documents constitutes an admission by Garland that “there was nothing written down at the DOJ and sent to Weiss, indicating Weiss had any of the authority that Garland claimed he did.”

“We’re beginning to understand why Biden’s DOJ is throwing everything and the kitchen sink at us to fight the release of these records in federal court, all paid for by the taxpayers of course,” Howell told The Federalist.

While the DOJ withheld some documents from the production, claiming various exemptions from FOIA, it is difficult to fathom what FOIA exemption would permit the DOJ to withhold a communication granting Weiss the authority Garland publicly discussed on multiple occasions. When asked why Garland had not memorialized his supposed grant of ultimate authority to Weiss, the DOJ did not respond to The Federalist’s inquiry.

The lack of any materials documenting such authority raises more questions about the statements both Garland and Weiss made to Congress. As far back as April 26, 2022, the attorney general told Tennessee Sen. Bill Hagerty that the “Hunter Biden’s investigation … is being run by and supervised by the United States attorney for the District of Delaware,” and that Weiss “is in charge of that investigation.”

Then on March 1, 2023, Garland unequivocally testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in response to questioning by Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, that “the U.S. attorney in Delaware has been advised that he has full authority … to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it’s necessary.”

Garland maintained that position even after IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley testified that during an Oct. 7, 2022, meeting, “Weiss stated that he is not the deciding person on whether charges are filed.” Specifically, after news broke of the whistleblower’s testimony, Garland said during a press conference that Weiss was assured he could “make a decision to prosecute any way in which he wanted to and in any district in which he wanted to.”

Weiss would later write to Congress to confirm Garland’s position, stating:

I want to make clear that, as the Attorney General has stated, I have been granted ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility for deciding where, when, and whether to file charges and for making decisions necessary to preserve the integrity of the prosecution, consistent with federal law, the Principles of Federal Prosecution, and Departmental regulations.

After the transcript of Shapley’s testimony was released, however, Weiss would walk back his claims by clarifying that what he meant was that Garland had promised him that he would be granted ultimate authority to make charging decisions — not quite the same thing as having that ultimate authority.

Either way, one would presume that if Garland had granted Weiss full authority over the Hunter Biden investigation and promised to authorize him to file charges in other venues, there’d be some documentation to back up the claim. But there was none in the FOIA production.

Of course, after the sweetheart plea deal — footsied out between one of Weiss’s top assistant U.S. attorneys, Lesley Wolf, and Hunter’s attorneys — imploded, Garland named Weiss special counsel. So, the federal prosecutor now has the requisite authority to charge the president’s son in whatever district he wants.

But that belated appointment isn’t a grant of absolution for misleading Congress, which is precisely what appears to have happened. And the documents that weren’t suggest as much.

Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion (forthcoming), National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prive—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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EXCLUSIVE: U.S. Attorney Weiss Colluded With DOJ To Thwart Congressional Questioning, Emails Show

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | AUGUST 28, 2023

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MARGOT CLEVELAND

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Emails obtained by the Heritage Foundation following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit and shared exclusively with The Federalist establish that on multiple occasions, the Department of Justice intervened on behalf of Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss to respond to congressional inquiries related to the Hunter Biden investigation. This revelation raises more questions about the June 7, 2023, letter dispatched to House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan under Weiss’s signature line, in which the Delaware U.S. attorney claimed he had “ultimate authority” over charging decisions related to Hunter Biden. It also suggests Weiss and the DOJ may have conspired to mislead Congress.

Did the DOJ’s Office of Legislative Affairs respond to Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson’s May 9, 2022, letter seeking information concerning the Hunter Biden investigation? Weiss posed that question to one of his lead assistant U.S. attorneys, Shannon Hanson.

“Not to my knowledge,” Hanson replied, followed soon after with a second email noting that Joe Gaeta, the then-deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legislative Affairs, was working on a response. And although Grassley and Johnson had addressed their May 9, 2022, inquiry solely to Weiss, DOJ’s Office of Legislative Affairs would intercede on his behalf, responding in a letter dated June 9, 2022, that the DOJ would not respond to the questions posed.

The following month, Grassley and Johnson dispatched another letter requesting information related to the Hunter Biden investigation, addressing this letter to Weiss, as well as Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray. Again, the Office of Legal Counsel intervened, telling Weiss’s office in an email reviewed by The Federalist that it would “take the lead on drafting a response” to Grassley and Johnson’s letter.

These never-before-seen emails establish the Department of Justice and U.S. attorney collaborated in responding to congressional inquiries and were among the first batch of documents provided to the Heritage Foundation following a court order last week in Heritage’s FOIA case against the DOJ. That court order required the DOJ to produce, by Aug. 25, 2023, all records collected from Weiss and Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf that were responsive to the Heritage FOIA lawsuit.

Mike Howell, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, initiated the FOIA request and then filed suit against the DOJ after the Biden administration attempted to slow-walk the production. Howell told The Federalist the emails show that while Garland was claiming Weiss had the independence to bring whatever charges he wanted, Garland was “simultaneously running communications from Weiss to Grassley through the political controls of Main Justice.” “It is a slap in the face,” Howell said.

Significantly, the emails also call into question the veracity of a series of exchanges between Weiss and Jordan, beginning with Weiss’s June 7 response to the May 25, 2023, letter Jordan sent to Garland. In that May 25 letter, Jordan questioned Garland on the removal of the IRS whistleblowers from the Hunter Biden investigation.

Even though the House committee addressed that letter solely to Attorney General Garland, Weiss responded to the inquiry on June 7 in a letter, which opened: “Your May 25th letter to Attorney General Garland was forwarded to me, with a request that I respond on behalf of the Department.” Weiss then claimed that, as Garland had stated, the Delaware U.S. attorney had “been granted ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility for deciding where, when, and whether to file charges and for making decisions necessary to preserve the integrity of the prosecution…”

Two more letters would soon follow, the first being to Weiss from Jordan on June 22. In that letter, Jordan reiterated the Judiciary Committee’s need for substantive responses, before asking Weiss for more details “in light of the unusual nature of your response on behalf of Attorney General Garland…” Specifically, Jordan asked for information concerning the names of individuals who drafted or assisted in drafting the June 7, 2023, letter, as well as details concerning the drafting and dispatching of the letter.

Weiss responded in a June 30 letter that he was not at liberty to provide substantive responses to the questions concerning an ongoing investigation. The Delaware U.S. attorney then sidestepped questions about the DOJ’s role in drafting the June 7 letter, stating only that he “would like to reaffirm the contents of the June 7 letter drafted by my office” — a statement representing that the Delaware office had composed the letter.

Weiss then proceeded to “expand” on what he meant when he said in his June 7 letter that he had ultimate charging authority, writing:

As the U.S. Attorney for the District of Delaware, my charging authority is geographically limited to my home district. If venue for a case lies elsewhere, common Departmental practice is to contact the United States Attorney’s Office for the district in question and determine whether it wants to partner on the case. If not, I may request Special Attorney status from the Attorney General pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 515. Here, I have been assured that, if necessary, after the above process, I would be granted § 515 Authority in the District of Columbia, the Central District of California, or any other district where charges could be brought in this matter.

Of course, having ultimate authority and being assured that you would be given ultimate authority, if need be, are two different things. But the scandal goes beyond Weiss not having the authority to charge Hunter Biden, to what clearly seems to be an attempt by the DOJ and Weiss to mislead Congress.

It’s important to remember that when Weiss sent the June 7 letter to Jordan, the whistleblowers’ transcripts had not yet been released. Thus, neither Weiss nor the DOJ knew the specifics of the whistleblowers’ testimony, leading them to represent to Congress that Weiss had ultimate decision-making authority — something Weiss would later have to massage. Weiss’s questionable statements didn’t end there, however. In the June 30 letter, Weiss represented to Congress that he had drafted the June 7 letter.

But why would Weiss draft the June 7 letter? That letter was not even addressed to Weiss. And the emails obtained by the Heritage Foundation establish that even when congressional oversight letters were addressed directly to the Delaware U.S. attorney, Weiss did not answer them. Instead, the DOJ’s Office of Legislative Affairs intervened and spoke on his behalf.

There is a second reason to suspect Weiss did not draft the June 7 letter: the footnote reference in the correspondence to the Linder letter.

Tristan Leavitt, a former Capitol Hill staffer and the president of Empower Oversight, which is helping represent IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, told The Federalist that when he “worked on Capitol Hill (particularly on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which did regular oversight of the Justice Department), the Department’s Office of Legislative Affairs frequently referenced the otherwise-obscure Linder letter in response to congressional oversight.”

“It’s hard to imagine the letter was widely known outside of Justice Department headquarters,” Leavitt continued, “especially in U.S. attorneys’ offices, which almost never respond directly to congressional correspondence.”

Conversely, it is easy to imagine Main Justice drafting the June 7 letter on behalf of Weiss to provide Garland cover and to seemingly corroborate the attorney general’s Senate testimony that he had given Weiss full authority to make charging decisions in the Hunter Biden investigation.

That cover may soon be blown away, however, thanks to the Heritage Foundation.

“The only reason these documents are starting to trickle out is because we sued for transparency,” Howell told The Federalist. “We’ve faced taxpayer funded resistance at every step of the way and haven’t given up,” he added, noting that “the DOJ is under a judicial order to continue this production.”

The next round of responsive documents is due by Oct. 31, and since none of the documents produced to date include references to Jordan’s May 25, 2023, letter, it seems likely we’ll see those emails in the next batch — unless House Republicans seek access to them first through a subpoena.

This article has been updated since publication.

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.

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No, Appointing A ‘Special Counsel’ Is Not a License for DOJ To Obstruct Congress

BY: TRISTAN LEAVITT AND JASON FOSTER | AUGUST 21, 2023

TRISTAN LEAVITT AND JASON FOSTER

The need for more public scrutiny of the Justice Department’s improper handling of the Hunter Biden case was already high following whistleblower revelations, the collapse of the sweetheart plea deal, and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss as “special counsel.” Now, the Biden legal team has apparently released a trove of its emails with prosecutors to friendly press. These new revelations about Justice Department collusion with Biden family lawyers make it clear the two sides acted essentially as allies to kill the case, and it almost worked.

It is now more important than ever that Congress get serious about obtaining answers from the DOJ. Our client, IRS supervisor Gary Shapley, and IRS case agent Joe Ziegler both blew the whistle to Congress regarding five years’ worth of political favoritism, pulling punches, and conflicts of interest in the Biden case on Weiss’s watch. Since then, they’ve been threatened, retaliated against, and removed from the case.

On March 1, 2023, Garland swore to Congress that the buck stopped with Weiss alone in the Hunter Biden case. But the Justice Department’s actions directly undercut his claims. Just weeks later, DOJ headquarters officials granted an audience for Biden lawyers to appeal above Weiss’s head, and soon an unprecedented generous plea deal with the president’s son was offered as the whistleblowers were removed from the case. Only after that plea agreement fell apart in open court on July 26 did Garland finally give Weiss the “special” authority they both claimed this year he did not need.

U.S. Attorney Weiss was obviously the wrong choice for special counsel because IRS whistleblowers had already credibly alleged that his own office and he himself had given Biden preferential treatment and provided misleading information to Congress. With his appointment as special counsel, many across the political spectrum (including perhaps Garland) seemed to think that move somehow insulated the Justice Department from congressional questioning about the growing controversy. But it shouldn’t.

Nothing in the Constitution grants prosecutors or “special” or “independent” counsels immunity from congressional oversight — especially in this unprecedented situation where the special counsel himself is alleged to have committed wrongdoing. No matter how many insiders in the modern D.C. establishment assume otherwise, that does not make it true. Prosecutors wield immense power, and there must be a check against the abuse and selective use of that power.

Just because Congress chooses to defer to the Justice Department’s “ongoing criminal inquiry” excuse on some oversight inquiries does not mean it always must, or that the objection is based on any constitutional limit to the congressional power to investigate. Congress has frequently made the opposite judgment and successfully obtained information about ongoing criminal cases when needed for its oversight function.

In our previous combined 30-year careers on Capitol Hill, we personally led congressional probes related to ongoing law enforcement matters, including the Anthrax attacks, Operation Fast and Furious, Secret Service scandals, the Clinton email server, the Parkland school shooting, the Trump-Russia allegations, and many more. We have conducted transcribed interviews of officials from line attorneys and line agents up to the deputy attorney general. We obtained sensitive law enforcement information about ongoing matters in official briefings from senior officials, including the then-FBI director, as well as lawfully from executive branch whistleblowers without the knowledge or consent of their agency management.

And that’s just our personal experience. There’s also a long, well-documented history of extensive federal law enforcement oversight by Congress, even in ongoing cases. So it is simply uninformed and untrue to claim that constitutional oversight interest must yield to ongoing criminal matters. The truth is quite the opposite — especially when government misconduct is involved.

The Justice Department doesn’t even believe its own rhetoric on the sanctity of information about ongoing criminal cases. Its senior officials routinely leak information about ongoing cases to friendly media outlets with no consequence whenever it suits them — as they no doubt have done in this case. The same officials simultaneously and hypocritically claim they must stiff-arm legitimate congressional oversight to preserve the “integrity” of pending criminal matters. In reality, more forceful congressional oversight is exactly what’s needed to restore public faith in the integrity of how the DOJ handles high-profile criminal cases.

The appointment of Weiss and the controversies that led to it raise serious questions about Justice Department misconduct, and those questions need not be sidelined indefinitely in deference to the very process in need of scrutiny right now.

An Inadequate Regulatory Solution

The current “special counsel” designation is rooted in Justice Department regulations adopted under Attorney General Janet Reno in 1999 after Congress allowed the old “independent counsel” statute to lapse. That law had fueled sprawling inquiries from Iran-Contra to Whitewater by prosecutors overseen by a court rather than by the attorney general. Although that law ensured more independence than the current regulations, it led to excesses that eventually generated bipartisan opposition to renewing the statute.

The DOJ recognized conflicts of interest would still arise and threaten public confidence in its integrity. The special counsel regulations were meant to address that problem. However, attorneys general have only selectively followed portions of the regulations, choosing to ignore certain provisions when it suits them because there is no enforcement mechanism. For example, by appointing the current U.S. attorney from Delaware who has already been handling this case for five years, Garland chose to ignore the portion of the regulations that would require a special counsel be someone from outside the government. In light of the whistleblower testimony and the failed plea deal, that decision undermines public confidence in the inquiry rather than enhancing it.

Without any binding force of law, this type of special counsel status isn’t actually all that special. The named prosecutor actually just exercises the attorney general’s own statutory authority as delegated and described in the appointment order. Since Congress defines the scope of the attorney general’s statutory authority, it has every right to investigate how that authority is being used and whether the DOJ’s procedures are effective in preventing conflicts of interest.

Spoiler alert: They aren’t.

Studying whether to resurrect some form of the independent counsel statute or impose some portions of the special counsel regulations as a statutory requirement would be more than enough of a legislative purpose to justify enforcing subpoenas to the Delaware prosecutors. Add to that evidence of misleading testimony and letters to Congress about the scope of Weiss’s authority, and the case for compelled testimony and document production is already very strong — even without any formal impeachment inquiry into the officials involved.

Statutes Recognize Congressional Access

To hear some people talk, you’d think Congress must inevitably yield to the interests of any criminal inquiry and defer to any prosecutor’s discretionary whim with no public accountability. This is the unstated assumption of those who eagerly embrace lawfare against domestic political opponents through the criminal process. It is uncritically adopted too often by people who should know better.

The law recognizes, however, that insulating ongoing criminal cases from public scrutiny by elected officials is not the prime goal of government. The presidential pardon power is the ultimate example of this principle, but it can also be seen in several statutory provisions that recognize: The congressional need for information to fulfill its constitutional duties can trump the interests of preserving a criminal case.

As Iran-Contra Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh noted:

The legislative branch has the power to decide whether it is more important perhaps to destroy a prosecution than to hold back testimony they need. They make that decision. It is not a judicial decision, or a legal decision, but a political decision of the highest importance.

He should know. Oliver North’s famously immunized testimony before Congress eventually led to Walsh’s conviction of North being overturned on appeal.

The statutory procedure for Congress to obtain an order granting immunity for witness testimony is set out at 18 U.S.C. § 6005 and implicitly anticipates sharing information about ongoing criminal matters with Congress. The law requires that the attorney general receive 10 days prior notice of the request and allows a delay of up to 20 days, but it does not allow the attorney general to block the order. The notice and delay period merely enable consultation, during which the attorney general would presumably need to share information about any ongoing criminal inquiry if there were any hope of persuading Congress to abandon its plan to immunize the witness.

Similarly, statutes like 26 U.S.C. § 6103(f)(5) (“Disclosure by whistleblower”) explicitly authorize protected disclosures of otherwise confidential tax return information to certain committees of Congress without regard to whether it’s related to an ongoing criminal inquiry. If not for this provision, Congress may never have learned about improprieties in the Hunter Biden case reported by the IRS whistleblowers. Whistleblower statutes such as 5 U.S.C. § 2302 and § 2303 also protect disclosures to Congress by law enforcement personnel at other agencies, including the FBI.

A Long History of Precedents

Congress has many times obtained testimony and documents from prosecutors involved in active probes, including deliberative prosecutorial memoranda. Below are just a handful of the dozens from the past century.

Palmer Raids: In 1920 and 1921, Congress investigated Attorney General Mitchell Palmer’s raids on suspected communists, and Palmer testified in public House and Senate hearings regarding deportation cases open on appeal.

Teapot Dome: The next year, Congress opened investigations into the Teapot Dome scandal. After Congress investigated for approximately a year and a half suspicious financial transactions surrounding the Interior Department’s disposition of oil and gas leases, it eventually became clear that an equally big problem was the Justice Department’s failure to prosecute wrongdoers.

When Congress began discussing the need for a special counsel to take prosecutions out of the hands of the Justice Department, President Calvin Coolidge attempted to get ahead of the issue by indicating on Jan. 27, 1924, his intent to nominate two such special counsels (a Republican and a Democrat). Congress adopted a joint resolution requiring that the president appoint the special counsels — subject to confirmation by the Senate. After rejecting the first two nominees, the Senate confirmed two others in mid-February 1924.

Congress did not wait for the newly confirmed counsels to finish their work. On March 1, 1924, the Senate established its own select committee to investigate the same prosecutorial decisions for which the special counsel now had jurisdiction. Its goal was to probe the Justice Department’s prosecutorial decisions and find cases that could still be prosecuted. It interviewed dozens of Justice Department attorneys — including about open cases — and obtained investigative records and prosecutorial memoranda.

When Attorney General Harry Daugherty’s brother refused to testify on the grounds that he was a private citizen, the case rose to the Supreme Court. The 1927 decision in McGrain v. Daugherty “sustain[ed] the power of either house to conduct investigations and exact testimony from witnesses for legislative purposes.” In this case, it noted, “[T]he subject to be investigated was the administration of the Department of Justice — whether its functions were being properly discharged or were being neglected or misdirected, and particularly whether the Attorney General and his assistants were performing or neglecting their duties in respect of the institution and prosecution of proceedings to punish crimes and enforce appropriate remedies against the wrongdoers, specific instances of alleged neglect being recited.”

But what legislative purpose could come from investigating open cases? The court answered:

The functions of the Department of Justice, the powers and duties of the Attorney General, and the duties of his assistants are all subject to regulation by congressional legislation, and … the department is maintained and its activities are carried on under such appropriations as, in the judgment of Congress, are needed from year to year.

The Supreme Court also reaffirmed in this case Congress’s inherent power to punish witnesses who refused to provide testimony. The court noted in Daugherty:

The power of inquiry — with process to enforce it — is an essential and appropriate auxiliary to the legislative function. … Mere requests for … information often are unavailing, and also that information which is volunteered is not always accurate or complete, so some means of compulsion are essential to obtain what is needed.

Two years later, another subject of the investigation, Harry Sinclair, argued before the Supreme Court that because the joint resolution signed into law on Feb. 8, 1924, gave a special counsel jurisdiction to investigate his affairs, Congress has ceded its own such jurisdiction to the courts. The court held in Sinclair v. United States: “Neither [the] Joint Resolution … nor the action taken under it operated to divest the Senate or the committee of power further to investigate. … The authority of that body, directly or through its committees, to require pertinent disclosures in aid of its own constitutional power is not abridged because the information sought to be elicited may also be of use in [the prosecution of pending] suits.” The court upheld Sinclair’s punishment for contempt of Congress.

Special Subcommittee to Investigate the Department of Justice: In early 1952, the House established a select committee of the Judiciary Committee to investigate (among other things) the Justice Department’s failure to enforce federal tax fraud and bribery laws. Around the same time, the attorney general appointed a “Special Assistant to the Attorney General,” Newbold Morris, to investigate the same matters.

Morris was fired by the attorney general just 63 days later and thus did not testify before the subcommittee until a week after his removal. However, in its overall review of the Justice Department’s failure to prosecute cases, the subcommittee went on to interview a sitting assistant U.S. attorney and the appellate chief of the Justice Department’s Tax Division, as well as several members of a St. Louis grand jury.

Church Committee: In January 1975, revelations emerging from Watergate — that the executive branch has used intelligence agencies to conduct domestic operations — led to the Senate establishing a select committee that came to be known for its chairman, Sen. Frank Church. The 800-plus witnesses interviewed over the next year included a host of Justice Department officials, from the attorney general down to an assistant section chief at the FBI. Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights also held hearings with sitting DOJ officials.

Billy Carter: In July 1980, the Senate established a select committee of its Judiciary Committee to investigate the relationship between President Jimmy Carter’s brother, Billy Carter, and the government of Libya, as well as whether the Justice Department had properly handled an investigation into that relationship and a decision to proceed civilly rather than with criminal prosecution.

The attorney general, the assistant attorney general over the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, and three deputy assistant attorneys general all provided testimony to the subcommittee. The department also provided prosecutorial memoranda, correspondence with the defendant, and other investigative reports and interview summaries.

ABSCAM: In late-March 1982, the Senate established a select committee to study Justice Department domestic undercover operations. The committee conducted interviews of a host of department witnesses, including line-level attorneys on Brooklyn’s Organized Crime Strike Force.

Recognizing that their preferences had to bow to constitutional oversight realities, Justice officials wrote to the select committee on July 15, 1982: “[T]he Department does not normally permit Strike Force attorneys to testify before congressional committees. … [W]e have traditionally resisted questioning of this kind because it tends to inhibit prosecutors from proceeding through their normal tasks free from the fear that they may be second-guessed, with the benefit of hindsight, long after they take actions and make difficult judgments in the course of their duties.”

In a statement that applies to all investigative interviews, the DOJ added that it would produce line-level attorneys “because of their value to you as fact witnesses and because you have assured us that they will be asked to testify solely as to matters of fact within their personal knowledge and not conclusions or matters of policy.” The department also produced more than 20,000 pages of documents, including prosecutorial memoranda. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights conducted a similar investigation, also receiving access to confidential DOJ documents.

E.F. Hutton: In 1985 and 1986, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime investigated the Justice Department’s conclusion of a plea agreement with stock brokerage firm E.F. Hutton. Hutton pleaded guilty to 2,000 counts of felony mail and wire fraud in May 1985, yet the department immunized a number of witnesses and ultimately charged none, instead simply requiring the payment of a $2 million fine and other conditions. The Justice Department produced a prosecutorial memorandum to the subcommittee.

Iran-Contra: On Jan. 6 and 7, 1987, the Senate and House, respectively, established select committees to investigate arms sales to Iran and the diversion of funds to Contras in Nicaragua. The two chambers then merged their investigations and hearings. The investigators had approximately 500 depositions and other interviews, from the attorney general down to the lowest-level Justice Department officials with knowledge of the case. Despite initial protests by the department that producing documents might prejudice pending or anticipated litigation by the independent counsel, the 1 million-plus pages of documents obtained by the committees included the documents they sought from the DOJ.

Ruby Ridge: In 1995, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Government Information investigated the Justice Department’s conduct preceding and during the siege of Randall Weaver’s home at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. The subcommittee interviewed line witnesses and agents, the U.S. attorney for the District of Idaho, and other department officials.

Operation Fast and Furious: Beginning in 2011, we led Sen. Chuck Grassley’s investigation for the Senate Judiciary Committee into the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ Operation Fast and Furious, where the gunwalking of more than 2,000 firearms contributed to the murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. We interviewed line officials, the U.S. attorney for the District of Arizona, and the chain of command in ATF and into the Justice Department, all while the prosecutions and appeals of various individuals charged in the operation were ongoing.

Congress Must Act

Given all this history and our personal experience in congressional oversight of federal law enforcement, it is frustrating to see even some members of Congress uncritically assume that their authority ends where a criminal inquiry begins.

It does not.

While it is clearly not a prerequisite to obtaining Justice Department testimony or documents in pending matters, several of the investigations above began with the body voting to establish a select committee. The current House has the added advantage of having already empaneled the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government and tasked it with looking into the expansive authority vested in the executive branch to investigate citizens of the United States, “including ongoing criminal investigations.” Surely an example like this where that expansive authority was not used against the president’s son in the same aggressive ways it has been used in others is worthy of investigation.

By providing hundreds of emails between the Biden camp and the Justice Department to friendly press outlets, either Hunter Biden’s legal team or the Justice Department has waived any claim of confidentiality. Congress should subpoena those communications immediately and let the public read them in full rather than relying on selected snippets chosen for curated narratives.

We aren’t suggesting that enforcing Congress’s constitutional right to information on pending criminal inquiries will be easy. It will take work and a shift in mindset away from relying on the executive branch or the courts to vindicate legislative branch oversight prerogatives. Congress must rely on its own constitutional powers — inherent contempt, the power of the purse, and impeachment — to be an effective check and balance on executive power once again.

Tristan Leavitt is the president of Empower Oversight. Jason Foster is the founder and chair of Empower Oversight.

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The Longer Republicans Sit On Their Hands, The More Likely America’s Self-Destruction Becomes Irreversible

BY: JORDAN BOYD | AUGUST 15, 2023

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Friday that U.S. attorney for the District of Delaware David Weiss, who orchestrated Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal, will now serve as special counsel in the government’s probe of the Biden family business. The blatantly partisan decision to appoint a co-conspirator in the plot to cover up the Biden family business should not go unpunished. Republicans should start by impeaching Garland, whose track record even before the recent special counsel appointment was worth immense scrutiny. Garland’s decision to bestow special privileges and status on yet another one of Biden’s corrupt deep-state attorneys only adds to the growing list of reasons why he should be prosecuted and removed.

Garland isn’t the only one who should pay. The whole DOJ, its pawns in the FBI, and whoever in the White House is giving them orders should be held to account for their travesties against the American people. The Biden administration shouldn’t get away with its attempts to obstruct the Democrat president’s role in an international influence-peddling scheme. Unfortunately, the corrupt bureaucracy’s Biden business cover-up is only part of the downfall of the nation.

Any American can see that the biggest election-rigging plot to date is happening right under their noses. Every time there is a bombshell breakthrough in the Biden family corruption case, former President Donald Trump is punished with more concocted charges and indictments. Now more than ever, the right must fight back. If Republicans don’t use their majority in the House and the thin margin in the Senate to curb the deep state, they may never have a chance again.

That sounds dramatic, but it’s true. One look at the actions of the Biden administration and its leftist cronies shows they want nothing more than to undercut the foundational principles of our constitutional republic and replace them with leftist fantasies. Already, leftists have worked overtime to ensure the nation’s cities burned, hardworking taxpayers were forced out of their jobs over a jab, national security was comprised thanks to a wide-open southern border, and American voters didn’t get all of the information they needed to make an informed decision during the 2016, 2020, and now 2024 election cycle.

The few institutions the left doesn’t quite dominate, such as the Supreme Court, are constantly threatened with smears and court-packing campaigns. Red states that have rejected the left’s advances face lawsuits from the feds and out-of-state-funded ballot measures designed to make them look like blue states. As I write, the unconstitutional left is trying to overturn election integrity laws so it is easier to permanently put themselves in power. Once that is accomplished, there’s little to nothing that can be done to fight it. The authoritarian takeover is happening in plain sight, and Republicans are doing very little, if anything, to stop it.

Democrats love to use “X thing or person is a threat to democracy” as the justification for their unconstitutional actions. In reality, leftists and their radical agenda are the biggest threats our self-government faces today.

Impeachment can’t wait until Congress is back from its summer vacation. Defunding the FBI can’t wait until the spineless Senate Republicans get on board. Protecting our elections can’t wait until the corporate media are busy spinning on other issues.

The best time for the right to ward off the destruction of the country is now. Those Republicans who are silent now are throwing American voters to the wolves. Without a defense against a corrupt regime that has no problems imprisoning its political enemies and those it deems guilty of wrongthink, Americans and the founding principles that inspire and invigorate them will be long gone.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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Ted Cruz: Trump Indictment Is Election Tampering for 2024

By Sandy Fitzgerald | Thursday, 27 July 2023 08:59 AM EDT

Democrats “hate democracy” and are “deathly afraid” that voters will elect former President Donald Trump to return to the White House, so they are pushing for him to be indicted on various charges to keep that from happening, Sen. Ted Cruz tells Newsmax.

“They are trying to use the machinery of law enforcement to prosecute him,” the Texas Republican said on Newsmax’s “Eric Bolling The Balance” on Wednesday night. “I think these indictments are a disgrace.”

Trump last week said he got a letter from special counsel Jack Smith to inform him that he is the target of the federal investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021 events at the Capitol. The letter comes after Trump was charged and pleaded not guilty in June to a 37-count federal indictment in connection with his handling of presidential documents. Trump also pleaded not guilty in April to a 34-count indictment filed in New York through Democrat Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

The former president, now a front-runner in the campaign for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination, is also under investigation in Georgia concerning allegations that he tried to overturn the state’s results in the 2020 presidential election.

Cruz told Bolling that he not only believes indicting Trump in connection with the Jan. 6 protests would be an “abuse of power,” but he thinks “each of the Trump indictments we’ve seen so far are abuses of power.”

“They are politicizing the Justice Department,” the senator said. “This Department of Justice, this attorney general, this FBI is the most politicized and weaponized we’ve ever seen.”

Further, Cruz called for Attorney Merrick Garland’s impeachment and removal from office “for allowing the Department of Justice to be turned into a partisan hammer to attack the political enemies of the White House.”

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Biden Family Scandals Are So Much Bigger Than Hunter’s Hookers And Burisma Bribery

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 26, 2023

Joe Biden at his desk talking on the phone in black and white

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

When the New York Post broke the news that documents recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop implicated Joe Biden in a pay-to-play scandal, the corporate media — to the extent they didn’t frame the story as Russian disinformation — pretended the reporting solely concerned Hunter Biden’s personal life. The scandal, however, was never about Hunter’s sordid sex life and history of drug abuse. Rather, it concerned Joe Biden’s abuse of power as vice president for financial gain. But now it reaches much further — including 10 distinct scandals.

Saturated in Scandal

1. The Many (Uncharged) Crimes of Hunter Biden

While the current scandals swirling around the laptop are unrelated to Hunter Biden’s sex life or drug abuse, the president’s son features in the first scandal: Evidence indicates Hunter Biden committed numerous crimes, including felonies. Evidence suggests Hunter Biden acted as an unregistered foreign agent for, at a minimum, Ukraine and China in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The confidential human source’s (CHS) reporting suggests Hunter also accepted bribes from Burisma or alternatively helped extort $10 million from the Ukrainian oil and gas company for himself and his father.

IRS whistleblowers and federal prosecutors also believed the evidence supported multiple felony tax counts. Lying on a federal firearm application is a serious felony as well.

The evidence that the president’s son likely engaged in extensive criminal conduct for over a decade is a huge scandal, but it also bred a separate scandal: the DOJ and FBI’s efforts to protect him, No. 7 below.

2. Joe Biden’s Business Lie

Hunter Biden’s laptop also exposed the reality that Joe Biden lied to the American public, dating back to September 2019. During a campaign stop, the then-Democrat presidential candidate snapped at Fox News’ Peter Doocy, claiming: “I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.”

More than two years later, after The Washington Post and New York Times belatedly confirmed the authenticity of the emails recovered from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, Doocy asked then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki whether “President Biden still maintains he never discussed overseas business deals with his son Hunter,” to which Psaki replied, “Yes.”

While Biden and his team stuck with that lie for two-plus years, his current press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, is attempting to snuff out that scandal by reframing Biden’s denial. “I’ve been asked this question a million times. The answer is not going to change. The answer remains the same: The president was never in business with his son,” Jean-Pierre said on Monday.

Moving the goalposts won’t erase the lie.

3. Joe Biden’s Corruption

The much more serious scandal, however, concerns extensive evidence of Joe Biden’s widespread corruption. Bank and corporate records, suspicious activity reports, emails and text messages recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop, travel records, reporting from a “highly credible” CHS, and testimony and expected testimony from Hunter Biden’s business partners indicate that Joe Biden, while vice president, exchanged political favors for payments to his family members — with a cut of the cash coming to the “Big Guy.”

People and/or organizations from Romania, Ukraine, Russia, and China, among others, all paid Biden-related business entities millions of dollars, with evidence indicating the now-president received a cut of the bribes. The evidence indicates that in exchange, the individuals received access to the then-vice president. In the case of Ukraine, Biden forced the firing of the prosecutor general who was investigating Burisma, the company where Hunter held a board seat and which allegedly paid Joe and Hunter Biden each $5 million in bribes.

The evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption is bad enough, but the scandal deepens when one considers the president has supplied Ukraine with cluster bombs and billions in American tax dollars.

Cover-Ups

While the first three scandals involve misconduct and likely criminality by Hunter and Joe Biden, there are at least twice as many distinct scandals that flow from cover-up efforts to protect the Bidens.

4. FBI’s Interference in the 2020 Election

By December 2019, the FBI had authenticated the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware. Yet, knowing the laptop was real and contained spectacularly damaging details implicating Joe Biden in corruption, the FBI spent the months leading up to the November 2020 election grooming tech giants to believe a “hack-and-leak operation” was imminent. The FBI also pushed social media companies to change their terms of service to prohibit the posting of so-called hacked materials.

These combined efforts prompted social media companies to censor the New York Post’s Oct. 14, 2020 blockbuster article, “Smoking-Gun Email Reveals How Hunter Biden Introduced Ukrainian Businessman to VP Dad.” After the story broke and after initially confirming its authenticity to Twitter, the FBI refused to comment on whether the material had been hacked or was Russian disinformation, leading to its continued widespread censorship. Not only did the FBI improperly protect Joe Biden and prompt the censorship of true political speech, it interfered in the 2020 election and likely handed Biden the White House.

5. Intelligence Agencies’ Interference in the 2020 Election

Former and current members of intelligence agencies soon joined the FBI in interfering in the 2020 election. The House Intelligence and Weaponization Committees previously detailed evidence of that interference in their report titled, “How Senior Intelligence Community Officials and the Biden Campaign Worked to Mislead American Voters.”

That report established that the infamous October 2020 letter, which was signed by 51 former intelligence officials and falsely framed the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation, was concocted by Biden-campaign officials, including now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who served as a senior adviser to the Biden campaign. Then-candidate Joe Biden would cite that letter in his final debate with Donald Trump to lie to the American people (again), telling the country the laptop was Russian disinformation.

It is scandalous that scores of former intelligence officials would use their prior positions and reputations to deceive Americans in a way that likely affected the 2020 election. That any of those individuals retained security clearances adds to the scandal, as does the role of the Biden campaign and the involvement of at least one CIA employee in soliciting signatories for the statement.

6. Intel Agencies’ Failure to Protect America Against Foreign Influence

Not only did intelligence agencies interfere in the 2020 election, but in their efforts to protect Joe Biden, they likely also failed to provide necessary defensive briefings, putting Americans at risk.

To protect our country, intelligence officials must have frank discussions with leaders (and candidates) about the risks of foreign malign influence. Given how hard the FBI and intelligence agencies tried to bury the news of the laptop, it seems likely they omitted any reference to the laptop and details contained on it in briefings to then-President Trump, then-candidate Biden, and the Biden campaign.

To date, this scandal has been overlooked and merits further inquiry to determine whether the intelligence apparatus fulfilled its duty to the country or omitted inconvenient facts in briefings to protect Joe Biden. Of particular concern is whether intelligence agencies assessed and warned about the risk that the Russians had stolen a second Hunter Biden laptop that contain materials the Biden son believed rendered him susceptible to blackmail.

7. DOJ and FBI’s Handling of Biden Investigations

When it comes to how the DOJ and FBI handled investigations into Biden family corruption, the evidence of potential misconduct is overwhelming.

Broadly, this scandal includes conflicts of interest between Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys — including the Pennsylvania U.S. attorney handling an investigation into the Jim Biden-connected company Americorp, and the California and D.C. U.S. attorneys who reportedly refused to bring felony charges against Hunter Biden. Likewise, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s conflict of interest proves scandalous given the numerous efforts by the DOJ and FBI headquarters to interfere in the investigations.

Beyond conflicts of interest, the IRS whistleblowers and another whistleblower who’s provided information to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, have revealed numerous instances of DOJ and FBI procedural violations, the burying of evidence such as the FD-1023, the false labeling of derogatory evidence as disinformation, and limits on the investigative steps agents could take. Consequently, the DOJ charged Hunter Biden only with misdemeanors and one firearm felony that could be dropped, and to date it appears no investigation has occurred into Joe Biden or his brother, Jim Biden, on allegations of bribery and money laundering.

While Democrats counter the growing evidence of corruption by wrongly claiming it has not been corroborated, that fact does not vindicate the Bidens: It implicates the DOJ and FBI in a separate scandal.

Cover-Ups of the Cover-Ups

8. DOJ and FBI’s Cover-Up of Failure to Investigate Bidens

Once whistleblowers began exposing the Biden administration’s interference in the family’s pay-to-play investigation, the DOJ and FBI began to cover-up the cover-up. We saw this most clearly when Garland professed that there was no political interference in U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s investigation into Hunter Biden. Garland stressed that, as a Trump holdover, Americans could trust Weiss’s independence.

Garland’s testimony cannot be squared with the extensive interference coming from FBI headquarters and the limitations the DOJ placed on investigative techniques. When Grassley pushed on the point, Garland maintained that Weiss had ultimate charging authority. According to an IRS whistleblower, however, Weiss said otherwise, claiming he wasn’t the ultimate decision-maker.

Here, the cover-up of the cover-up began in earnest, with Garland and Weiss writing a series of letters and making public statements that attempted to obscure the ultimate question of whether Weiss had ultimate authority to charge Hunter Biden and whether DOJ or FBI headquarters interfered in the investigation. This scandal has yet to be unraveled. But on Monday, the DOJ sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee offering up Weiss to testify — indicating Biden’s Justice Department might be preparing to throw Weiss under the bus.

9. Democrats Lying to Protect Joe Biden

Many Democrats are also wrapped up in lying to protect Joe Biden. Some of these lies predate the election when they spun the laptop as Russian disinformation. But more recently, we saw Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin lying to the American public about the FD-1023 form. Had former Attorney General William Barr not gone on the record to correct Raskin’s falsehood, the public would have been none the wiser.

Seeking to protect Joe Biden from damning bribery claims, Raskin falsely claimed that Trump appointees Barr and U.S. Attorney Scott Brady had reviewed the CHS’s reporting contained in a June 2020 FD-1023 form and closed out the investigation. Raskin also portrayed the CHS’s reporting as connected to Rudy Giuliani.

But as The Federalist first reported, Barr unequivocally said that Raskin’s claim was “not true.” The investigation into the FD-1023 “wasn’t closed down.” “On the contrary,” Barr stressed, “it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.” Likewise, Barr explained the CHS’s reporting was unrelated to Giuliani.

10. Press Acting as Biden-Run Media

When the Post broke the laptop story, the legacy media either silenced it or framed it as Russian disinformation. Even two years later, after belatedly authenticating the material recovered from Hunter Biden’s computer, the corporate media refused to cover the implications — that the emails, documents, and texts indicated Joe Biden was involved in a massive corruption scandal. The corrupt press still refuses to cover the news fairly, opting instead to brand the evidence as a conspiracy theory.

The media’s refusal to seek and report the truth proves the most dire of all the scandals because without a free press checking government corruption, the corruption will only grow.

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.

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7 Things the House Oversight Committee Should Ask IRS Whistleblowers

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 18, 2023

one of the IRS whistleblowers, Gary Shapley

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

The IRS whistleblowers who exposed the Department of Justice and FBI’s interference in the investigation into Biden family corruption will publicly testify on Wednesday before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.

The duo, Gary Shapley and a man known now only as Whistleblower X, had previously sat for transcribed interviews with the House Ways and Means Committee. And while some details from that closed-door testimony should be reiterated during the on-camera congressional hearing, Oversight Committee Chair James Comer should corral Republicans before Wednesday to coordinate the questioning of the whistleblowers so the country learns the depth of the scandal.

Here’s what they should ask Shapley and the soon-to-be-named second whistleblower and how they should do it.

1. Let the Whistleblowers Do the Talking

Because the legacy press will be poised to present Wednesday’s hearing as a Republican witch hunt and their supposed continued hounding of Hunter Biden, the representatives on the right side of the aisle should save the grandstanding for another time and let the agents speak for themselves.

As experienced agents, both Shapley and Whistleblower X know how to testify in a clear and understandable way. They also know how to respond to a hostile cross-examination, which unfortunately will be what they face from Democrats. Republicans should ask the agents open-ended questions that call for narrative responses and allow the whistleblowers’ words to convey to America the protect-Biden scandal they witnessed.

2. Start with Preliminaries, Not the Most Salacious Details

While it is understandable that the House Oversight Committee will want to strike hard and fast with the most devastating testimony, Republicans must remember the media blackout over this scandal means most Americans remain ignorant of many of the basics of the Hunter Biden investigation and how it connects to now-President Biden. Many Americans likely also know little about the two witnesses and may even believe the Democrats’ defamatory branding of the whistleblowers as “bought and paid for” by extreme MAGA Republicans.

For these reasons, before delving into the details, Republicans should ensure the country learns of the whistleblowers’ extensive and impressive professional background. Comer should also ensure the whistleblowers come clean about any political leanings they have, which appears to be none or, if any, leaning more to the left than the right. The whistleblowers’ opening statements will likely cover these preliminaries to some extent, but providing another minute for each witness to briefly remind Americans of your experience with the criminal investigation division of the IRS and explain to the country where you stand politically would be wise.

3. Begin Big-Picture Before Hitting the Details

The committee should then move to the origins of the investigation and the big picture of the scandal. More detailed questions will follow, but could you first broadly explain why and when the investigation began? Can you summarize the staffing of the investigative team and how the FBI field offices, FBI headquarters, the IRS criminal division, and the U.S. attorneys’ offices interacted at the beginning of the investigation, and then later throughout the investigation?

Again, let the whistleblowers tell their story, using follow-up questions to draw out more details, if necessary, but from a big-picture perspective. And once the whistleblowers explain how the investigation proceeded, broadly speaking, ask: Was that staffing and interaction, especially with the DOJ and FBI, the norm?

4. Evidence and Interference

With the above backdrop established, the committee should focus next on two main lines of questioning: the evidence uncovered of potential criminal conduct and the interference the agents faced when investigating the case.

The most effective and efficient way to present this testimony will be by requesting the whistleblowers walk the committee through the chronology of the investigation, identifying at each stage what evidence was uncovered and how, and whether there was any interference in the investigation.

Follow-up questions for each leg in the investigative journey should inquire of any witnesses or evidence they know of to corroborate their testimony and what steps they normally would have taken absent the interference.

Because the committee has the transcript of the whistleblowers’ previous closed-door testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee, the staffers should be able to easily sequence the questioning to ensure it is accessible to ordinary Americans.

5. Weiss’s Weasel Words and Garland’s False Ones

While the whistleblowers’ prior testimony revealed scores of ways in which the DOJ and FBI interfered in the investigation, equally concerning is U.S. Attorney David Weiss and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s attempts to cover up that interference.

For instance, Shapley testified about the D.C. and California U.S. attorneys’ refusal to file charges against Hunter Biden, and Weiss’s inability to indict the president’s son in those venues without permission from the Department of Justice — permission Weiss allegedly claims had been denied him. According to Shapley, Weiss made that statement during an Oct. 7, 2022, meeting and said he was “not the deciding person on whether charges are filed.”

Neither Weiss nor Garland has expressly denied Shapley’s claims, but both made statements that cannot be reconciled with Shapley’s testimony. Garland, for his part, testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Weiss “has full authority” to bring cases in another jurisdiction if he deemed it necessary. Weiss similarly claimed in a letter to Congress that “he had been granted the ultimate authority” over the Biden investigation, but the Delaware U.S. attorney quickly clarified in a second letter that he didn’t have that authority yet but had been assured he would be granted it if necessary.

On Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee should ask Shapley to retell the events of the Oct. 7 meeting because the IRS agents’ testimony implicates Weiss and Garland in a cover-up. Republicans should also ask Shapley whether it is possible Weiss said during that meeting that he had been denied a request to be appointed a special attorney as opposed to a special counsel, as some Democrats are suggesting Shapley misunderstood Weiss. A quick follow-up here, however, will also make clear that no matter which “special” appointment Weiss said he was denied, the U.S. attorney clearly said he wasn’t the decisionmaker.

6. Evidence Seen or Not Seen

The DOJ and FBI also interfered in the investigation by withholding evidence from Shapley and his investigative team. For instance, both Shapley and Whistleblower X stated they were not aware of the FD-1023 form that summarized a confidential human source’s claims that Joe and Hunter Biden each received $5 million in bribes from Burisma. Shapley also testified that he was prevented from seeing all the evidence on the Hunter Biden laptop, even after the FBI had removed documents potentially protected by attorney-client privilege. The committee should elicit testimony from Shapley and Whistleblower X concerning this withheld evidence.

Republicans should then attempt to learn what other evidence may have been secreted from the investigative team. The committee should read off a litany of the evidence it has and ask the whistleblowers if they were familiar with that evidence. Similarly, the committee should provide a list of witnesses with likely knowledge of the pay-to-play scandal and ask whether the whistleblowers knew of those individuals’ potential involvement and whether they were questioned.

This line of questioning may reveal new areas of inquiry — something the whistleblowers may not have known of previously. But in that case, the whistleblowers may not be able to respond to the questions because only the House Ways and Means Committee has the authority to receive protected tax information. The right questions, though, will give the whistleblowers the opportunity to convey that they have not seen the particular evidence referenced and therefore cannot respond to the query in this setting, but would be happy to provide the Ways and Means Committee a supplemental affidavit.

7. Anything More That Could Be Done

The whistleblowers have already made clear the statute of limitations ran out on potential felony tax charges against Hunter Biden because the Delaware U.S. attorney lacked the authority to indict the president’s son in another state. But what about the allegations contained in the FD-1023 or the other banking records recovered by the various House committees? Does that evidence indicate additional crimes have been committed for which the statute of limitations has not yet expired?

The whistleblowers should be asked: What potential crimes? What investigative techniques would you recommend? Given the international scope of these potential crimes, does the Baltimore FBI field office have the expertise to investigate adequately? Do you and your team have the ability to investigate this evidence and determine if there is a there, there?

Ending the hearing thusly will send a message that Weiss may have called off the investigation, but that doesn’t mean the case of corruption against the Biden family is dead.

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.

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Top 10 Takeaways From FBI Director Christopher Wray’s House Judiciary Testimony

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 13, 2023

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

FBI Director Christopher Wray sat for nearly four hours of questioning on Wednesday before the House Judiciary Committee. Here are the top takeaways from the hearing.

1. Wray Indicates Foreign Intel Agencies Worked with Big Tech to Silence Speech

The FBI director faced fierce questioning from Republican committee members on the FBI’s efforts to induce Big Tech to censor American speech. Several representatives specifically challenged Wray to justify the FBI passing along requests from the Ukrainian intelligence agency, SBU, to social media companies. The FBI’s role as a conduit for SBU was just revealed on Monday in a report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

That report revealed that following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the SBU enlisted the FBI to forward to American social media companies lists of accounts that allegedly “spread Russian disinformation.” The FBI obliged, sending a flurry of requests for accounts to be removed, including many American accounts, to multiple social media platforms. In fact, the House report highlighted the inclusion of the official, verified, Russian-language account of the U.S. State Department. The House Judiciary Committee queried Wray on how this could happen, while also inquiring why the FBI would assist the SBU in this endeavor, especially in light of Russia’s known infiltration of SBU.

In explaining the FBI’s involvement, Wray stressed that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 had cut off Ukraine’s communications, causing SBU to ask the FBI to contact U.S. companies on their behalf with the list of accounts supposedly spreading Russian disinformation. But as Republicans on the committee highlighted, the account lists in question included American accounts. Thus, the FBI’s involvement triggered the same First Amendment problems as those litigated in Missouri v. Biden.

This testimony also raised a second area of concern, namely the apparent coordination between U.S. social media companies and foreign governments. Wray said he served as an intermediary because Ukraine’s communications system was down. But in that case, it appears SBU would have contacted the American companies on its own behalf, seeking the silencing of Americans’ speech.

So the question for American social media companies is this: Do they accept requests to remove accounts or posts from foreign countries? And do they censor Americans’ speech based on foreign claims of disinformation?

2. Private Corporations Present a Bigger Concern Than Wray

Social media companies are not the only ones who have some explaining to do following Wray’s testimony. Americans should also demand answers from private businesses with access to consumer information, especially those in the financial sector.

This concern flows from Wray’s response to questioning about Bank of America handing the FBI financial records of customers who had purchased firearms within the six months before the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Wray defended the FBI’s receipt of this information by noting that “a number of business community partners, all the time, including financial institutions, share information with us about possible criminal activity.” Such activity is entirely lawful, the FBI director maintained, although he added that the FBI opted not to use the Bank of America data to avoid concerns over the bureau obtaining that data.

That the FBI decided not to use the data, however, provides no comfort because Bank of America obviously had no qualms about sharing the information. Further, Wray framed Bank of America’s data sharing as consistent with “business partners” who “all the time” share information about possible criminal activity.

But financial data showing a customer had previously purchased a gun does not represent evidence of “possible criminal activity.” Yet that didn’t stop Bank of America from giving the information to the FBI. So what other financial information is Bank of America providing? And what about other “business partners”?

3. Wray Needs to Read the Court’s Opinion in Missouri v. Biden

The partnership that took main billing during Wednesday’s hearing was that forged between the FBI and social media companies, and Republicans drilled Wray on the coordinated efforts to censor American speech. Throughout the entire hearing, though, Wray unwaveringly maintained the bureau was not responsible for the censorship because the FBI was merely making suggestions that posts involving foreign malign influence be removed.

No one who read the district court’s opinion in Missouri v. Biden could reasonably reach that conclusion. And since the FBI played such a heavy role in the censorship enterprise summarized in that case, the FBI director owes it to the public to actually study that opinion.

DOJ lawyers may be telling Wray the FBI is in the clear, but a federal judge disagreed,

and since the court has ordered the FBI to abandon its unconstitutional conduct, Wray needs to understand precisely what that means. Reading the court’s unfiltered opinion is the only way to see the many ways the FBI violated the First Amendment.

4. So Much Ignorance, So Little Time

Wray was not only ignorant of the facts underlying Missouri v. Biden, but he also revealed several other blind spots. For instance, during the hearing, Wray acknowledged he had previously testified that the FBI had not used Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the federal government to collect communications of foreign individuals, in its investigation of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. That ended up not being accurate, however, but Wray was “blissfully ignorant” of that fact when he testified to the contrary to Congress.

Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell also put on a display of ignorance Wednesday, although in his case it was a feigned ignorance, with the California congressman framing the Hunter Biden laptop as concerning the nudes of a private citizen. While Swalwell may still be fixated on the nudes on the laptop, Republicans’ concern has always been of the evidence of a pay-to-play scandal implicating now-President Biden.

Then there’s Rep. Zoe Lofgren who claimed the GOP majority was engaging in “conspiracy theories” to discredit “one of the premier law enforcement agencies in the United States,” and “without any evidence” trying to “make the case that the FBI is somehow opposed to conservative views.” These 20 examples tell a different story.

5. Why Was Auten Anywhere Near Biden Evidence?

Wray and the Democrats weren’t the only ignorant ones, however. Republicans were clueless when it came to understanding why FBI analyst Brian Auten was anywhere near evidence implicating Hunter Biden. After all, Auten had been under internal investigation since 2019 for his role in Crossfire Hurricane. Given the partisan witch hunt that investigation proved to be, why would the bureau allow Auten to play a part in the highly political investigation of Hunter Biden?

Yet it apparently did. A whistleblower has told Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, that Auten opened an assessment in August 2020 and that assessment provided other FBI agents the ability to falsely brand derogatory information about Hunter Biden as disinformation.

Wednesday’s testimony by the FBI director shed no light on the question of Auten’s involvement.

6. AG Garland’s the Real Hack Targeting Parents

While Wray was unable to explain Auten’s involvement in the Hunter Biden investigation, he made clear that when it came to the parents-are-terrorists memorandum, that was all Attorney General Merrick Garland’s doing. That testimony proved enlightening by showing that for all of the FBI’s deficiencies, even its director sees the attorney general as more of a hack for targeting parents at school board meetings.

7. Orange Man Bad, FBI Good

Also enlightening were the Democrats’ main lines of questioning. Here, there were two. The leftist lawmakers spent most of their time rehabilitating the FBI, reciting the many important bureau missions, showcasing hero agents, highlighting horrible attacks on FBI offices, and rejoicing in the FBI’s family days. Then the far-left faction merely attacked Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans.

Together these lines of questioning exposed the Democrats as unconcerned by the many abuses Americans have witnessed over the last half-dozen years. And what was unserious appeared downright absurd when Democrat Pramila Jayapal used her allotted time to challenge the FBI director over the bureau’s purchase of citizens’ data, including location data, from various data brokers. Pre-Trump, every Democrat would have been drilling Wray on such abuses of civil liberties, but this week it was only Jayapal.

8. The Speech or Debate Clause Does Some Heavy Lifting

In addition to the Democrats’ two main lines of questioning, a sub-theme of many of the comments concerned the whistleblowers, with Democrats attempting to discredit their testimony. One way they sought to do that was by presenting the whistleblowers as hired tongues. But beginning with Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., and continuing through Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, they made this point by slandering the whistleblowers, falsely stating they had been paid for their testimony.

Of course, the speech or debate clause prevents the whistleblowers from suing the committee members who lied about them, which is precisely why they had no qualms about doing so.

REMEMBER WHAT THE DEMS WERE SAYING ABOUT THE SO-CALLED WHISTLEBLOWER THAT CAME OUT ABOUT PRESIDENT TRUMP? I guess it’s the accused that makes their speech different.

9. Schiff Can’t Stop Lying

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is proof of this point because he can’t stop lying. He lied about the Carter Page FISA warrants. And on Wednesday, he lied again about President Donald Trump’s telephone call with the Georgia secretary of state following the November 2020 election.

Unfortunately, “as I’ve been forced to detail time and again because the corrupt media continue to lie about the conversation, the transcript of the call established that Trump did not request that Raffensperger ‘find 11,780 votes.’” As I wrote in February, “It never happened.” Instead, during that “telephone conversation between Trump’s legal team and the secretary of state’s office, Trump’s lawyer explained to Raffensperger that ‘the court is not acting on our petition. They haven’t even assigned a judge.’” Thus the legal team wanted the secretary of state’s office to investigate the violations of Georgia election law because the court refused to do its duty.

Schiff knows this, but he also knows there are no consequences for lying. On the contrary, he might just convince Californians to send him to the Senate so he can follow in Harry “He Didn’t Win, Did He?” Reid’s footsteps.

10. A Mixed Bag on the Pro-Life Question

The final takeaway topic from Wray’s testimony concerned the pro-life question, and Wray presented a mixed bag. On the one hand, he outrageously refused to condemn the FBI agents who decided to use a SWAT-like display of force to arrest a pro-life sidewalk counselor at his family home when the man’s attorney had agreed to arrange for his client to voluntarily appear to face the charges — of which he was later acquitted.

On the other hand, when Rep. Deborah Ross, D-N.C., attempted to frame abortionists and abortion facilities as being increasingly targeted in the wake of Dobbs, Wray corrected the narrative, noting that the uptick in violence has been to pro-life centers, with 70 percent of the cases involving such organizations.

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.

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SPEAKER MCCARTHY PRESSED ON POTENTIAL IMPEACHMENT PROCEEDINGS AFTER RELEASE OF ALLEGED HUNTER BIDEN MESSAGE

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Rep. Kevin McCarthy Op-ed: On Biden’s watch, Lady Justice has been weaponized. But Merrick Garland can’t do this one thing

When a prosecutor wants to protect the boss’ son more than the country, we’ve got a problem.

By Rep. Kevin McCarthy | Fox News | Published July 12, 2023 4:00am EDT

Outside the Supreme Court building in our nation’s capital, Lady Justice is depicted blindfolded holding a scale that’s in balance because in principle justice is both “blind” and “equal.” But under President Biden, Justice is neither.

Evidence continues to mount that the Biden Justice Department enforces the law unequally by tilting the scales to favor friends and family while unleashing the FBI and prosecutors on President Biden’s political opponent. This is a perversion of the founding principles of our Republic and a violation of the constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law.

The good news is that Americans are now learning about these abuses of power because House Republicans are uncovering the weaponization of our government, especially at President Biden’s Department of Justice.

Republicans have been in the majority for six months. Yet even before then, we began investigating possible corruption by the Biden family. Those investigations continue today, as our committees work together to gather testimony, investigate misconduct, and uncover the truth, despite attempts by the media and the Biden administration to downplay and disrupt these efforts.

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Leading the charge are Chairman Jim Jordan of the Judiciary Committee, Chairman James Comer of the Oversight Committee, and Chairman Jason Smith of the Ways and Means Committee.

Here’s what we know so far:

After a five-year investigation, the president’s son received a sweetheart deal from his father’s DOJ in which Hunter Biden was allowed to plea down to misdemeanor tax charges and would not face any charges for money laundering or working as an unregistered lobbyist.

Attorney General Merrick Garland insists that David Weiss, the Delaware U.S. Attorney in charge of the Hunter Biden probe, has not faced any interference from the Department of Justice, telling Congress under oath that Weiss “has full authority to … bring cases in other districts if he needs to do that.” But compelling evidence from whistleblowers refute Garland’s version of events.

HUNTER BIDEN’S ATTORNEY SLAMS IRS WHISTLEBLOWER’S ‘ILLEGAL’ RELEASE OF WHATSAPP MESSAGE TO CHINESE BUSINESSMAN

The Ways and Means Committee learned that Weiss sought to bring charges in two other districts and was denied both times. They also learned that Weiss reportedly sought and was refused special counsel status, telling a room full of IRS and FBI officials, “I am not the deciding person on whether charges are filed.” IRS agent Gary Shapley, who was present at the meeting, memorialized these comments in an email at the time.

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Political interference from the Biden administration also prevented investigators from taking basic steps that they would have in other tax evasion cases. For example, Garland’s DOJ allowed the statute of limitations to run out on Hunter Biden’s tax evasion on payments from Ukrainian energy firm Burisma when his father was President Obama’s lead on Ukraine while Vice President of the United States. As Shapley said, “the purposeful exclusion of the 2014 and 2015 years sanitized the most substantive criminal conduct and concealed material facts.”

And when investigators uncovered a WhatsApp message from Hunter Biden to an executive at a Chinese energy firm in which Biden said, “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled”, prosecutors refused to authorize search warrants of the Delaware home or obtain location data to confirm the location of Joe Biden.

DOJ BRIEFED HUNTER BIDEN TEAM ON JOE BIDEN ALLEGATIONS, BUT EXCLUDED IRS AGENTS: GRASSLEY

In fact, according to the whistleblower, one of the prosecutors admitted there was “more than enough probable cause for a physical search warrant” of President Biden’s home and “a lot of evidence in our investigation would be found in the guest house of former Vice President Biden.” Yet the search warrants were never approved because of “optics.”

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Shapley stated clearly what this meant for his team: “I would say that they limited certain investigation leads that could have potentially provided information on the President of the United States.”

A prosecutor allegedly even tipped off Hunter Biden’s lawyers that the IRS had probable cause to search Hunter’s storage unit, a clear violation of the unbiased and independent role DOJ has to investigate allegations of wrongdoing. Additionally, Shapely testified that while there was probable cause for a search warrant, no warrant was obtained and no search was conducted.

After slow-walking this investigation for five years, the DOJ turned what the whistleblower described as a “slam dunk” felony case against Hunter Biden into a sweetheart plea deal and possibly buried evidence of crimes that have sent other Americans to prison. When a prosecutor shields his boss’s son from investigators, it smells like a cover–up. Garland’s DOJ did not aggressively follow the money. Why? Are they afraid of where that trail ends?

Recently, Weiss sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee disputing that his charging authority was limited. He later claimed he had not requested special counsel designation from Garland but admitted he had some discussions about obtaining authority to file charges in a district outside of Delaware. What Weiss and DOJ have failed to answer is why Weiss told a room full of IRS and FBI officials, “I am not the deciding person on whether charges are filed.”

Clearly, someone is not telling the truth, and Congress has a duty to get answers. To get all the facts, Weiss and others must testify before Congress, cooperate fully, and provide full access to their records.

David Weiss (Fox News screenshot)

The United States needs an attorney general who defends equal justice under the law rather than engaging in a political, partisan agenda. Attorney General Garland took an oath to uphold the Constitution and faithfully discharge the duties of his office. If the whistleblowers’ allegations are true, it raises serious concerns that Garland lied to Congress under oath.

Our committees will continue to gather evidence and conduct oversight, and we will follow the facts wherever they lead. Nothing will stop us from getting to the truth for the American people.

If warranted by the facts, the entire House could decide whether a formal impeachment inquiry is necessary. At the conclusion of a serious, thorough and fair inquiry, the Judiciary Committee would decide whether to refer any articles of impeachment to the full House for an impeachment vote. Given the gravity of this constitutional remedy, House Republicans will ensure that any inquiry would be conducted in a transparent and public manner, without the partisan missteps of prior impeachments.

There are serious questions about the credibility of the Department of Justice. It is our responsibility to hold them accountable.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM SPEAKER KEVIN McCARTHY

Republican Kevin McCarthy represents California’s 20th district and is the 55th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.

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Holiday Weekend News Dump Implodes Merrick Garland’s Biden-Investigation Testimony

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JULY 05, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

A new letter sent by Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss to the House Judiciary Committee suggests Attorney General Merrick Garland lied to Congress when he testified that Weiss “has full authority” to charge Hunter Biden in “other jurisdictions.” Whether Garland committed perjury will all come down to the meaning of the word “has.”

Late Friday, just as Americans unplugged for the long Independence Day weekend, Weiss confirmed he didn’t really have “ultimate authority” over the Hunter Biden criminal investigation. In his letter, Weiss gave away the deceptive word game he has been playing with Congress — and Garland has been playing with America. More significantly, the letter suggests Biden’s attorney general lied to Congress and that everything the IRS whistleblower has said is true.

What the Whistleblower Said

Weiss’s letter followed the House Ways and Means Committee’s release of IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley’s testimony and related exhibits concerning the Hunter Biden investigation headed out of the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office. The transcript of Shapley’s May 26, 2023, closed-door testimony revealed the IRS agent had told the House committee that during an Oct. 7, 2022 meeting between Weiss and senior-level managers, Weiss allegedly said, “I am not the deciding person on whether charges are filed.”

According to Shapley’s testimony, Weiss then explained that the Biden-appointed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Matthew Graves, refused to allow Weiss to charge Hunter Biden in the D.C. district — the necessary venue for certain charges based on Hunter Biden’s residency during the relevant time. Shapley noted, “Weiss stated that he subsequently asked for special counsel authority from Main DOJ at that time and was denied that authority.” “Instead,” Shapley recounted, Weiss “was told to follow the process,” which sent Weiss through another Biden-appointed U.S. attorney, for other potential criminal charges based in California.

Without the cooperation of Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys, Shapley told the House committee, Weiss was unable to bring charges outside his Delaware district. And Weiss’s lack of authority led to the statute of limitations expiring on felony tax charges against the president’s son for the 2014 and 2015 tax years.

To corroborate his testimony, Shapley provided the House Ways and Means Committee with an email he had sent a colleague soon after the meeting summarizing the key points. That Oct. 7 email recounted the details to which Shapley had testified and, significantly, Shapley copied the special agent in charge of criminal investigations of the IRS D.C. field office, Darrell J. Waldon, who had also attended the Oct. 7 meeting. Waldon would then reply to Shapley’s email summary, “Thanks Gary. You covered it all,” indicating Shapley had accurately recounted Weiss’s representation that he is “not the deciding person on whether charges are filed.”

The release of Shapley’s testimony and the collaborating email was huge because it indicated both Weiss and Garland had deceived Congress. Weiss for his part had sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee on June 7, 2023, stating:

I want to make clear that, as the Attorney General has stated, I have been granted ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility for deciding where, when, and whether to file charges and for making decisions necessary to preserve the integrity of the prosecution, consistent with federal law, the Principles of Federal Prosecution, and Departmental regulations.

Weiss’s Friday letter was in response to questions House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan posed to the Delaware U.S. attorney about his claim “to have been granted ultimate authority” over the Hunter Biden investigation.

In his pre-Fourth of July weekend epistle, the Delaware U.S. attorney said he stood by what he wrote in the June 7, 2023 letter. He added, however, that he wished to expand on what he meant. Weiss then acknowledged that as the U.S. attorney for the District of Delaware, his charging authority is geographically limited to his home district.

“If venue for a case lies elsewhere, common Departmental practice is to contact the United States Attorney’s Office for the district in question and determine whether it wants to partner on the case,” the letter noted. “If not, I may request Special Attorney status from the Attorney General pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 515.” Weiss concluded by stressing that he had “been assured that, if necessary after the above process,” he “would be granted § 515 Authority in the District of Columbia, the Central District of California, or any other district where charges could be brought in this matter.”

There was no reason Weiss could not have provided this explanation earlier — or at least no good reason: The Delaware U.S. attorney clearly intended to convey to Congress the false impression that he had “ultimate authority” to charge Hunter Biden, which would in turn suggest the IRS whistleblower’s claims to the contrary were false.

But Weiss’s clarification confirms he lacked “ultimate authority,” which is entirely consistent with Shapley’s testimony. In fact, had Shapley falsely summarized the statements Weiss made during the Oct. 7, 2022 meeting, Weiss could have easily said so. That he didn’t speaks volumes.

Lies, Lies, Lies

While Weiss’s clarification from late last week is technically consistent with what he told Congress in his June 7, 2022 letter, the same cannot be said for Garland’s earlier testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

On March 1, 2023, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, asked Garland whether Weiss had “independent charging authority over certain criminal allegations against the President’s son outside the District of Delaware.” After responding that Weiss “would have to bring the case in another district,” Garland added that “the U.S. attorney in Delaware has been advised that he has full authority … to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it’s necessary” (emphasis added).

But according to Weiss’s latest letter, he didn’t have “full authority” and still doesn’t. Rather he had been assured, “if necessary,” he “would be granted § 515 Authority in the District of Columbia, the Central District of California, or any other district where charges could be brought in this matter.”

Given Shapley’s testimony, there is a huge difference between Weiss having “full authority” to bring charges in other districts and being promised a grant of such authority. If Weiss had “full authority,” as Garland told Congress, that would mean that either the whistleblower lied to Congress or Weiss lied to his senior team handling the Hunter Biden investigation. It would also clear Garland, the DOJ, and FBI headquarters of interfering in the investigation — a second allegation the whistleblower leveled in his testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee.

With both Weiss and Garland playing word games with Congress, it seems likely Weiss also sought to mislead the House when he stressed that he “had been assured” he “would be granted § 515 Authority in the District of Columbia, the Central District of California, or any other district where charges could be brought in this matter.” That language suggests Weiss always had that assurance, but from the whistleblower’s testimony, it appears Weiss had previously requested such authority and been denied it. (The whistleblower and Waldon likely confused Weiss’s reference to special attorney status with special counsel status.)

A belated promise by Garland to give Weiss special attorney authority under § 515 means nothing, as the statute of limitations has already run out for the felony tax charges. So the question remains: Was Weiss denied such authority, as the whistleblower claims Weiss told him? And when did Garland assure Weiss he would have § 515 authority? For that matter, why wouldn’t Garland have immediately conferred such authority on Weiss?

It seems unlikely Congress or the American public will learn the answers to these questions any time soon. Weiss appears to be coordinating his communications with Garland, as demonstrated by his reference in Friday’s letter to the DOJ’s Department of Legislative Affairs — further proof that Weiss is no more independent from the Biden administration than the rest of the Department of Justice.

This article has been updated since publication.

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.

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Lara Trump to Newsmax: ‘No Doubt Hunter Biden Received Special Treatment’

By Peter Malbin | Wednesday, 28 June 2023 02:50 PM EDT

Responding to the news that Attorney General Merrick Garland will be called to testify before the House Judiciary Committee Sept. 20, as two IRS whistleblowers are alleging that the Department of Justice interfered in the criminal investigation into Hunter Biden, Lara Trump told Newsmax on Wednesday that there’s no question that President Joe Biden’s son received special treatment.

“There’s no doubt that Hunter Biden received special treatment,” she said while appearing on “John Bachman Now.” “Anyone in America can very clearly see that, and you have to ask yourself, ‘Why would that happen here?’ I mean, think about the fact that Merrick Garland almost became a Supreme Court justice. Imagine him making decisions on the Supreme Court bench. That would be terrifying.”

Lara Trump, a senior adviser for former President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign and the host of “The Right View Podcast,” said that Americans need the truth, and need clarity about the Hunter Biden probe.

“We need equal application of the law,” she said. “I sure hope that we get a lot of answers to a lot of questions that I think we all still have. Think about what it takes to come forward as a whistleblower. Think about what these people are putting on the line, especially Gary Shapley by putting his name out there.”

Shapley, the IRS supervisory agent who helped oversee the investigation of Hunter Biden, told CBS News earlier this week that, dating back to the Trump administration, he was repeatedly prevented from taking steps he would have considered routine in other cases. Shapley said the five-year investigation uncovered conduct that he says could have resulted in additional charges.

“Based on my experience, if this was a small business owner or any other non-connected individual, they would have been charged with felony counts,” Shapley said.

Shapley told CBS News that Hunter Biden wrote off as business expenses the money he paid for “prostitutes, sex club memberships, travel for the prostitutes, hotel rooms for purported drug dealers, no show employees.”

Shapley also said his efforts to explore money trails that involved “dad” or “the big guy” were blocked by a senior prosecutor working for David Weiss, the U.S. attorney for Delaware (who was appointed by President Trump).

“I would say that they limited certain investigative leads that could have potentially provided information on the president of the United States,” Shapley said.

Speaking about the whistleblowers, Lara Trump said: “These are people who are saying, ‘We love this country enough to see that this sort of thing does not happen. This is not how our country is supposed to function.’ So when you have all of these folks saying, ‘Here’s what we saw, and here’s our testimony to back it up,’ and we gain nothing from coming forward to talk about this, I think it raises a lot of red flags. I think that’s why a lot of people have really started to pay attention to this. As they should, and as we all should, as American citizens.”

The conversation turned to CNN and the audio recording of a 2021 meeting in Bedminster, New Jersey, where former President Trump purportedly discusses holding secret documents he allegedly did not declassify.

“Well, look, none of this is surprising. I think we all know where these leaks are coming from,” Lara Trump said. “It seems to be on purpose to distract from a very obvious problem that the Biden family has right now. All the information that is coming out about Hunter Biden, about Joe Biden, about their connections to money they received from, you know, entities all around the world from Ukraine, from China. These are very problematic for the Democrat Party, for the Biden family, and for our entire government, and so they want to distract people.”

Trump continued: “The goal is clear: to damage Donald Trump and prevent people from wanting to vote for him in 2024. I think people see this, and they say, ‘Really, this is where you want us to obsess and focus, when we have real national security implications happening right now with the Biden family that you guys don’t want us to talk about?'”

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IRS Whistleblower Emails Suggest David Weiss Misled Congress In Letter Claiming Charging Authority

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JUNE 26, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

VISIT ON TWITTER@PROFMJCLEVELAND

Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss told the House Judiciary Committee he had “been granted ultimate authority” over prosecutorial decisions related to the criminal investigation into Hunter Biden in a June 7, 2023, letter obtained by The Federalist. However, Weiss’s letter to Congress — and Attorney General Merrick Garland’s earlier testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Weiss had “full authority” to charge Hunter Biden — directly conflicts with statements Weiss made to senior members of the team investigating the Biden son.

So, either Weiss lied to his top investigators, or Weiss and Garland deceived Congress. There’s no other way around it.

Something Doesn’t Add Up

The House Ways and Means Committee’s release of IRS Criminal Supervisory Special Agent Gary Shapley’s testimony and related exhibits last week created a serious conflict.

Shapley, the IRS whistleblower who came forward earlier this year with claims of political bias and breaches of protocols in a high-profile investigation, testified before the House Ways and Means Committee during a closed-door session on May 26, 2023. The House’s release of the transcript of Shapley’s testimony provided the first official confirmation that Hunter Biden was the subject of the investigation.

During his hours-long testimony, Shapley told congressional investigators that a meeting on Oct. 7, 2022, with Weiss and senior-level managers from the IRS, FBI, and U.S. attorney’s office, was his “red-line” meeting. According to the whistleblower, Weiss was present for the meeting and surprised the team by stating, “I am not the deciding person on whether charges are filed.”

Shapley said Weiss further explained that the Biden-appointed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Matthew Graves, would not allow Weiss to charge Hunter Biden in the D.C. district, where certain of the alleged crimes needed to be filed based on Hunter Biden’s residency during the relevant time. Shapley noted, “Weiss stated that he subsequently asked for special counsel authority from Main DOJ at that time and was denied that authority.” “Instead,” Shapley recounted, Weiss “was told to follow the process, which was known to send U.S. Attorney Weiss through another President Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney,” that one in California, the second locale relevant to the proposed criminal charges.

Without the cooperation of Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys, Shapley explained, Weiss made clear he could not bring charges outside the Delaware district. Consequently, the statute of limitations on felony tax charges against the president’s son for the 2014 and 2015 tax years expired.

The IRS whistleblower then shared with the House committee an email thread Shapley initiated following the meeting with Weiss. In his email on Oct. 7, 2022, Shapley summarized the substance of the meeting: “Weiss stated that he is not the deciding person on whether charges are filed” (bold in original). Shapley then commented that he “believe[s] this to be a huge problem—inconsistent with DOJ public position and Merrick Garland testimony.”

The email then recounted that Weiss said he had gone to the U.S. attorney in D.C. “in early summer to request charge there,” but the Biden-appointed U.S. attorney “said they could not charge in his district.” Weiss then said he “requested Special counsel authority when it was sent to D.C.,” but “Main DOJ” denied the request.

The special agent in charge of the FBI D.C. field office, Darrell J. Waldon, who had been present during the Oct. 7 meeting, responded to the email summary, stating: “Thanks Gary. You covered it all.”

Merrick Garland’s Denial

During a Friday press conference, Garland contradicted Shapley’s testimony, stating: “As I said at the outset, Mr. Weiss was appointed by President Trump as the U.S. Attorney in Delaware and assigned this matter during the previous administration and would be permitted to continue his investigation and to make a decision to prosecute any way in which he wanted to and in any district in which he wanted to.”

This statement tracks with Garland’s earlier unequivocal testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 1, 2023, when Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley asked for clarification on whether Weiss had authority to bring charges outside the Delaware district.

“The U.S. Attorney in Delaware has been advised that he has full authority … to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it’s necessary,” the attorney general replied, stressing that he would ensure Weiss would be able to do that.

Garland reiterated that point when Grassley inquired whether Weiss had “independent charging authority over certain criminal allegations against the President’s son outside the district of Delaware.”

“He would have to bring the case in another district,” Garland replied, but added, “But as I said, I promised to ensure that he is able to carry out his investigation and that he be able to run it and if he needs to bring it in another jurisdiction, he will have full authority to do that.”

Garland’s March 1 testimony directly conflicted with what Weiss had told investigators during the meeting on Oct. 7, 2022. And as the email Shapley sent after that meeting indicates, Shapley believed Weiss’s statement that he lacked the authority to file charges against Hunter Biden in another district also conflicted with what Garland had previously told Congress.

Before Grassley quizzed the attorney general on Weiss’s authority, Tennessee Sen. Bill Hagerty had asked Garland during an April 26, 2022, Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science hearing whether Garland had been briefed on the Hunter Biden investigation. In response, the attorney general stated, “Hunter Biden’s investigation … is being run by and supervised by the United States attorney for the District of Delaware.”

“He is supervising the investigation,” and “he is in charge of that investigation,” Garland continued, stressing “there will not be interference of any political or improper kind.”

Shapley’s testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee counters Garland’s claims that there would be no political or improper interference. But more significantly, the whistleblower’s testimony and the email he provided the House cannot be reconciled with Garland’s clarifying testimony to Grassley on March 1, 2023. During that hearing, Garland expressly stated that “the U.S. attorney in Delaware has been advised that he has full authority … to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it’s necessary.”

The Weiss Letter

However, it is not merely the veracity of Garland’s Senate testimony that is in question now. On June 7, 2023, Weiss wrote to the House Judiciary Committee to corroborate Garland’s testimony. In that letter, obtained by The Federalist, Weiss stated:

I want to make clear that, as the Attorney General has stated, I have been granted ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility for deciding where, when, and whether to file charges and for making decisions necessary to preserve the integrity of the prosecution, consistent with federal law, the Principles of Federal Prosecution, and Departmental regulations.

In signing that letter and dispatching it to the House Judiciary Committee, Weiss has entangled himself in what appears to be Garland’s lie to Congress — that is, unless Weiss had instead deceived the senior-level officials responsible for the Hunter Biden investigation when he told them last Oct. 7 that he was not the “deciding person” on whether charges are filed.

But why would Weiss mislead the senior leadership responsible for the Hunter Biden investigation?

On this point, Shapley has “no insight,” his lawyers noted on Friday, adding: “That Mr. Weiss made these statements is easily corroborated.” Then the whistleblower’s attorneys listed the names of three individuals who, in addition to Shapley and Weiss, had attended the meeting on Oct. 7, 2022: Baltimore FBI Special Agent in Charge Tom Sobocinski and Assistant Special Agent in Charge Ryeshia Holley and IRS Special Agent in Charge Darrell Waldon.

If these individuals confirm the whistleblower’s account — as seems likely given Waldon had previously said, “you covered it all,” in response to Shapley’s email summary of the meeting — Weiss will have some explaining to do. He’ll have to explain his statements during the meeting on Oct. 7, 2022, and the genesis of the June 7, 2023, letter Weiss sent the House Judiciary Committee.

Sources familiar with the letter have suggested it reads as if drafted by someone connected to the Department of Justice’s Office of Legislative Affairs, telling The Federalist a U.S. attorney would be unlikely to know about the so-called Linder letter referenced in a footnote. That possibility raises the further question of whether the DOJ and Garland induced or pressured Weiss to sign the letter.

It is important to remember that Weiss dispatched the letter to the House Judiciary Committee before the Ways and Means Committee released the whistleblower’s testimony, meaning the DOJ and the Delaware U.S. attorney’s office would not have known Shapley had the Oct. 7, 2022, email to corroborate his oral testimony.

The House Judiciary Committee seems similarly concerned about the possibility the Department of Justice and/or Garland pushed Weiss to help mislead Congress, writing to the Delaware U.S. attorney last Thursday about the “unusual nature” of Weiss’s June 7 letter. That letter, which The Federalist has reviewed, asks the Delaware U.S. attorney to provide “a list of individuals who drafted or assisted in drafting” the June 7 letter. The oversight committee also asked Weiss “who instructed you to sign and send your June 7 letter to the Committee,” and for details on any conversations Weiss had with Garland or others at the DOJ.

These details suggest we have passed the cover-up stage of the Hunter Biden scandal and have now entered the cover-up of the cover-up phase. But unlike the typical case, it cannot be said that the cover-up is worse than the crime — because selling your country out to the Chinese communists with your vice president father is about as bad as it gets.

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.

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Sen. Ron Johnson to Newsmax: Hunter Plea Deal Attempt to Keep Truth From Public

By Brian Freeman | Tuesday, 20 June 2023 02:46 PM EDT

The Hunter Biden plea deal for failing to pay federal income tax and illegally possessing a weapon is highly suspicious and appears to be an attempt to keep the truth from the American public, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told Newsmax on Tuesday.

“The timing is more than interesting — just as we find out about a credible source claiming a $5 million to $10 million bribery scheme and [Hunter’s business associate] Devon Archer poised to testify before the House committee,” Johnson told “National Report.”

“Is this the Justice Department’s attempt to try and seal this all up and keep the truth from the American public? This is what I fear.”……………..

For the rest of the article go to https://www.newsmax.com/us/donald-trump-classified-documents-trial-date/2023/06/20/id/1124171/

Hunter Biden’s Plea Deal Is A Coverup Disguised As Justice

BY: CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD | JUNE 20, 2023

To hear President Joe Biden’s supporters tell it, Hunter Biden was finally held accountable Tuesday, and the long national nightmare of him facing any scrutiny at all can finally end.

This accountability for the president’s son, however, was little more than a chiding for offenses that have virtually nothing to do with the serious allegations the Department of Justice should actually be pursuing — like giving a speeding ticket to “the getaway driver after a bank robbery,” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley remarked.

Over the past two weeks alone, congressional Republicans have revealed a paid, “highly credible” FBI informant’s report that $10 million was paid in bribes to Hunter and his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, by Ukrainian oligarch and Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky.

Zlochevsky called the then-vice president “the big guy,” a nickname also used in the Biden family’s allegedly corrupt China dealings. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, revealed the existence of two audio recordings Zlochevsky reportedly made of Joe Biden (and another 15 he made of Hunter) discussing their dealings, which Zlochevsky reportedly kept as a sort of “insurance policy” that he’d get what he was paying for.

What was he paying for? Emails from the chairman of Burisma (revealed three years ago) show “the ultimate purpose” of “the deliverables” was “to close down for any cases/pursuits against [Burisma’s president] in Ukraine.” That case was indeed closed down, when Vice President Biden pressured Ukraine to fire the prosecutor pursuing Burisma.

Congressional investigators also revealed that Hunter helped Burisma executives open an account for their transactions at Satabank,……….

For the rest of the article go to https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/20/hunter-bidens-plea-deal-is-a-coverup-disguised-as-justice/

Hunter Biden’s Wrist Slap On Gun, Tax Crimes Is A Complete Smokescreen

BY: JORDAN BOYD | JUNE 20, 2023

Joe Biden, Jill Biden, Hunter Biden at inauguration in 2021

President Joe Biden’s corrupt Department of Justice is so desperate to distract from Republicans’ exposé of the Biden family bribery scandal that it finally brought a handful of weak charges against Hunter Biden for his tax and gun crimes.

Under the guise of serving equal justice, the DOJ announced on Tuesday that it would charge the president’s youngest son with two federal misdemeanor counts for failing to pay his taxes and one federal felony charge for possessing a gun while being an illegal drug user and addict.

Hunter’s lawyers are scrambling to declare “the five-year investigation” into their client as “resolved.” Corporate media like NBC News, similarly, claimed the DOJ’s “resolution suggests that prosecutors did not find cause to file charges related to Hunter Biden’s dealings with foreign entities or other wrongdoing.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. Just like when it strategically timed its political arrest of a Republican congressman to coincide with a GOP press conference detailing evidence of Biden corruption, the DOJ is working overtime to ensure that Hunter serves as a distraction from the bigger Biden problem.

Since at least 2021 when Politico exposed records and receipts, the public has known that Hunter, who has an extensive and public history of illicit drug use, appeared to lie about this drug use on the Firearms Transaction Record he filled out during a revolver purchase in 2018.

Government officials such as local police, the Secret Service, FBI, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, likely knew about the lie earlier than 2021 since the .38 revolver soon became the center of a missing gun investigation, in which the Secret Service reportedly tried to interfere on behalf of the Biden family.

Similarly, most of the preliminary federal investigation into Hunter’s 2017 and 2018 financial wrongdoings was completed by 2020.

Yet, U.S. Attorney David Weiss delayed bringing charges against Hunter because, as Politico described, “the investigation would become a months-long campaign issue” that would hurt Biden’s presidential chances. It wasn’t until Republicans’ increasingly evidenced probe into the Biden bribery scheme, which the Biden administration continues to hamper, that Weiss finally decided to target the president’s son.

That timing is not a coincidence………….

For the rest of the article go to https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/20/hunter-bidens-wrist-slap-on-gun-tax-crimes-is-a-complete-smokescreen/

Hunter Biden’s Charges Are Nothing But A Diversion

BY: BRETT TOLMAN | JUNE 20, 2023

What a breathtaking and damaging act of misdirection. After five years of investigation into a host of criminal acts by Hunter Biden, the Department of Justice (DOJ) finally brought charges against the president’s wayward son. But while the DOJ hopes the public focuses on words like “charges” and “guilty” to form an image of accountability for all, it’s letting Hunter walk away with the kind of slap on the wrist most defendants can only dream about from inside a prison cell.

In the same breath in which DOJ announced it was filing charges against Hunter Biden, it also stated that the case had already been resolved. Hunter will plead guilty to and serve probation for two tax fraud misdemeanors while a felony firearm possession charge will disappear after he completes pretrial diversion. It’s a resolution that if the defendant’s last name weren’t Biden would sound almost too good to be true.

The feds are notoriously tough on firearms. Nationally, for example, 94.2 percent of federal firearms convictions in 2022 involved some prison time, and the median sentence was 39 months.

Of course, Hunter won’t even have to end up with a conviction. This is an even rarer event. In 2021, fewer than 1 percent of cases filed by U.S. attorneys in federal court resulted in the kind of pretrial diversion offered to Hunter.

It’s that disparity between Hunter’s case and everybody else’s that’s the true problem, not necessarily the sentence itself. After all, the law in question, which prohibits individuals suffering from an illegal drug addiction from possessing a firearm, likely violates the Second Amendment. Plus, diversion programs across the country have improved public safety at lower cost to taxpayers than prison alternatives.

But that’s clearly not how things are shaking out in practice at DOJ, and President Biden has expressed an ongoing willingness to harshly punish firearms offenses. His DOJ is defending this law in court, and he signed a law in 2021 to increase maximum penalties from 10 years to 15 years in prison. Apparently, President Biden does not believe offenders should be treated with kid gloves — at least when it’s not his kid.

Indeed, if Hunter’s were a typical case, ………….

For the rest of the article go to https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/20/hunter-bidens-charges-are-nothing-but-a-diversion/

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Crime, Law, Political

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Merrick Garland’s J6 Juries Prove Durham’s Point: Conservatives Can’t Get A Fair Trial In D.C.

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | MAY 22, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

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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.

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Grassley Corroborates Whistleblower Claim: FBI Labeled Damning Evidence ‘Russian Disinfo’ To Protect Bidens

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | APRIL 26, 2023

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

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Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, revealed in a floor speech on Tuesday that material reviewed by his investigative staff supported whistleblower allegations that the FBI falsely labeled evidence of potential criminal conduct by members of the Biden family “Russian disinformation.” While Grassley had previously discussed the whistleblower allegations, he now confirmed for the first time that an independent review of the pertinent records supported the accusations.

In response to last week’s announcement by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that he planned to offer a resolution denouncing former President Donald Trump’s call to defund the FBI, Grassley excoriated Democrats for remaining silent while the country faced an uptick in violence against law enforcement officers and the radical left pushed to defund the police. The Iowa senator then chastised Democrats for offering a political resolution that ignored the weaponization of the FBI, proceeding then to catalog the DOJ and FBI’s many abuses.

Here, Grassley stressed that protected whistleblower disclosures made “clear that the FBI has within its possession very significant, very impactful, and very voluminous evidence with respect to potential criminal conduct by members of the Biden family.”

“I know the FBI falsely labeled that evidence as Russian disinformation to bury it,” Grassley continued, revealing that his staff had “independently reviewed records” that support the whistleblower allegations.

Tuesday’s comments came some six months after Grassley revealed that the FBI had possession of “a series of documents relating to information on Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma, and his business and financial associations with Hunter Biden.” According to an October 2022 news release and an accompanying letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, Grassley said:

The documents in the FBI’s possession include specific details with respect to conversations by non-government individuals relevant to potential criminal conduct by Hunter Biden. These documents also indicate that Joe Biden was aware of Hunter Biden’s business arrangements and may have been involved in some of them.

At the time, Grassley noted it was “unclear whether the FBI followed normal investigative procedure to determine the truth and accuracy of the information or shut down investigative activity based on improper disinformation claims in advance of the 2020 election…” The senator also expressed concern over whether Weiss had independently evaluated the evidence.

Grassley concluded his October 2022 letter by requesting from the DOJ and FBI all records from Jan. 1, 2014, forward “that reference Mykola Zlochevsky, Hunter Biden, James Biden and Joe Biden.” While his letter sought “all records,” Grassley explicitly highlighted several forms including, among others, FD-209a, which is used to record an “asset contract”; FD-794b, which is used to request a payment; FD-1023, which is used for a source report; and FD-1040a, which is used to close a source.

The specific documents requested suggest the whistleblower had claimed the FBI had a source that provided information on the Burisma owner and the Biden family.

While it is unclear whether the DOJ and FBI provided the documents, Grassley’s floor statement on Tuesday shows his office had access to records corroborating the whistleblower claims that the FBI buried evidence derogatory to the Biden family by framing it as Russian disinformation.

This latest revelation follows last week’s news that an Internal Revenue Service whistleblower claimed FBI headquarters interfered in the investigation into Hunter Biden and that two Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys declined to file tax charges against the president’s son, against the recommendation of career prosecutors.

Yet Garland and Wray remain silent. If it weren’t for Grassley’s various letters and floor statements, Americans would know little about the FBI’s political favoritism and the “get out of jail free card” they seem to be handing out to Hunter Biden at every opportunity.

But now that we know that evidence, likely including a confidential human source, was buried under the guise that it was Russian disinformation, will anything change?

Sadly, for all of Grassley’s efforts to expose the scandal, the last seven years suggest not.

Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

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6 Reasons The IRS Whistleblower Will Blow Open DOJ’s Biden Family Protection Racket

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | APRIL 24, 2023

Joe and Hunter Biden — The IRS whistleblower should terrify those behind the DOJ’s Biden family protection racket.

MARGOT CLEVELAND

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An Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whistleblower hinted to congressional leaders last week that the FBI improperly blocked aspects of the Hunter Biden investigation and that Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys blocked an indictment against the president’s son on tax charges. The carefully worded letter also indicated Attorney General Merrick Garland had testified inaccurately when he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Trump-appointed Delaware U.S. attorney had the authority to file charges against Hunter Biden in other jurisdictions.

Here are six reasons this whistleblower should terrify those behind the DOJ’s Biden family protection racket.

1. Whistleblower Has Corroborating Evidence

While Wednesday’s letter from the whistleblower’s attorney to the congressional oversight chairs spoke only in cryptic terms, as I detailed on Friday, individuals claiming to be “directly familiar with the case” revealed the whistleblower had accused two Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys of refusing “to seek a tax indictment against Hunter Biden despite career investigators’ recommendations to do so.”

The sources also claimed the whistleblower’s disclosures establish that Garland refused Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s request for special counsel protection and that Garland testified inaccurately when he represented to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Weiss had full authority “to bring cases in other jurisdictions if he feels it is necessary.”

It isn’t merely the seriousness of the whistleblower’s accusations that should shake those sheltering Hunter Biden, however, but the promise of corroborating evidence.

The whistleblower’s attorney, Mark Lytle, reportedly maintains his client can “identify contemporaneous witnesses to corroborate his claims of political interference.” The whistleblower will “be able to talk about these meetings that he attended, that were with both agents and prosecutors … and how he summarized those meetings and put it in writing and distributed those to folks within the IRS and sometimes other agents,” Lytle claims, adding that those contemporaneous memoranda and emails will “end up corroborating his credibility.”

Sources also maintain DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz has already begun reviewing documents that purportedly corroborate the whistleblower’s claims. They say he has sought out both IRS and FBI witnesses, indicating several paths exist to confirm the accusations of political bias.

2. IRS Agent Is Nonpartisan and Credentialed

The whistleblower’s apparent nonpartisan pedigree is another reason for participants in the Biden protection racket to be afraid. The whistleblower is “not a political person” and does not have a “political agenda,” Lytle told Fox News last week. He “is a career law enforcement official who hasn’t made any political donations and doesn’t even use social media,” the IRS agent’s attorney told Just the News.

“He is just a guy who likes his job as a law enforcement officer, as an investigator, and he takes it seriously, and he’s dedicated,” Lytle explained, adding, “And when he sees something that is not routine and doesn’t follow the rules, or … something maybe is affected by politics — that’s what made him come forward.”

“My client wrestled with whether or not to come forward,” the whistleblower’s attorney told Fox News. He had “sleepless nights. He decided he could not live with himself if he stayed quiet and said nothing.”

Also strengthening the whistleblower’s claims of a nonpartisan motivation is his insistence that “when he comes forward, this is not to talk to just one party or the other party.” Lytle stressed his client wants both sides of the political aisle to “ask him questions and cross-examine him.”

That Lytle is one of the whistleblower’s attorneys will also negate concerns of partisanship, given the attorney previously represented Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, during the heated Republican-controlled weaponization hearings. Lytle is also “currently defending a former FBI supervisor named Timothy Thibault who has been accused of pro-Biden political bias.” Before retaining Lytle, the whistleblower hired “prominent Democrat lawyer Mark Zaid, who previously represented clients whose allegations about a call with the Ukrainian president led to Donald Trump’s first impeachment in 2019.”

His dedicated service at the IRS will likewise bolster the whistleblower’s credibility. As an IRS special agent for more than 10 years, the whistleblower reportedly has been “trusted with international investigations,” received several commendations, and taught “other agents how to properly do investigations.” His lengthy experience will strengthen his claims that “protocols that would normally be followed by career law enforcement professionals in similar circumstances” were not followed in the case of the politically connected Hunter Biden.

3. Dual Authorization Was Required

The IRS whistleblower’s claims that two Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys inappropriately, and for political reasons, “declined to seek a tax indictment against Hunter Biden” carry more weight given the dual-authorization procedures required by the DOJ for criminal tax cases.

The Department of Justice Manual provides that the tax division oversees federal criminal tax enforcement. Thus, while a grand jury is empowered to investigate tax crimes, “the Tax Division must first approve and authorize the United States Attorney’s Office’s use of a grand jury to investigate criminal tax violations.” Accordingly, in tax cases, prosecutions generally require two independent assessments that criminal prosecution is appropriate.

In the case of Hunter Biden, both career investigators and career prosecutors in the DOJ tax division signed off on the recommended charges, the whistleblower maintains. That dual approval suggests the evidence underlying the proposed charges was strong. It also pits the two Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys, who allegedly declined to seek charges against the president’s son, against the recommendations of two distinct sets of career employees.

4. Criminal Violations Seem Obvious

“Of course, Biden officials are interfering in his son’s case — why else has Hunter skated for five years?”

That title from former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy’s Friday New York Post article capsulizes perfectly another reason those running the Biden family protection racket should be shaking: The political favoritism shown Hunter Biden is obvious.

Who else could lie on a federal firearm form to purchase a handgun — only to lose physical possession of the gun and have it turn up across the street from a school — without getting charged with a federal crime?

As McCarthy wrote, “The gun offenses are so straightforward that they’d take a competent investigator five days, not five years, to wrap into a prosecutable case.” Likewise, “[s]ome of the tax offenses, which stretch back seven years or more, are so undeniable that liens were placed on Hunter’s properties…”

A public that for years has witnessed the president’s son escape any consequence for his clearly criminal conduct will easily nod along to the whistleblower’s claims of political favoritism: The IRS agent’s accusations aren’t just believable — they are self-evident.

5. The Timing Is Suspect

The timing also renders the whistleblower’s claims believable. Recall that in March of 2022, The New York Times began prepping the country for an indictment of Hunter Biden by soft-peddling his criminal conduct. The Times even previewed several potential defenses the president’s son could assert to counter the series of predicted criminal charges.

The Times article was a transparent attempt to get ahead of an anticipated story, namely that a grand jury had indicted Hunter Biden. But a grand jury indictment never dropped. Instead, about six months later, the whistleblower reportedly filed complaints related to the investigation with the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration and the DOJ’s Office of Inspector General. The whistleblower’s complaints indicated charges had been recommended and approved by the tax division but never materialized because the Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys did not seek grand jury indictments as recommended.

The New York Times’ efforts to groom Americans to discount the seriousness of the expected criminal charges wasn’t needed because the DOJ and FBI already had the president’s son covered.

6. The Scandal Reaches the FBI and POTUS

The Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys who allegedly declined to seek grand jury indictments against the president’s son are not the only ones implicated, however. The whistleblower’s allegations reportedly also reach FBI headquarters, although that does not necessarily mean Director Christopher Wray.

The unnamed sources further maintain the whistleblower’s disclosures claim that “specific DOJ employees placed strictures on questions, witnesses and tactics investigators may be allowed to pursue that could impact President Biden.” This accusation suggests political corruption beyond the refusal of the DOJ to charge Hunter Biden with tax crimes.

Whether the “specific DOJ employees” refers to individuals working at FBI headquarters or elsewhere with the DOJ is unclear. Either way, the whistleblower’s claim conflicts with Garland’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had left the matter of Hunter Biden to the Delaware “U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI squad working with him.”

Garland’s testimony suggests that whoever instituted those “strictures” acted without the authority to do so. That is bad enough, but the implication is worse: namely that either FBI headquarters or other DOJ employees have kept the president from being incriminated during the multi-year unraveling of Hunter Biden’s complicated “business” ventures.

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.

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UPDATE: Mark Houck, Pro-Life Dad Targeted by Biden Regime, Acquitted of Trumped-Up Charges

BY: JORDAN BOYD | JANUARY 30, 2023

Mark Houck acquitted — **‘The Biden Department of Justice’s intimidation against pro-life people and people of faith has been put in its place,’ Houck’s attorney says.**

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On Monday a federal jury acquitted Mark Houck, the Christian pro-life activist whose house was swarmed by FBI agents last fall in front of his wife and children. The not-guilty verdict comes more than four months after the Biden administration accused Houck of violating federal law for protecting his son from an angry abortion activist across the street from a Planned Parenthood in 2021.

After leaving the courtroom in a deadlock on Friday, on Monday a federal jury agreed Houck was not guilty of violating federal law, contrary to the Biden Department of Justice’s position.

The early-morning FBI raid on Houck’s home in front of his children and wife included battering rams and ballistic shields at the ready and was committed even after Houck’s attorney had told the U.S. Department of Justice Houck would turn himself in if they asked. Since his arrest in September 2022, Houck and his lawyers maintained “This case is being brought solely to intimidate people of faith and pro-life Americans.”

“We are, of course, thrilled with the outcome,” stated Peter Breen, head of litigation for the Thomas More Society, which defended Houck in court. “We took on Goliath – the full might of the United States government – and won. The jury saw through and rejected the prosecution’s discriminatory case, which was harassment from day one. This is a win for Mark and the entire pro-life movement. The Biden Department of Justice’s intimidation against pro-life people and people of faith has been put in its place.”

Houck is now freed from the threat of “a maximum possible sentence of 11 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and fines of up to $350,000.” He also thanked Americans and pro-lifers for their support after the FBI raid and subsequent federal prosecution.

After weeks of ignoring pro-abortion violence and threats against pro-life pregnancy support centers across the nation, dozens of FBI agents arrested Houck in front of his wife and seven children in a raid at his home in September. When Houck’s wife recounted that “they had big, huge rifles pointed at Mark and pointed at me and kind of pointed throughout the house,” the FBI defended their “guns out and ready” positions as necessary.

The Biden administration’s Department of Justice alleged Houck violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a law barring the physical obstruction of abortion facilities, by “attacking a patient escort” more than 100 feet away and across the street from a Planned Parenthood in Philadelphia during one of his regular trips to peacefully protest abortion.

The “patient escort,” Bruce Love, repeatedly initiated profanity-laced verbal confrontations with Houck and his son, Mark Houck Jr., said court documents. The documents also say Houck asked Love to stop multiple times to no avail. On Oct. 13, 2021, when Love escalated by invading Mark Jr.’s personal space, Houck Sr. shoved him away.

Love fell and claimed he “required medical attention,” an allegation the DOJ indictment took as fact. Brian Middleton, a spokesman for the Houck family, said the “medical attention” Love spoke of was “a Band-Aid on his finger.”

During his testimony to the jury, Houck gave his side of the story.

“You consider it to be a battle, don’t you?” Assistant U.S. Attorney Ashley Nicole Martin asked Houck during the trial.

“A spiritual battle,” the father of seven replied.

Houck also disclosed that Love instigated the incident that later was used to sic federal investigators on the Houck family.

“All of this was set in motion by the escort, and that’s not a FACE violation,” Thomas More Society Senior Counsel Michael McHale said in a trial recap video on Friday. “FACE is about access to clinics. And what happened here was an escort interfering with Mark and Mark’s son.”

Houck’s son Mark Jr. also testified on Friday. In his testimony, Mark Jr. explained that Love initiated a conversation with him.

“That directly contradicted Bruce Love’s testimony,” McHale said. “Mr. Love testified that he never, has ever, talked to Mark Jr. And to have Mark Jr. on the stand today and just testify confidently and clearly that Bruce Love talked to him and said ‘Your dad’s a bad person and your dad’s harassing women.’ I really think that went a long way, at least with some people on the jury.”

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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Loudoun County Dad Arrested For ‘Trespassing’ At Local Public School Board Meeting Found Not Guilty

BY: JORDAN BOYD | JANUARY 05, 2023

John Tigges being arrested at school board meeting

A Loudoun County father, whose arrest at a June 2021 school board meeting was used by the Biden administration to justify a politicized attack on concerned parents, was found not guilty of trespassing on Wednesday.

Law enforcement arrested Jon Tigges at a Loudoun school board meeting on June 22, 2021, after he tried expressing concerns about the school district’s “moral decay.” A Virginia district judge found Tigges guilty in October of 2021. Loudoun Circuit Judge Douglas Fleming Jr., however, cleared Tigges of any wrongdoing. Fleming determined that Tigges not only had a First Amendment right to attend the heated meeting but also that the superintendent who shut down the official gathering last summer had no right to declare it an “unlawful assembly.”

“My thanks to God for justice,” Tigges wrote on Twitter on Wednesday afternoon.

Tigges was one of the more than 250 people who had signed up to speak during the public comment section of the Loudoun County School Board meeting that summer night. He intended to voice opposition to the board’s new transgender policy proposal, which mandated that employees use students’ so-called “preferred pronouns” and preferred restrooms regardless of their sex. Before Tigges could speak, School Board Chairwoman Brenda Sheridan called off the meeting, and the now-recently fired Superintendent Scott Ziegler declared the gathering an “unlawful assembly.” Ziegler ordered the hundreds of people waiting to express their outrage at the government school district to vacate the premises or risk arrest.

Tigges refused to leave.

“I just felt led to realize that we could still speak,” Tigges told The Federalist last year. “It’s a public forum, a public room. It had been scheduled until seven o’clock for people to speak. I stood up to encourage folks to stay and if they had something to say whether they were on the left or the right, didn’t matter. They’d be heard and we’d respect one another and do so and so people started doing that without any amplification at all and you could hear them fine because it was a peaceful assembly.”

Despite Tigges’ claim on the First Amendment, police officers handcuffed, arrested, and charged him with trespassing.

Two arrests made at the Loudoun County, Virginia school board meeting after it was declared an unlawful assembly and some parents here to protest against critical race theory and a transgender policy refused to leave right away #CriticalRaceTheory pic.twitter.com/dsZDrqJ0Gp
— Gabriella Borter (@gabriellaborter) June 22, 2021

Tigges’ arrest in June of 2021 was used by the National School Boards Association (NSBA), in collusion with the Biden White House, to justify the smearing of concerned parents as “domestic terrorists” who required punishment from federal law enforcement. In September of 2021, the NSBA sent its infamous complaint letter, secretly solicited by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, to the Department of Justice, which sparked a politicized attack on parents who wanted to speak out against corrupt school boards.

“Despite this victory, I have serious concerns about where we are as a country. We’ve been subverted by a darkness that is spilling out in rot at all levels and in both political parties,” Tigges tweeted after the decision. “Nothing will change until We the People value conviction over comfort.”

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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Garland Reiterates Policy Banning DOJ Employees From Communicating With Congress

By NICOLE SILVERIO, MEDIA REPORTER | August 31, 2022

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo Tuesday reiterating the prohibition on Department of Justice (DOJ) employees communicating with Congress. The memo directed DOJ employees to an existing guideline restricting DOJ employees’ communication with federal lawmakers, Senate and House committees and congressional staff. Garland explained that these rules help the DOJ prevent political interference in the department’s activities.

“Like the policies regarding communications with the White House, these policies ‘are designed to protect our criminal and civil law enforcement decisions, and our legal judgements, from partisan or other inappropriate influence, whether real or perceived, direct or indirect,’” the memo read. Garland also cited a section of the department’s manual that explained the guidelines also help preserve Congress’ ability to “carry out its legitimate investigatory and oversight functions.”

NEW: Attorney General Merrick Garland also sent a memo today reminding DOJ employees of the policies around communications with Congress. pic.twitter.com/8lN5tlyE7C
— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) August 30, 2022

The memo reiterated DOJ’s policy that all communication with members of Congress is subject to approval by the Office of Legislative Affairs (OLA). This policy requires the Assistant Attorney General for the OLA to manage all communications between department members and Congress “to ensure that relevant Department or Executive Branch interests are fully protected.”

“No Department employee may communicate with Senators, Representatives, congressional committees, or congressional staff without advance coordination, consultation, and approval by OLA,” the policy states. “All congressional inquiries and correspondence from Members, committees, and staff should be immediately directed to OLA upon receipt.”

Garland issued a separate memo Tuesday prohibiting politically appointed DOJ officials from participating in political events. The memo revoked exceptions that allowed “non-career appointees” to attend partisan political events for “close family members who were running for political office” and to attend events for non-relative candidates “in their personal capacities on the evening of Election Day.”

“As Department employees, we have been entrusted with the authority and responsibility to enforce the laws of the United States in a neutral and impartial manner,” the memo read. “In fulfilling this responsibility, we must do all we can to maintain public trust and ensure that politics — both in fact and appearance — does not compromise or affect the integrity of our work.”

These orders come as the DOJ and FBI face accusations of political bias following the Aug. 8 raid on former President Donald Trump’s residence. Trump and other figures on the political right have accused the DOJ of practicing a double standard by investigating Trump more aggressively than Hunter Biden. (RELATED: High-Ranking FBI Official Out After Allegedly Attempting To Stonewall Hunter Biden Laptop Probe)

Garland announced August 11 that he had “personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant” for the FBI raid the former president’s private residence. The FBI said it retrieved 11 sets of classified documents, including four sets of top-secret material. Trump has disputed this account, claiming that he had declassified all the documents in question.

Republican Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley announced in a July letter to Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray that whistleblowers had told him the FBI downplayed and discredited intelligence concerning Hunter Biden’s alleged criminal activity in his overseas business dealings. Grassley later accused the FBI of a partisan double standard in a subsequent letter to Wray.

In subsequent letter to Wray, Grassley claimed that “political bias” had “infected the FBI’s Washington Field Office” and accused Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy Thibault of closing the case surrounding the president’s son without any valid reason. Thibault, who frequently shared partisan content on social media while working for the FBI, resigned Friday and was allegedly escorted out of the FBI building.

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Redacted Mar-A-Lago Affidavit Confirms Biden’s DOJ Fished For A Crime To Pin On Trump

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | AUGUST 29, 2022

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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.

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Think The FBI Deserves the Benefit of the Doubt? This Laundry List of Corruption Should Make You Think Again

BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | AUGUST 19, 2022

FBI Director James Comey with Mueller and Obama

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Can the FBI be trusted? A Federalist analysis of agency lies over the last decade is an unequivocal no.

FISA Warrants

In the summer of 2016, FBI bureaucrats launched a deep-state operation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, to thwart then-candidate Trump’s presidential ambitions. It began by targeting Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and quickly branched out as bureaucrats expanded their surveillance. The spy agency used the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) as a legal pretext to investigate and spy on Papadopoulos, in addition to former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, and former Trump adviser Carter Page. Several were interviewed by undercover FBI informant Stefan Halper, whose own investigation would prove a bust.

According to a declassified transcript between Papadopoulos and a Crossfire Hurricane confidential human source (CHS), Papadopoulos repeatedly denied the Trump campaign was working with Russian-backed entities to capture the 2016 election. The FBI, however, wrote off Papadopoulos’s recorded answers as rehearsed and omitted his denials of campaign collusion with overseas actors in FISA court warrant applications and renewals. These were two of the 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions” identified in the Department of Justice (DOJ) inspector general’s blockbuster report on the investigation in December 2019.

Papadopoulos, who pled guilty to making a false statement to the FBI in a perjury trap, was far from the only individual to face political persecution from the federal government’s dystopian investigation.

Not one of the four FISA warrants obtained by the FBI was legally justified, according to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report. In fact, at least two of the warrant applications to spy on Page were declared illegal by a federal judge. Following Horowitz’s blistering report outlining FBI misconduct throughout the entire operation, another federal judge declared that agency malfeasance “calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable.”

Subsequent reporting revealed gross abuses of power within the FBI to prosecute political opponents. According to Horowitz, the FBI’s FISA warrants “relied entirely” on DNC-funded opposition research compiled by former British intelligence official Christopher Steele known as the “Steele dossier.” The dossier, which outlined supposed Trump-Russia collusion and has since been thoroughly debunked, included salacious allegations such as supposed “pee tapes” featuring Trump engaging in golden showers with Russian prostitutes at a Moscow hotel.

The FBI knew the dossier lacked credibility as early as January 2017 and knew Steele’s material itself contained Russian disinformation. Desperate to continue their deep-state operation, however, officials lied to the FISA court about Steele’s credibility and hid incriminating info related to the former British intelligence official who was later fired over leaks to the press. An 18th omission, overlooked by the inspector general’s report but documented by Federalist Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland, was that Steele’s sources did not include the ones he developed as a British official.

Even after Steele’s termination as a reliable source, DOJ attorney Bruce Ohr continued to feed information from Steele to the FBI over the course of its investigation. Steele met with Ohr 12 times after the former’s tenure ended as a confidential human source for the bureau, according to the inspector general. Ohr also promoted his wife’s opposition research to FBI investigators and did not disclose she was paid by Fusion GPS, the DNC-contracted firm that commissioned the Steele dossier.

The FBI never told the FISA court that the Trump dossier written by a source who was fired for lying, did not undergo independent verification, and was funded by Hillary Clinton and the DNC.

Despite the overt abuse of the nation’s surveillance apparatus to spy on political opponents, only one FBI official has faced criminal conviction for his role in the probe. In January last year, former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith was sentenced to just 12 months probation after pleading guilty to fabricating evidence to obtain a FISA warrant. By December, Clinesmith was re-admitted to the D.C. Bar Association in good standing.

Steele’s primary sub-source, Igor Danchenko, was indicted in November on five counts of making false statements to the FBI. In May, a D.C. jury acquitted former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann on charges of lying to the FBI when submitting supposed evidence of Trump-Russian collusion to federal investigators.

Misleading Congress

Following the collapse of the grand Russia-collusion hoax, lawmakers on Capitol Hill began demanding answers about FBI misconduct. Former FBI Director James Comey lied to Congress, claiming the bureau was just investigating four individuals, not the Trump campaign, in a dubious spin.

“Late July of 2016, the FBI did, in fact, open a counterintelligence investigation into, is it fair to say the Trump campaign or Donald Trump himself?” asked then-Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., in a 2018 hearing.

“It’s not fair to say either of those things, in my recollection,” Comey said. “We opened investigations on four Americans to see if there was any connection between those four Americans and the Russian interference efforts. And those four Americans did not include the candidate.”

Horowitz also contradicted the FBI in a December 2019 hearing on the release of his report documenting FISA abuses. In September 2017, the FBI told Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, that the bureau gave the Trump campaign a defensive briefing about Russian interference in the 2016 race.

“In August of 2016 the FBI provided a counterintelligence defensive briefing to then candidate Donald Trump and other senior campaign officials,” wrote FBI Assistant Director of Congressional Affairs Gregory Brower in response to a letter from Grassley. “This defensive briefing was conducted by an experienced FBI counterintelligence agent and focused on the broad range of threats posed by foreign intelligence entities.”

Horowitz testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that there was no briefing given.

Misleading DOJ Leaders

Not only was Congress led astray as FBI officials conducted a rogue operation to defend the incumbent regime, but so was senior leadership in President Trump’s DOJ.

Handwritten notes revealed in the Sussmann trial exposed how FBI agents sought to cover up malicious misconduct, wherein DOJ leaders tasked with FBI oversight were misled about the investigation’s progress. The notes show FBI agent Peter Strzok wrongly told DOJ supervisors the surveillance warrant on Page had been “fruitful.” Strzok also concealed knowledge that Steele’s sources were not credible and claimed instead that the dossier was “CROWN reporting” from MI6, the CIA’s British counterpart. The FBI said the dossier was being used to examine the RNC and Trump campaign’s effort to soften the GOP platform on NATO and Crimea for Russian energy stocks, but the document made no mention of NATO or Crimea.

Strzok also said Trump’s 2016 joke about Russia uncovering Clinton’s 30,000 deleted emails triggered Crossfire Hurricane, with an Australian diplomat tipping off the government about Papadopoulos at the American embassy in London. The tip that Papdopoulos was coordinating collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, however, came before Trump made the joke.

Strzok is the same agent whose text messages show he conspired with his mistress and FBI colleague, attorney Lisa Page. Strzok, a lead investigator for Crossfire Hurricane, assured Page of a mysterious “insurance policy” in place if Trump were to be elected, likely in reference to the agency’s inside operations. Page, according to the DOJ inspector general’s 2019 report, told colleagues to go easy on investigating Clinton because “she might be our next president.”

When Page fretted that Trump might actually win the 2016 contest, Strzok assured his romantic partner, “we’ll stop it.”

Misleading Trump

Comey thought the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was important enough to brief outgoing President Barack Obama on the probe but kept Trump in the dark. In fact, Comey later confirmed that he told Trump three times the president was not being investigated and refused to tell him Clinton funded the dossier.

Michael Flynn

In June 2020, a federal judge ordered that all charges be dropped against Flynn, whom Trump subsequently pardoned in the waning days of his administration. Prior to his exoneration, Flynn was facing heavy fines and prison time for making false statements to federal officials in another perjury trap orchestrated by Comey, who bragged about the setup in the first week of the Trump White House.

According to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Flynn lied to a pair of FBI agents about conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak as the incoming national security adviser. Flynn, prosecutors claimed, spoke with Kislyak about financial sanctions against Russian individuals after the 2016 election and then lied about it during an interview with Comey’s agents. Sending a pair of agents to question a senior White House official in the Situation Room, Comey said at a 2018 conference, was “something I probably wouldn’t have done or even gotten away with in a more organized investigation, a more organized administration.”

“We placed a call to Flynn and said, ‘Hey, we’re sending a couple guys over, hope you’ll talk to them.’ He said ‘sure,’” Comey explained at the 92nd Street Y conference. “Nobody else was there, they interviewed him in a conference room at the White House situation room, and he lied to them.”

Flynn initially pled guilty to making false statements to the FBI before firing his attorneys and hiring new representation to withdraw his guilty plea. His reversal followed the release of declassified transcripts, which revealed Flynn never spoke with Kislyak about sanctions. The two only discussed expulsions of Russian individuals under a different process. Handwritten notes from the FBI agents also revealed the sole purpose of their questioning was “to get him to lie so we can prosecute him or get him fired.” A bizarre 2017 inauguration day email by Susan Rice to herself also revealed Comey knew there was no legitimate reason to question Flynn.

Andrew McCabe

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was fired from his top role at the bureau for lying to the agency inspector general four times over multiple abuses during his tenure in senior leadership. Those abuses included efforts to set up former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus for obstruction charges, the sabotage of an investigation into Clinton emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop before the 2016 election, and failure to report conflicts of interest. While running for a Virginia state Senate seat in 2015, McCabe’s wife accepted a political donation from a close Clinton ally as her husband was tasked with investigating the former secretary of state.

A 2018 DOJ inspector general report blasted McCabe as a serial leaker who lied about it. That same year, a letter from Grassley shined a spotlight on McCabe’s purchase of a $70,000 table on taxpayers’ dime that the agency sought to cover up.

Clinton Emails

The FBI repeatedly told journalists there was no evidence that a foreign power had reviewed Clinton’s emails that she improperly handled on a private server. According to an inspector general report in 2018, however, texts show they almost certainly did, “at least one of them classified,” as Federalist Senior Editor David Harsanyi wrote.

“It is more accurate to say,” read a text from Strzok, “that we know foreign actors obtained access to some of her emails (including at least one Secret one) via compromises of the private email accounts of some of her staffers.”

Weiner Laptop

In 2018, Comey told lawmakers over the course of the investigation into Clinton’s emails that agency officials thoroughly reviewed the laptop belonging to Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her now-ex husband Anthony Weiner. The FBI was able to accomplish such a feat within a short timeframe “thanks to the wizardry of our technology” enabling agents who worked “night after night after night” to comb through the remaining material before the 2016 election.

“But virtually none of his account was true,” explained RealClearInvestigations’ Paul Sperry.

In fact, a technical glitch prevented FBI technicians from accurately comparing the new emails with the old emails. Only 3,077 of the 694,000 emails were directly reviewed for classified or incriminating information. Three FBI officials completed that work in a single 12-hour spurt the day before Comey again cleared Clinton of criminal charges.

Roger Stone

In 2019, former Trump associate Roger Stone was raided by the FBI after being indicted by Mueller. A CNN camera crew happened to be the only network present at Stone’s Fort Lauderdale home before the sunrise raid, suggesting the friendly press had been tipped off in advance. The FBI, however, refused to comply with a Federalist open records request for any and all emails to or from CNN on the day of the raid.

Jan. 6 Capitol Riot

The Jan. 6 saga has become the sequel in Democrats’ efforts to indict Trump, before FBI agents hatched a plot to go after the former president over supposed espionage.

In October, the bureau refused to offer House Republicans conducting their own independent investigation of the Capitol riot the same material given to congressional Democrats. The FBI’s refusal, the agency claimed, was because officials were already working with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Select Committee on Jan. 6. Pelosi’s committee, however, was established in violation of House rules. Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., the minority appointment as ranking member, is entitled to the documents presented to Democrats.

Senior FBI officials have also refused lawmakers’ questions about how many informants were present at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and stonewalled inquiries surrounding Ray Epps, the mysterious figure who disappeared from the most-wanted list after he encouraged rioters to swarm the Capitol.

At an Aug. 4 Senate hearing, FBI Director Christopher Wray sought to downplay agency negligence, claiming “we did not have any credible intelligence that pointed to thousands of people breaching the Capitol.” But according to Newsweek, the agency deployed commandos with “shoot to kill authority,” and even Capitol Hill parking attendants knew there were going to be mass protests. The FBI has also been less than forthcoming about a pair of pipe bombs planted at the RNC and DNC headquarters.

At the same time, the FBI has embarked on a nationwide manhunt, to incarcerating demonstrators who have been declared such a threat to the republic over trespassing that they’ve been denied a fair and speedy trial and held in detention for more than 18 months.

Julian Khater, one of two accused of assaulting a Capitol Police officer with pepper spray and whose case has been documented by Julie Kelly at American Greatness, appears to have been outright coerced into making an unconstitutional confession. Khater was detained in March 2021 and has remained in federal custody ever since after intense interrogation without an attorney present.

Kamala Harris on Jan. 6

The presence of Vice President Mike Pence and then-Sen. Kamala Harris at the U.S. Capitol has been the basis for nearly 800 people being charged with at least one count of violating 18 U.S. Code, section 1752, according to Kelly, which indicates that any building or complex hosting the vice president is a restricted area and therefore closed to the public.

“But the Justice Department recently was forced to admit that Harris was not in the building for most of the day on January 6,” Kelly reported, highlighting that Harris, at the time, remained a U.S. senator, not vice president. In the late morning, Harris was moved to the DNC headquarters where a pipe bomb had supposedly been planted.

“Prosecutors have begun amending language in court filings to reflect the fact Harris was not inside the Capitol despite making the assertion in thousands of charging documents,” Kelly wrote.

March 4, 2021

The FBI released a joint memo with the Department of Homeland Security warning that “domestic extremists” were preparing to launch an insurrection by overwhelming the Capitol and removing Democratic lawmakers “on or about the 4th of March.”

Nothing happened.

Hunter Biden Suppression

In July, Grassley’s office published a blockbuster whistleblower report wherein senior agency officials alleged that the bureau is actively trying to sabotage Trump and provide cover for President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.

“Multiple FBI whistleblowers, including those in senior positions,” Grassley’s office wrote in a press release, “are raising the alarm about tampering by senior FBI and Justice Department officials in politically sensitive investigations ranging from election and campaign finance probes across multiple election cycles.”

Washington Field Office Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy Thibault and Director of Election Crimes Branch Richard Pilger, the whistleblowers alleged, coordinated to amplify defamatory information against Trump while giving cover to Hunter Biden, dismissing Biden intelligence as disinformation.

The agency reportedly knew of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop full of incriminating information on the first family as early as 2019, and Grassley’s whistleblower report highlights how officials may have undermined DOJ investigations into Hunter Biden’s finances in Delaware and Pittsburgh. In March, FBI Assistant Director of the Cyber Division Bryan Vorndran told lawmakers he did not know the whereabouts of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Gretchen Whitmer Plot

In October 2020, the FBI revealed that a plot to kidnap Michigan Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had been heroically foiled by federal law enforcement. A group of far-right militiamen, the story goes, conspired to kidnap the governor and try her as a “tyrant” in Wisconsin. In July last year, however, BuzzFeed revealed that at least 12 people involved were FBI informants orchestrating another entrapment.

“The problem with the case is that it appears the FBI, through informants and undercover agents, hatched the kidnapping plot, served in the key leadership positions of the militia group, trained the militia members in military tactics, actively recruited participants, and funded much of the militia’s activities,” reported former CIA Paramilitary Operations Officer Max Morton. “Then, when various members of the Watchman militia became uncomfortable with the kidnapping plot, with several quitting, the FBI’s primary informant pushed the plot along, eventually becoming the militia group’s leader.”

In April, a jury refused to convict four of the 14 defendants charged. Two were found not guilty, another two concluded the trial with no verdict, and another two took plea deals.

Ralph Northam Plot

Dan Chappel, the primary informant in the Whitmer kidnapping conspiracy, targeted a senior disabled veteran named Frank Butler using the same formula to go after then-Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, another Democrat.

“Just as in the Whitmer plot, Chappel lured Frank Butler into attempting to build an explosive device,” Kelly explained in American Greatness. “Chappel also invited Butler to a field training exercise in Wisconsin during the last weekend in October, an excursion attended by some defendants in the Whitmer caper.”

Unlike the FBI’s victims in the Whitmer plot, however, Butler did not participate and has not been charged with any crime.

Sen. Ted Stevens’ Conviction

Former Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, became the victim of FBI corruption in 2008 when forced to defend himself on charges of false statements to federal officials. Stevens lost his seat as the scandal played out, only to be later exonerated when a judge conducting an independent investigation concluded that prosecutors inappropriately hid evidence.

Prosecutors indicted Stevens on charges that he had concealed that he did not pay full value for renovations on an Alaskan cabin less than 100 days out from the 2008 election.

“In fact, Ted Stevens and his wife had paid more than $160,000 for renovations that independent appraisers valued at less than $125,000 at the time,” Roll Call reported.

Prosecutors, however, secured a conviction by hiding evidence that incriminated their own witnesses, one of whom came up with testimony right before trial, with inconsistent statements concealed from the defense, according to the D.C. paper.

Likewise, the government concealed evidence that its star witness had suborned perjury from an underage prostitute with whom the star witness had an illegal sexual relationship. And the government concealed evidence that another witness — whom the government flew back to Alaska away from the Washington, D.C., trial after their mock cross-examination of him went poorly — had told the senator that the bills he received and promptly paid included all of the work that was done. Government prosecutors mocked Stevens when he explained that on the stand — all the while knowing that they had a witness who would have supported him, but whom they had removed from the trial.

Rep. Jeff Fortenberry’s Conviction

Former Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb., was sentenced to two years of probation with a $25,000 fine and 320 hours of community service in March after a Los Angeles jury convicted him of lying to the federal government after he was entrapped by the FBI.

The saga began in 2019 when a pair of FBI agents showed up at Fortenberry’s Nebraska home ostensibly over a national security issue, not a criminal investigation. Prosecutors ultimately convicted Fortenberry for scheming to conceal material facts to federal officials and two false statements to the FBI.

One false statement was attributed to Forteberry not recognizing a person whose 10-year-old picture was presented to him by agents on their trip to his Nebraska residence. In July 2019, the FBI lied to Fortenberry and his attorney, Gowdy, claiming Fortenberry was not under federal investigation when he was. Fortenberry resigned from the House during his ninth term following conviction.

Pulse Nightclub Shooting

In June 2016, a 29-year-old gunman named Omar Mateen stormed the gay Orlando nightclub Pulse, killing 49 and injuring 53 more in the name of Islamic terrorists killed in Iraq and Syria. Mateen’s father, Seddique, was an FBI informant, whom documents published by The Intercept suggest convinced the bureau to stop investigating his son.

The bureau turned instead to charging Mateen’s widow, Noor Salman, with material support and obstruction of justice. Prosecutors sought to conceal the father’s status as an FBI informant, according to the Intercept, in pursuit of Salman’s conviction.

“Seddique Mateen has not faced criminal charges despite a tip to the FBI that he raised money for terrorism in Pakistan, and an ongoing investigation into money transfers he allegedly made to Turkey and Afghanistan,” the Intercept reported. “Omar Mateen was researching flights to Turkey at the same time that his father was sending payments there, according to defense lawyers’ summary of FBI evidence.” Salmon was apparently unaware of their possible plans to travel to either country.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported on Salmon’s 2018 trial:

Testimony from an F.B.I. agent revealed that prosecutors knew early on, but did not reveal, that one of their crucial initial pieces of evidence — that Ms. Salman had admitted driving by the nightclub with her husband in the days before the attack — most likely did not happen.

Salmon was ultimately acquitted after a 12-hour jury deliberation.

Texas Synagogue Attack

On Jan. 15, 44-year-old Malik Faisal Akram took hostages in a Texas synagogue near Dallas and demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani national also known as “Lady Al Qaeda” serving an 86-year sentence for assault and attempted murder of federal agents and military personnel.

Matthew J. DeSarno, the FBI’s special agent in charge of the Dallas field office, said the attack on a synagogue had nothing to do with targeting Jews.

“We do believe from our engagement with this subject that he was singularly focused on one issue, and it was not specifically related to the Jewish community,” DeSarno said at a press conference.

But as Chuck DeVore of the Texas Public Policy Foundation reported, Akram “was heard to say via the live stream that operated from the synagogue for much of the incident that he chose it because he thought it was the closest assemblage of Jews to the federal facility holding Siddiqui.”

“There are about 1,000 churches in the Fort Worth area within a half-hour drive of Siddiqui’s place of incarceration, compared to seven Jewish centers of worship,” DeVore wrote. “But sure, Special Agent DeSarno, the terrorism was ‘not specifically threatening to the Jewish community.’”

Congressional Baseball Shooter

The FBI designated the death of a shooter who attempted to gun down Republican lawmakers at a 2017 congressional baseball practice as motivated by a desire to commit “suicide by cop.” Last year, the bureau doubled down on the designation.

“It’s fair to say the shooter was motivated by a desire to commit an attack on members of Congress and then knowing by doing so he would likely be killed in the process,” Jill Sanborn, the executive assistant director of the FBI, told the House Appropriations subcommittee.

“The FBI still doesn’t know exactly what the shooter was up to,” McCabe, now a CNN contributor, said last summer. “They never really uncovered the sort of detailed evidence that laid out a specific plot or an objective.”

On the contrary, the 66-year-old shooter who almost killed House GOP Whip Steve Scalise left behind a long record of extremist social media posts dripping with contempt for Republicans, even branding them as the “Taliban of the USA” on Facebook. The FBI also found a list of six congressmen in a rented Virginia storage locker but refused to call it a “hit list.”

Inflating Extremism Cases

Whistleblowers claim the FBI is inflating the number of “domestic violent extremism” cases to fit President Biden’s overarching narrative that home-grown extremism is the nation’s worst national security threat.

“From recent protected disclosures, we have learned that FBI officials are pressuring agents to reclassify cases as ‘domestic violent extremism’ even if the cases do not meet the criteria for such a classification,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, wrote in July, detailing whistleblower allegations in a letter to Wray. “Given the narrative pushed by the Biden Administration that domestic violent extremism is the ‘greatest threat’ facing our country, the revelation that the FBI may be artificially padding domestic terrorism data is scandalous.”

Ignoring Larry Nassar Abuse

The FBI turned a blind eye as former USA gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar abused dozens of young female athletes. According to the DOJ inspector general last year, “senior officials in the FBI Indianapolis Field Office failed to respond to allegations of sexual abuse of athletes by former USA Gymnastics physician Lawrence Gerard Nassar with the urgency that the allegations required.”

“We also found that the FBI Indianapolis Field Office made fundamental errors when it did respond to the allegations, failed to notify the appropriate FBI field office (the Lansing Resident Agency) or state or local authorities of the allegations, and failed to take other steps to mitigate the ongoing threat posed by Nassar,” the inspector general added.

Kyle Rittenhouse

Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of politicized charges brought against him last summer when he shot three men in self-defense. Two died, and contrary to the media’s racialized coverage of the trial, all three were white.

During the proceedings, wherein an 18-year-old Rittenhouse (now 19) faced life in prison, prosecutors used aerial footage from FBI surveillance in their effort to convict Rittenhouse. When the defense tried to access “the rest” of the FBI footage from the night in question, however, the bureau claimed it no longer existed.

Demonizing James Rosen

In 2010, the Obama administration began aggressive surveillance of journalist James Rosen who was working for Fox News at the time. The Justice Department tracked Rosen by falsely claiming the reporter was a potential terrorist collaborator and accused him of violating the Espionage Act.

The Obama administration tracked Rosen’s movements and, according to Fox News, even seized the phone records of his parents.

Deadly Wrongful Conviction

A 2007 ruling against the government cost the FBI $102 million after agency misconduct resulted in the deaths of two men. In order to protect a mob informant, the FBI was caught deliberately withholding evidence in a case that led to the wrongful convictions of four men, three of which were sentenced to death, two of whom died before true justice was served.

Martha Stewart

Most Americans today believe Martha Stewart was convicted 20 years ago on charges of “insider trading.” Her actual conviction that sent her to federal prison was conspiracy to lie about the crime for which she was never charged over a trade that had already taken place.

Stewart’s quarter-million-dollar sale of ImClone stock served as the pretext for which federal prosecutors, led by none other than Comey, went after the media mogul. Comey’s case, however, was so weak that prosecutors pursued a novel legal theory to secure a conviction.

According to the theory they pursued, Stewart engaged in “securities fraud” when she declared that she was innocent, which prosecutors said was designed to prop up the value of her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. In other words, Stewart’s proclamation of innocence was declared a crime by federal law enforcement, and she spent six months incarcerated.

Mar-a-Lago Raid

The Department of Justice appears to be following the same playbook agency officials have used for years in the Democrats’ series of manufactured scandals to bring down Trump.

Last week, the FBI executed an unprecedented raid of the former president’s Florida residence ostensibly conducted to enforce the Presidential Records Act. Federal officials confiscated more than a dozen boxes from the 128-room mansion pursuant to the rarely prosecuted law, claiming Trump harbored classified information related to the nation’s nuclear secrets. Leaked claims to the Washington Post that Trump possessed sensitive nuclear records, which came hours after Attorney General Merrick Garland professed the agency’s professionalism, however, showcase the sensationalism crafted by officials desperate to justify the raid, which included more than 30 agents.

At a press conference last week, Garland admitted to personally signing off on the raid he called “narrowly scope[d].” An examination of the warrant, however, reveals that it authorized FBI agents to seize any and every document Trump came into contact with as president. Furthermore, none of the three criminal statutes the DOJ cited in the warrant required the material to be classified, according to Cleveland.

The FBI also attempted to dispel claims that federal officials stripped the president of his passports, telling CBS News that the agency was not in possession of the documents after Trump blasted that they had been confiscated. An email made public by Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich, however, exposed the FBI’s lie. The email from Jay Bratt, the chief of the counterintelligence and export control section in the DOJ’s National Security Division, confirms that “the filter agents seized three passports belonging to President Trump, two expired and one being his active diplomatic passport.”

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.

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Democrats Say, ‘No One Is Above the Law,’ But This List of Their Corrupt Allies Proves Otherwise

BY: JORDAN BOYD | AUGUST 17, 2022

President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland

Author Jordan Boyd profile

JORDAN BOYD

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When the FBI executed a raid on the home of former President Donald Trump, who happens to be the most popular political leader in America, the “get Trump” crowd was overjoyed.

Democrat Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Miles Taylor (the “anonymous” author who pretended to be a senior Trump aide), Clinton-era Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, even Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, and many others all gave the same justification for the FBI’s actions that they gave for Trump’s first and second impeachments: “No one is above the law, not even a president of the United States.”

Yet, a majority of Americans know that’s categorically untrue. That’s why so many of them rejected Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray’s scolding of anyone who dared question their credibility following the raid.

But while the FBI and DOJ have busied themselves with targeting Trump and his aides, colluding with the National School Boards Association to silence concerned parents, concocting entrapment schemes masquerading as plots to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and chasing down election integrity supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, plenty of real criminals and security threats have gotten away scot-free. That’s no accident.

Here is everyone who Democrats and their bureaucrat buddies have deemed “above the law” and unworthy of proper investigation and prosecution.

1. President Joe Biden

A president avoiding paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes seems like the kind of thing federal agencies, including the recently financially invigorated Internal Revenue Service, should explore. Yet Biden, who hasn’t explained millions of dollars of his recorded income, and First Lady Jill Biden together reportedly dodged about $517,000 in Medicare and Obamacare taxes between 2017 and 2020 without scrutiny.

2. Hunter Biden

The president’s son isn’t just a walking liability for the Biden family name, he’s a glaring national security threat with a long, infamous history of using illicit drugs, engaging in possibly criminal sexual escapades with foreign women, and selling access to his dad under the guise of doing business with foreign oligarchs.

Besides all this and his reckless handling of a lost gun in 2018 — which, against normal protocol, the Secret Service reportedly helped him cover up — Hunter likely lied on federal forms about his drug use to purchase that gun, a felony, with barely a whisper of punishment.

3. Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton and her staff mishandled highly classified information, which resulted in at least 91 security violations. The FBI, of course, never raided Clinton’s house over her rogue server despite the crimes committed to cover it up. Instead, as Sen. Chuck Grassley put it, the FBI “inexplicably agreed to destroy [Clinton staffers Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson’s] laptops knowing that the contents were the subject of Congressional subpoenas and preservation letters.”

4. Everyone Involved in Benghazi

Speaking of Clinton, why wasn’t she or any other Obama-era bureaucrat who was responsible for abandoning four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, where they were murdered by terrorists, punished for trying to cover up the fatal scandal?

5. Illegal Border Crossers

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has apprehended roughly 3.5 million illegal border crossers since Biden assumed office, but those migrants are rarely punished for violating the law.

Instead of addressing how the compromised border is fostering an environment ripe for trafficking and other crimes, the Biden administration along with the FBI and DOJ have brushed off concerns about illegal immigration. Apparently, it is more important to go after American citizens than prosecute potentially dangerous foreign ones.

6. Gavin Newsom and Every Other Dem Who Partied While Americans Suffered Lockdowns

Dozens of Democrats including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Pelosi, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio were caught violating their own Covid-19 lockdown rules. If Democrats cared about rule of law so much, why did these politicians escape accountability?

7. Summer of Rage Rioters

During the summer of 2020, rioters looted, burned, and destroyed more than $2 billion worth of private and federal property. Some of those who were caught were bailed out by Kamala Harris and her allies and let off the hook by the federal government. The rioters who weren’t caught can live comfortably knowing that the DOJ is too busy trying to track down potential J6 offenders to prosecute them.

8. Climate Insurrectionists

In October 2021, rowdy climate rioters stormed the Department of the Interior, physically fought with police, and vandalized a building. Several officers were even injured, but I don’t see the rioters’ faces plastered all over an FBI tip line website nor an illegitimate congressional committee dedicated to their downfall.

9. Jane’s Revenge

It took 44 days after attacks on dozens of pregnancy centers, churches, and pro-life organizations began for the FBI to tell The Federalist that it would investigate the firebombings. Two months after the agency reportedly started its search into the criminal activity, neither the FBI nor DOJ has announced charges against the vandals, including a mysterious anarchist-connected group called Jane’s Revenge, which took responsibility for some of the destruction.

10. Everyone Else Who Threatened SCOTUS over Dobbs

Shortly after a leak revealed that the Supreme Court planned to strike down Roe v. Wade, leftists called for violence against the Republican-nominated justices. While the Biden administration and DOJ stood idly by, some even said the court should burn to the ground. It took until a man was caught attempting to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of Garland’s former colleagues, for the DOJ to respond to Republican Sen. Marco Rubio’s questions about whether the agency planned to prosecute anyone touting the “ongoing, coordinated campaign of intimidation against the majority of the justices on the Supreme Court.” Even then, nothing came of the DOJ’s words.

11. The Pelosi Family

Suspected insider trading deserves at least a second glance by federal investigators, but it looks like, so far, Nancy Pelosi and her husband Paul have gotten away with conveniently timing their stock purchases and sales to massively grow their wealth.

12. Almost Everyone on Jeffrey Epstein’s Client List

Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell were both convicted of trafficking children for sex, but the list of their clients is still reportedly harbored by the DOJ, something lamented by many including Elon Musk. Of those names that have surfaced from Epstein’s “little black book,” few have been prosecuted and convicted for their involvement in the sex-trafficking ring.

13. Marc Elias and Election Law-Breakers

Marc Elias has repeatedly tried to undermine U.S. elections, something the FBI loves to spy on Americans for. Elias has such a reputation for meddling and manipulating elections that even a federal judge reprimanded him for it. Unlike Douglass Mackey, who was charged by the DOJ for posting a meme encouraging Hillary voters to “text” their votes, however, Elias has not faced any charges or unannounced raids.

14. Mark Milley

Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, undermined Trump by having secret conversations with known U.S. enemy communist China. In those covert calls, Milley promised to warn China if the U.S. ever decided to attack. Talk about a national security threat that deserves some attention from federal law enforcement.

15. Eric Swalwell

Speaking of communist China, Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell canoodling with a known spy for the nation’s No. 1 enemy seems like a pretty serious offense. Instead of a member of the House Intelligence Committee facing consequences for giving foreign spies access to key U.S. government offices and information, Swalwell is still comfortably rage-tweeting about Trump and MAGA supporters and appearing as a guest on corrupt corporate media programs.

16. The NSA

The National Security Agency deserved to be disbanded over its wiretapping scandal, but it’s still spying on Americans such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson with no reprimand.

17. Eric Holder

Former Attorney General Eric Holder misled Congress during its investigation of the Obama-era “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal, which used taxpayer dollars to put guns into the hands of Mexican drug lords. Holder was held in contempt, but that’s pretty much the only punishment he received for intentionally dodging subpoenas and hiding documents from congressional oversight.

18. Susan Rice

President Barack Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice unmasked members of the Trump transition team and then lied about it. Unmasking may be a legitimate and legal process for those with the authority, but covering up an attempt to target the political enemies of the regime is an abuse of power that deserves examination.

Instead, it was yet another action U.S. intelligence agencies exploited to justify spying on American citizens.

19. All the Russia Hoaxers

There were plenty of people in the DOJ and FBI who broke the law when they lied on official documents and to other officials to advance the Russia-collusion hoax. Yet, FBI Director Christopher Wray admitted during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in early August that so far, none of the FBI agents involved in the SpyGate scandal against Trump have faced serious consequences.

Similarly, despite lying about why he was supplying information about a supposed link between Trump and the Russia-based Alfa Bank to the FBI, former Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann was acquitted and let go without consequence.

20. Themselves

The same people who control the enforcement of the law, who love lording “no one is above the law” over Americans, are the ones who think they are above any semblance of oversight or law or constitutionality.

That’s why the FBI has skirted any of Congress’s attempts at oversight even though it has a long history of botched and politicized investigations, sometimes authorized on falsified information.

Instead of investigating and prosecuting real crimes, the FBI and DOJ have chosen to shame Americans who have called out the corruption and politicization that clearly drives their agencies’ actions. That’s a deliberate decision, but also a disastrous one.

Rule of law is one thing that sets the United States apart as a bastion of freedom, but when the government fails to uphold it properly, as the list details, the nation is in crisis and on the verge of falling apart.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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BREAKING: FBI Raid Warrant Demanded Seizure of Literally Any Record Trump Ever Saw During 4-Year Presidential Term

BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | AUGUST 12, 2022

Merrick Garland and Marine One over Mar-a-lago

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TRISTAN JUSTICE

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The FBI search warrant authorizing a government raid of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence sought an exhaustive list of any White House records the president ever came in contact with, according to the document obtained by The Federalist.

Outlining the “property to be seized” by the more than 30 agents who rummaged through the former president’s Mar-a-Lago mansion, the warrant demanded confiscation of any document Trump ever saw, read, or created for the entirety of his four years as commander-in-chief.

“All physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed in violation” of federal statutes governing records possession, the warrant reads, were to be seized. Records extended to “Any government and/or Presidential Records created between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021.”

In other words, had Trump written something down on a napkin, federal officials were authorized to raid the former president’s home and capture it.

The affidavit allegedly asserting probable cause has not been made available to the public by the DOJ or the federal court that sealed it. The search warrant was signed on Aug. 5 and gave authorities two weeks to conduct the unprecedented raid. The federal magistrate who signed the warrant previously donated thousands to former President Barack Obama. Attorney General Merrick Garland, whose Supreme Court nomination was invalidated after Donald Trump became president in 2017, acknowledged that he personally signed off on the raid in a Thursday press conference. Garland also claimed the search was conducted with a narrow scope.

“First, I personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter,” Garland said. “Second, the department does not take such a decision lightly. Where possible, it is standard practice to seek less intrusive means as an alternative to a search, and to narrowly scope any search that is undertaken.”

On Monday, three days after the warrant was signed, FBI officials conducted the hours-long raid of the 128-room estate which reportedly included an intrusive search of former First Lady Melania Trump’s wardrobe. While ostensibly executed under the pretext of violations of the Presidential Records Act, a law that rarely results in prosecutions, the raid has become the latest episode of Democrats weaponizing the Justice Department to go after political opponents, with Trump at the top as public enemy No. 1.

According to Fox News, law enforcement officials say they confiscated classified documents. Trump, however, says documents were declassified.

“Number one, it was all declassified. Number two, they didn’t need to ‘seize’ anything,” the former president said on TruthSocial. “They could have had it anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago. It was in secured storage, with an additional lock put on as per their request… They could have had it anytime they wanted–and that includes LONG ago. ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK. The bigger problem is, what are they going to do with the 33 million pages of documents, many of which are classified, that President Obama took to Chicago?”

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.

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EXCLUSIVE: Prominent Conservative Groups Write Open Letter to Garland, Wray for ‘Politicizing’ DOJ Under Biden

By SARAH WEAVER, STAFF WRITER | August 15, 2022

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland swears in the new Bureau of Prisons (BOP) Director Colette Peters in Washington — **REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein**

Multiple conservative organizations penned an open letter Friday, sharply criticizing Department of Justice (DOJ) Attorney General Merrick Garland and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray for politicizing both agencies. The letter, exclusively obtained by The Daily Caller, was signed by individuals representing organizations including the Conservative Partnership Institute, the Media Research Center, and the Leadership Institute. The contents of the letter called for the release of all documents related to the raid on President Trump’s home in Florida as well as the confiscation of Congressman Scott Perry’s cellphone, stating both actions “undermined the rule of law in America.”

“In overseeing these actions, you and FBI Director Christopher Wray have grossly failed in your mission to oversee an impartial and equal application of the law,” the letter reads.

WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 12: FBI director nominee Christopher Wray testifies during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee July 12, 2017 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.

WASHINGTON, DC – JULY 12: FBI director nominee Christopher Wray testifies during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee July 12, 2017 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.

The letter stipulated several other examples of what the organizations claimed pointed to a “politicized” DOJ and FBI, including labeling parents at school board meetings domestic terrorists, perpetuating the Russia collusion narrative about Trump and turning a blind eye to the crimes of Hunter Biden.

“Under your leadership and that of Mr. Wray, the DOJ and FBI have breached the public trust. This blatant politicization of the federal justice system is a dangerous escalation without precedent, and incompatible with the United States Constitution,” the letter said.

Garland Open Letter by Sarah Weaver

“Accordingly, we, the undersigned hereby demand that you immediately make public all underlying information relied upon or referenced in both the warrants executed against former President Trump and Congressman Perry this week,” the letter concluded.

The FBI raided Trump’s home in Florida last week, in an apparent effort to retrieve classified documents the former president had allegedly taken with him when he left the White House. The FBI obtained 11 sets of classified documents from Trump’s house, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller Friday.

Garland, in a press conference Thursday, announced that he had “personally approved” the decision to obtain a warrant. (RELATED: ‘I Don’t Know’: Schiff Can’t Explain Why DoJ Took So Long To Retrieve Documents From Trump)

The FBI seized Republican Rep. Scott Perry’s cell phone a day after the raid on Mar-a-Lago.

“DOJ chose this unnecessary and aggressive action instead of simply contacting my attorneys,” Perry told Fox News at the time.

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Senior DOJ officials blast FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago as ‘spectacular failure’: ‘The worst of the bureaucracy in action’

By CHRIS ENLOE | August 11, 2022

A senior Justice Department official condemned the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago as a “spectacular backfire” for triggering a tsunami of backlash against the Justice Department. Two senior DOJ officials spoke with Newsweek and disclosed new details about what led up to the raid. According to one official, the FBI specifically planned to conduct the raid when former President Donald Trump was not present at Mar-a-Lago. Trump was in New York at the time of the raid, Fox News reported.

“What a spectacular backfire,” the senior DOJ official said of the FBI’s attempt to keep the raid “low-key.”

“I know that there is much speculation out there that this is political persecution, but it is really the best and the worst of the bureaucracy in action,” the official explained. “They wanted to punctuate the fact that this was a routine law enforcement action, stripped of any political overtones, and yet [they] got exactly the opposite.”

The second DOJ official told Newsweek the FBI “were seeking to avoid any media circus” but “they also created the very firestorm they sought to avoid, in ignoring the fallout.”

The officials explained the FBI had been planning the raid for weeks after receiving information from a confidential source about allegedly classified documents being stored at Mar-a-Lago. Newsweek reported the informant both identified the documents and told investigators where they were located. Importantly, the sources told Newsweek that Attorney General Merrick Garland did not have advance knowledge about the specifics of the raid. Instead, FBI Director Christopher Wray approved the raid.

“I know it’s hard for people to believe,” one of the DOJ officials said, “but this was a matter for the U.S. attorney and the FBI.”

Despite claims that Garland was not involved in the planning of the raid, Republican lawmakers are demanding that Garland and Wray face repercussions for the unprecedented raid.

“I’ve never been a fan of overusing impeachment, but I think there has to be an investigation. And if it warrants it, there’s going to have to be a look at whether or not the attorney general has misused his office for political purposes. Have they gone after a political opponent? I mean, this is beyond the pale,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said on Fox News.

“At a minimum, Garland must resign or be impeached. The search warrant must be published. Christoper Wray must be removed. And the FBI reformed top to bottom,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said.

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Ann Coulter Op-ed: Merrick Garland Is a Lunatic

Ann Coulter | Posted: Aug 10, 2022

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com, and WhatDidYouSay.org.

Merrick Garland Is a Lunatic

Source: AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

Let’s hope Merrick Garland’s search of Mar-a-Lago is based on more evidence than his indictment of the Louisville, Kentucky, police officers involved in the raid on Breonna Taylor’s house.

That passive construction I just used — “involved in the raid on,” instead of “who raided” — is not sloppy writing: It’s the facts. The officers who actually shot Taylor have not been charged, apparently on the flimsy grounds that they were being shot at when they fired.

Instead, our lunatic attorney general has indicted officers who prepared the affidavit used to obtain the warrant to search Taylor’s home. In the words of the indictment, the affidavit “contained information that was false, misleading and out-of-date … and the officers lacked probable cause for the search.”

Further, the indictment also alleges that the officers knew they were providing false information.

Breonna Taylor, you will recall, was the moll for drug dealer Jamarcus Glover, one of Louisville’s biggest suppliers of cocaine and fentanyl, and therefore by definition a murderer. On March 13, 2020, the police executed simultaneous search warrants on two of his “trap houses” as well as the home of his bagwoman, Breonna.

At Taylor’s house, police announced themselves and got no response. They announced themselves again; no response. They announced themselves again; no response. Finally, they used a battering ram to enter. Almost immediately, an officer was shot.

The man with Taylor, Kenneth Walker, claims he shot at the officers because he thought the guys pounding on the front door and yelling “POLICE!” were home invaders. Skeptics will say that’s implausible, but it is now treated as hard fact in such solid, reliable news sources as The New York Times.

The officers returned fire and hit Taylor, who had the misfortune to be standing next to her boyfriend as he was shooting at the police. Riots ensued. Taylor’s family got $12 million.

Kentucky’s criminal prosecution of the one officer charged ended in an acquittal. With last week’s suit, the federal government is now bringing its own criminal charges against the police — in a sane world, this would be double jeopardy — alleging that the affidavit for a search warrant was based on information that was knowingly “false, misleading and out-of-date.”

Specifically, the feds say the following claims were false:

1. Glover and Taylor had an “ongoing connection”;

2. Glover used Taylor’s address as his residence;

3. Glover received packages at Taylor’s address.

While it can be murky determining the precise relationship status and residence of a drug dealer, especially when he works out of three trap houses and has multiple girlfriends, those three claims are not false. They are “true.”

The cops didn’t lie; the indictment does.

1. Did Glover and Taylor have an “ongoing connection”?

Their relationship dates back to at least 2016, when Taylor loaned Glover her rental car, only to have the police show up at her door to ask about the dead body in the trunk. The dead man turned out to be the brother of one of Glover’s criminal confederates.

But that was four years before the raid! Surely, Breonna wised up after the body-in-the-trunk incident and dumped Jamarcus like a hot potato. Right?

Nope! Taylor continued bonding Glover out of jail through his many arrests from 2016 to 2020. He called Taylor from jail at least 26 times during those four years — that can be proven — including on Jan. 3, 2020, three months before the raids. During that call from January 2020, the two talk about sleeping together and exchange “I love you’s.”

On Jan. 2, 2020, police installed a pole camera to observe one of the crack houses in response to numerous violent assaults in the area. The very day the camera went up, Taylor’s car was seen pulling up to the house, dropping off Glover. On Feb. 13, 2020, Taylor drove him there again, and while waiting for him, got out of her car, in full view of the camera.

GPS tracking showed his car driving to Taylor’s house six times in January 2020 alone.

But this is a dry recitation of police evidence. Glover’s baby mama (not Breonna) is more colorful. In a recorded jailhouse phone call the day after the shooting, she told him: “This b*tch (Breonna) where she’s been with you, since you ain’t been over at my house … the same day you post a picture I guess she post a video, you knew it because she said what’s up she was in the bed with you, you kissing all over her.”

Glover repeatedly assures the irate baby mama that Breonna just kept his money for him — and that thousands of dollars were still at her house.

Now, where in the world would the police get the idea that Glover and Taylor had some sort of “ongoing connection”? It’s a puzzlement.

2. Did Glover use Taylor’s address as his “residence”?

Again, what constituted Glover’s “residence” is a bit of a philosophical question because, in the words of his baby mama, “You bounce back and forth between these btches.”

But he had to give the bank an address. He gave them Taylor’s — as confirmed by the police with subpoenaed bank records they obtained on Feb. 24, 2020, mere weeks before the raids. He also had to give police a phone number when he filed a complaint in February about his car being towed. He gave them Breonna’s number.

To the extent that a major coke dealer with a string of ladies has any fixed address, Glover’s address was Taylor’s house.

3. Did Glover receive packages at Taylor’s residence?

This one’s the easiest to answer. The police had photos of Glover carrying a USPS package from her house on Jan. 16, 2020. His car pulls up, he walks into her house empty-handed, then emerges carrying the USPS package. (Whereupon, he drove directly to a trap house.)

The hilarious part of this charge is that according to the indictment, it is based on the word of U.S. Postal Inspector Tony Gooden, who has been giving interviews all over, saying that in January 2020, his office investigated whether any “potentially suspicious packages” were being sent to Taylor’s house. But after a thorough investigation, he reported, nope, no suspicious packages!

That search must have been exhaustive!

Even the lawyer representing Taylor’s family wasn’t stupid enough to deny the packages. Amid a blizzard of fanciful claims about Taylor and Glover’s relationship — They’d broken up years ago! They barely stayed in touch! — the lawyer admitted that Taylor “accepted packages” for Glover.

Yeah, we know. There are pictures. The only people who don’t know are the Louisville postal inspector and the attorney general of the United States.

This fall, the Democrats will try to convince you that they support the police. Why, look at how well we treated the cop who shot Ashli Babbitt! Never forget that this is the party that spent 2 1/2 years — and counting! — trying to destroy Louisville police officers for risking their lives to take down a major drug ring.

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Democrats Have Arrested, Prosecuted, And Raided Their Enemies. There’s Only One Way to Make Them Stop

BY: CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD | AUGUST 10, 2022

President Joe Biden, first lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Douglas Emhoff in June 2022. White House/Adam Schultz.

Author Christopher Bedford profile

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD

VISIT ON TWITTER@CBEDFORDDC

Arrests and convictions over contempt of Congress. Police enforcement of bureaucratic and relatively obscure archivist laws. FBI raids on former presidents (and future political opponents?). In their rage, the Democratic Congress and administration have written a vicious battle plan — one that conservatives will do well to follow when they return to power if they’re at all serious about restoring any semblance of respect for law in our country. In weeks past, there’s little reason to believe conservatives are; but Monday night’s raid might finally have changed that.

Just over one year after President Joe Biden’s election to the White House, his Department of Justice arrested Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former political director. Bannon was arrested for contempt of Congress, or, refusing to answer a congressional subpoena. After he was convicted last month, Bannon became the first American to face a prison sentence for contempt since the House Un-American Activities Committee sent 10 uncooperative, suspected Hollywood communists to prison in 1948. In the more than 70 years between the Hollywood Ten’s sentencings and Bannon’s conviction, contempt of Congress had devolved into more of a political tool used to investigate the other party, but rarely brought to its legal conclusion.

While Democrats tried to prosecute contempt of Congress twice during the Reagan years, the administration only let one prosecution come to pass (in which the defendant was ultimately found innocent of contempt). Decades later, when Republicans tried to bring a similar case against President Barack Obama’s obstinate attorney general, Eric Holder declined to prosecute himself, citing executive privilege. Two years later, when Republicans sought answers from the IRS’s Lois Lerner over her targeting of political opponents, Holder also declined to prosecute. Later, when Democrats tried to bring criminal contempt charges against Trump’s secretary of commerce and attorney general, Bill Barr similarly declined to prosecute himself.

Criminal enforcement is extremely rare because the reality is Congress can refer who they like, but the administration prosecutes whomever the administration chooses to prosecute.

The Biden administration has made clear they’ll prosecute their political opponents every chance they get. That means that despite Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s threat to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland accountable in the next Congress, he will only be empowered to hold Garland accountable under a Republican administration (unless he complies with Republican congressional oversight, which he won’t).

True: Arresting an administration official after he’s left office is a dangerous precedent, but it’s one Democrats gleefully set this past year. And contempt of Congress is far from the only weapon the administration has wielded against their out-of-power opponents: Tuesday’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s home, for example, reportedly centered on his handling of classified information (and the Watergate-era Presidential Records Act).

While politicians such as Hillary Clinton have been accused of similar crimes, prosecution is extremely rare — and focuses on the most egregious cases. For example, Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, was prosecuted in 2004 for stealing and destroying classified documents on the Clinton administration’s handling of terrorism prior to his testimony before the 9/11 Commission. Gen. David Petraeus was similarly charged for sharing classified documents with his mistress. Neither Berger nor Petraeus was charged with so much as a felony, instead pleading guilty to misdemeanors. Neither Berger nor Petraeus’s homes were ever raided, either, and, neither man ever served a day in prison. Most importantly, neither was a former president of the opposing party — nor a potential political opponent in the next general election.

That’s what makes the FBI’s raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home so shocking — so disconcerting that voices from former Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to the liberal Bloomberg editorial board to D.C.-groupthink mouthpiece Playbook have all voiced their unease.

These liberals’ unease stands in contrast with Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, who ignored a reporter’s Tuesday afternoon question on the subject and didn’t issue so much as a peep of concern for the first 23 hours after the raid was publicized. He was joined in his silence by Senate Republican Whip John Thune (who issued a statement at the same time, Tuesday night), Senate Republican Policy Committee Chairman Roy Blunt (who remained silent as of 9 p.m. on Tuesday), and the Senate’s premier “thoughtful conservative” cosplayer, Ben Sasse. Why the silence? While after five years of increasingly unrealistic (and unproven) conspiracies and accusations against the former president, some Republicans still somehow trust the FBI. The reality is that others, such as McConnell, are pleased by the raid. But regardless of their private thoughts and motivations, their impotent silence in the face of the Biden administration’s charges, arrests, and raids on its political opponents exposes their inability to handle the crisis the American state finds itself in.

While over the coming years, still other Republicans will cite this dead norm or that gutted precedent as they hesitate to use the Democrats’ own battle plans back on them, one-sided disarmament is no strategy at all. The only way to fight back is to make the kinds of people who’ve weaponized and undermined the American state suffer for their actions. They’ve arrested their enemies, revived obscure rules as pretexts for partisan attacks, and raided their opponents’ homes, and they won’t be sorry until they’ve felt the same pain.

They aren’t sorry at all — yet.

Christopher Bedford is a senior editor at The Federalist, a founding partner of RightForge, vice chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, a board member at The Daily Caller News Foundation and National Journalism Center, and the author of “The Art of the Donald.” His work has been featured in The American Mind, National Review, the New York Post and the Daily Caller, where he led the Daily Caller News Foundation and spent eight years. A frequent guest on Fox News and Fox Business, he was raised in Massachusetts and lives across the river from D.C. Follow him on Twitter.

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Under Biden’s DOJ, The Rule of Law in America Has Become a Farce

BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | AUGUST 10, 2022

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

The criminal indictment and imprisonment of former heads of state by ruling regimes in other countries is more common than most Americans probably realize. Today, former presidents of Argentina, Bolivia, El Salvador, Colombia, Guatemala, Panama, Peru, Paraguay, and Costa Rica are all imprisoned — and that’s just in Central and South America.

The world is replete with corrupt leaders who criminalize the opposition and politicize domestic law enforcement. That’s why, for example, Daniel Ortega has been president of Nicaragua since 2007. When you jail your political opponents and potential rivals, as Ortega did with gusto ahead of Nicaragua’s 2021 presidential election, it’s easy to stay in office. One of the salient features of these so-called “developing countries” is that they have not developed a way to transfer power peacefully. Brute force, not free and fair elections, is how rulers of the Third World seize and retain power.

Soon, the United States might join their ranks. On Monday evening, dozens of FBI agents raided the Florida home of former President Donald Trump. The absurd pretext for the raid was a dispute over documents with the National Archives — a circumstance by no means unique to the Trump administration and one that no serious person believes could ever justify such a raid. (As my colleague David Harsanyi pointed out on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton and her staff committed numerous felonies by using a private email server to send classified and even top-secret information and then destroyed all evidence related to the illegal server. Yet there was never an FBI raid or even a single charge filed against anyone. Just the opposite, in fact: Clinton’s staff was given immunity.)

Everyone in America knows the real reason for the FBI raid: to tarnish Trump as unfit for office and to intimidate and dissuade him from running again in 2024. Nothing like this has ever happened in American history. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., was exactly right to compare the FBI raid to the kind of thing you see in Ortega’s Nicaragua. It’s what ruling regimes do to rob the people of their voice and avoid the consequences of elections.

Biden is playing with fire by using a document dispute to get the @TheJusticeDept to persecute a likely future election opponent

Because one day what goes around is going to come around

And then we become Nicaragua under Ortega pic.twitter.com/LwODnsYtcr
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) August 9, 2022

As bad as the raid was, though, it’s only the most recent incident in a larger pattern of corruption, not only in the Justice Department but across the federal government, designed to keep Trump out of office and away from the levers of power.

On Monday, before news broke of the FBI raid, The New Yorker published a remarkable piece about Gen. Mark Milley and other top Pentagon officials during Trump’s presidency. The article, an excerpt of a forthcoming book by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser titled “The Divider,” is meant to show what a hero Milley was to stand up to Trump, especially after the 2020 election (no doubt thanks to Milley obviously being the unnamed source for the conversations the article recounts). But what it unintentionally reveals is a U.S. military establishment that simply refused to follow the orders of a duly elected commander-in-chief and worked behind the scenes to thwart Trump’s entire foreign policy agenda, and, in Milley, a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who came within a stone’s throw of staging a military coup in Washington. Milley and other top-ranking generals undermined Trump not because he asked them to do anything illegal but because he asked them to do things they opposed, like withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and Afghanistan and take a hard line on Iran.

Withdrawing U.S. troops from these places and pushing back against Iran is, of course, one of the things Trump campaigned on in 2016. Many of Trump’s voters, disillusioned with unending and seemingly pointless foreign conflicts, were ready for a radical shift in U.S. foreign policy. But Milley, whom zero Americans voted for, disagreed. He thought he knew better. Thus, we are told about how in December 2020, Milley met privately with then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “to personally urge him to back off with Trump” and not strike Iran’s ballistic missile sites, which Trump wanted to do in response to Tehran’s breakout nuclear capabilities. This was around the same time Milley was making phone calls to a Chinese general to reassure Beijing that Trump wasn’t about to start a war — and that if Trump did plan to attack, Milley would personally warn his Chinese counterparts ahead of time.

The left and the Never Trump crowd think that doesn’t count as treason because they think Trump was never a legitimate president. They think we needed people like Milley to undermine him until he was out of office and the “adults” were in charge again. Under the circumstances, almost anything was justified, goes the thinking.

The same twisted logic is at work in this FBI raid against Trump. In addition to corrupt Democrat lawyers like Marc Elias admitting on Twitter that the real purpose of the raid is to rig the 2024 election by disqualifying Trump from running, you have Never Trumpers like David French peddling the laughably naive line that “no president is above the law” and that no one should assume the FBI is abusing its power. Even South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott said Americans should not jump to conclusions but let the DOJ investigation “play out.”

But of course the FBI is abusing its power, as is Attorney General Merrick Garland. The idea that the FBI and Garland’s DOJ deserve the presumption of integrity and impartiality is only possible if you have been blissfully unaware of the events of the past six years in American politics.

The FBI fabricated evidence and then repeatedly submitted it to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain an illegal warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. The FBI’s top officials then illegally leaked to the press and later lied about it. They used this illegal surveillance as a pretext for the years-long Mueller investigation. All of it was designed to remove Trump from office or, failing that, fatally weaken his administration. None of it had anything to do with the rule of law.

Nor did the FBI’s decision to quash an investigation into Hunter Biden’s criminal activities and overseas business dealings ahead of the 2020 election, even though much of the information driving the investigation was verified or easily verifiable. And neither does this FBI raid. This is about one thing and one thing only: holding onto power by any means necessary. There is nothing particularly subtle or nuanced about it. If you want to know where it leads, check out Nicaragua.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Merrick Garland Is A Petty, Vindictive, Little Man

By Larry O’Connor | Posted: Aug 09, 2022

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

Merrick Garland Is A Petty, Vindictive, Little Man

Source: AP Photo/Susan Walsh

Merrick Garland should have recused himself from anything pertaining to former President Donald Trump. Period, full stop.

Think about it.

President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland for the United States Supreme Court in 2016. With the presidential election looming that coming November, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell halted the nomination and refused to allow it to even go to the Judiciary Committee, let alone to the floor of the Senate for a confirmation vote.

This immediately made Garland a major issue in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Donald Trump vowed to personally remove his name as a nominee for the high court should he win the election, and that became part of the reason for his historic and unlikely victory.

Trump won. Garland’s name was withdrawn, and his hopes of landing the lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court and a place in American history were dashed forever.

Fast-forward to last year when Joe Biden became the accidental place-holder president for the Establishment and the Deep State. He made Garland Attorney General partially as a consolation prize and partially as a symbolic message to Trump and Republicans.

In the intervening months since taking his position, he’s dutifully done the bidding of the Biden White House, including the outrageous decision to set up a special FBI task force to investigate parents who protest at school board meetings as domestic terrorists.

Whatever Biden, the Democrats, and their special interest overlords demanded, he was quick to comply.

You want parents investigated? You got it!

You want extra investigations into new voting laws in Republican states? We’ll double our investigative staff!

You want hundreds of Trump supporters arrested for “illegal parading” on January 6th to languish in jail for over a year before they get a court date? Done!

You want midnight raids on advisors to the president to intimidate them into testifying to the January 6th kangaroo committee? You don’t even need to ask!

You want Bannon arrested and convicted? No problem!

Any chance this petty, little, vindictive man had to use his department as a political tool to punish the enemies of the American left, he took it.

And it all led to yesterday’s Banana Republic cosplay in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Under the guise of the Presidential Records Act (seriously?), 30 FBI agents stormed into the home of the former president and conducted an authoritarian fishing expedition seizing whatever documents they wanted without even perusing them to see if they matched the criteria of their sham search warrant, broadcasting their third-world larping around the planet to send the message that the FBI was treating Donald Trump like a mafia boss and common criminal.

And Merrick Garland oversaw the entire pathetic scene.

This angry, bitter Napolean should never have had anything to do with the chain of command regarding any issue pertaining to Donald Trump.

As detailed above, he has a very personal reason to despise the former president. Trump single-handedly kept Garland off the Supreme Court. And now, he’s in the position as chief law enforcement officer in America to release the full weight and power of the FBI on the man who thwarted his career and ambition.

That’s not just a conflict of interest, that’s a murder plot in a John Grisham thriller.

In fact, it goes well beyond the obvious conflict of interest stemming from the “Revenge factor” over the events of 2016. Garland has a vested interest in stopping Donald Trump so as to advance his future political and financial fortunes.

You see, Donald Trump is not just a former president, he is also a future presidential candidate. He will likely run against Garland’s current boss. If Trump wins, he would once again end Garland’s current run as attorney general, and he would, once again, end any future prospects of Garland getting another Supreme Court nomination.

If Trump wins the next election, Garland’s career is pretty much over.

So, Garland uses his power to help make sure that doesn’t happen.

This is what the professionals who care about these things refer to as the appearance of impropriety and a direct conflict of interest.

Jeff Sessions recused himself as attorney general for anything pertaining to the Russian Collusion hoax because he had a bowl of borscht at a Trump Tower restaurant or something stupid like that. And Garland doesn’t feel any pressure to recuse over his obvious, direct, past, present, and future conflict with Donald Trump?

You make sense of it… I’ve lost the energy to even try.

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In The Wake of Roe’s Demise, Democrats Are Doing All They Can to Thwart Democracy

BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | JULY 22, 2022

Democrats say they love democracy, but when it produces laws they oppose, they’ll use all their power to undermine it.

Author John Daniel Davidson profile

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOHNDDAVIDSON

Democrats love to talk about democracy — mostly about how it’s under threat from Republicans and “Christian nationalists” and anyone who opposes their agenda. But at least on a rhetorical level, they seem to cherish democracy and rightly think that a government of the people, by the people is the surest safeguard against tyranny.

In practice, though, they hate democracy and will use every tool at their disposal to subvert and destroy it. Hardly a day goes by that Democrats don’t proclaim as much by their actions. Just look at their response to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade last month, which triggered laws in more than a dozen states banning or placing new restrictions on abortion. Voters in those states elected the people who passed these new laws, which in many cases are broadly popular. By overturning Roe, the court breathed new life into the democratic process, returning an issue to the American people that an earlier Supreme Court had snatched away from them.

But Democrats don’t really want democracy when it comes to abortion, which they consider sacrosanct. They have no qualms about protecting it from regulations by state lawmakers through the raw exercise of federal executive power, if need be. This week, Attorney General Merrick Garland threatened to sue states that have outlawed or restricted abortion since the end of Roe, and he also said the Justice Department would try to get a judge to toss a Texas lawsuit that would block newly issued rules from the Biden administration’s U.S. Department of Health and Human Services forcing doctors to perform abortions in emergency rooms.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Garland’s DOJ said last week it had launched a special task force to “evaluate state laws that hinder women’s ability to seek abortions in other states where the procedure remains legal or that ban federally approved medication that terminates a pregnancy.” The task force will also “oppose state efforts to penalize federal employees” who perform abortions “authorized by federal law.”

What could that mean? Well, take a look at the lawsuit Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just filed against HHS. The administration is trying to use the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) to force ER doctors to perform abortions, even if it contravenes state laws outlawing the procedure. EMTALA was passed in 1986 as a way to prevent “patient dumping,” or turning away people who couldn’t pay, and it requires hospitals that receive Medicare money (which today is all of them) to treat people who show up at an ER in need of emergency treatment.

The Texas lawsuit argues the Biden administration is trying to “use federal law to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic,” and that “EMTALA does not authorize — and has never authorized — the federal government to compel healthcare providers to perform abortions.”

Garland and HHS claim that EMTALA preempts state law, but it’s unclear what that means in the context of the new HHS rules. If a state legislature passed a law saying that emergency rooms are prohibited from treating patients who have no health insurance, then yes, EMTALA would preempt that.

But as Paxton’s lawsuit rightly notes, the law says nothing about abortion, nor does it say anything about which specific treatments a hospital ER must administer. It only states that Medicare-participating hospitals have to provide “stabilizing treatment” for “emergency medical conditions,” and it specifically defines both of those terms in the statute.

For Democrats, though, laws passed by representatives of the people don’t carry as much weight as rule by administrative fiat. On July 11, the Biden administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued “guidance” purportedly reminding hospitals of their obligations under EMTALA. But the guidance was much more than a reminder, and it was accompanied by a letter from HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra that amounted to an abortion mandate for hospitals, asserting powers under EMTALA that simply don’t exist anywhere in federal law.

First, Becerra’s letter claims that if an ER doctor determines that “abortion is the stabilizing treatment necessary to resolve [an emergency medical condition as defined by EMTALA], the physician must provide that treatment.”

But this is nothing more than a cheap word game. Abortion isn’t a “stabilizing treatment,” and nowhere in federal law is it construed as such. Becerra is conflating Democrats’ loose rhetoric about abortion — that it’s “reproductive healthcare” or “women’s health” — with the straightforward reality of the federal EMTALA statute, which says nothing about abortion and, to the contrary, specifically includes a mention of an “emergency medical condition” as one that threatens the life of an unborn child.

Second, Becerra’s false claim that EMTALA preempts state abortion laws is contradicted by the plain language of the law itself, which says it doesn’t preempt state law “except to the extent that the requirement directly conflicts with a requirement” of EMTALA. But abortion is not a requirement of EMTALA and doesn’t even fit the law’s definition of “stabilizing treatment” for an “emergency medical condition.”

In a decent country, Texas would easily win this lawsuit — and the Justice Department would never step in to try to get it thrown out. But Democrats are committed to subverting the democratic process at both the state and federal level in order to preserve some shred of their abortion regime. They’re trying to preempt state laws they don’t like by twisting the meaning of federal laws that don’t have anything to say about abortion.

Remember that the next time you hear President Biden or some other leading Democrat talk about “threats to democracy.” They don’t care about democracy, they care about power. And they will use every ounce of it they have to advance their policies — the will of the people be damned.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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EXCLUSIVE: Republicans Demand DOJ Release J6 Surveillance And Police Body Cam Footage

Reported by GABE KAMINSKY, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER | July 14, 2022

Capitol Hill Prepares Ahead Of Full House Vote On Impeachment Articles This Week — **Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)**

House Republicans are demanding the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) release body and surveillance camera footage as well any other footage in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Wisconsin Rep. Glenn Grothman, Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert and South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman first requested the information from the DOJ in October 2021. Now, they are re-upping their inquiry, asking Attorney General Merrick Garland to release the information since their constituents have a “growing concern” with the DOJ’s “apparent failure” to do so.

“Many Americans question why their government, and the Department in particular, has been so selective in its release of footage,” the lawmakers said in their letter. “We believe all Americans, including Members of Congress, the media, and the public at-large, should be able to view footage from January 6th that the Department has in its possession.”

The committee investigating Jan. 6 has publicized some degree of unaired footage during its ongoing hearings. The Republicans want to know “what percentage of body camera, surveillance camera, and any other footage related to the events surrounding January 6th” in the DOJ’s possession has actually been made public.

Most of the 14,000 hours of surveillance footage from Jan. 6 has not been made public, Buzzfeed News reported in August 2021. It is unclear how things have changed roughly one year later. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Rep. Rodney Davis Demands Answers From Legislative Branch Agencies On Their Work For Jan. 6 Committee)

“From every camera on the Capitol grounds – including body and fixed surveillance cameras – every second of footage from January 6, 2021 ought to be in the public domain by now,” Norman told the DCNF. “It is baffling to me why the Attorney General has failed to make the entirety of footage available, especially while the Select Committee is cherry-picking clips to suit its narrative.”

TOPSHOT – Trump supporters clash with police and security forces as people try to storm the US Capitol in Washington D.C on January 6, 2021. – Demonstrators breeched security and entered the Capitol as Congress debated the a 2020 presidential election Electoral Vote Certification. (Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP) (Photo by JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images)

While lawyers and defendants charged in the Capitol riot have gained access to watch related surveillance footage, the footage is given under protective orders, which does not allow the parties to release it, Buzzfeed News reported. The Capitol Police’s chief lawyer said in a March 2021 affidavit that members of Congress can watch Jan. 6 footage on a case-by-base basis under the supervision of a police employee.

“The disclosure of any footage from these cameras is strictly limited and subject to a policy that regulates the release of footage,” said the lawyer.

The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment.

“It continues to be our hope that all Americans have faith in our systems of government, including our criminal justice and judicial system,” wrote the Republicans in their letter, setting an August 4 deadline. “For this reason, it is imperative that the Department adequately respond to our requests in timely manner.”

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07-14-22_Follow Up Letter t… by Gabe Kaminsky

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Democrats To Americans: If You Disagree With Us, You’re An Insurrectionist

Reported By Jonathan S. Tobin | NOVEMBER 1, 2021

For Democrats, Groundhog Day came nearly a month early this year. For them, like the character in the classic Bill Murray comedy, every day is Jan. 6. For them, every challenge to leftist orthodoxy, whether in the form of Biden administration policy or local school boards attempting to impose critical race theory, unreasonable COVID precautions, or transgender policies, is another day of insurrection.

They see insurrectionists everywhere. They see them in the media, where they demand that Fox News be canceled or demonetized because of its Trumpist heresies and refusal to treat a Capitol riot — in which the only person killed was an unarmed protester gunned down in cold blood by a police officer — as a new Civil War. They see them in Congress, where anyone who challenged the 2020 results or resists the Democrats’ bills to ban voter ID laws and make permanent pandemic-based election changes that removed guardrails against cheating are seeking to steal not just the 2020 election but the ones yet to be held in 2022 and 2024. They also see insurrectionists in state capitals, where legislatures that have passed voter integrity bills that seek to prevent future fraud without taking away anyone’s right to vote as not merely advocates of a new “Jim Crow” but the moral equivalent of the Confederates who fired on Fort Sumter to save slavery.

When Everyone Is an Insurrectionist

It also explains why U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland isn’t backing down on his outrageous effort to treat school board protests as an insurrectionist terrorist conspiracy. Despite heated questioning from furious Republican senators last Wednesday, he wouldn’t concede that his directive to the FBI and the rest of the Department of Justice to investigate school board critics around the country was based on a lie. He denied that he was targeting the free speech of parents who have protested decisions by school boards on curricula and other policies. That Garland would stand by the rash directive was all the more curious because the hearing came after the National School Boards Association (NSBA) had apologized for the letter that began this shocking episode.

Garland’s doubling down at the hearing about the need for the government to crack down on opponents does make sense. Or at least it does when placed in the context of his party’s current political obsession.

For nine months the Biden administration, its congressional allies, and its media cheerleaders have treated the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as not merely a disgraceful episode but an “insurrection” and “attempted coup” that represented an ongoing threat to the government rather than just a mob that ran amuck. At this point, it’s clear the Biden team has come to view any dissent from leftist dictums — be they national or local — as not merely unwelcome criticism but the work of Trumpist insurrectionists who must be put down rather than tolerated.

Democrats are determined to go on running against former President Donald Trump and his “deplorable” band of insurrectionists indefinitely. But they have been dismayed by the turn of events in Virginia, where resistance against the radical takeover of the schools by angry parents has transformed the gubernatorial race in what the left assumed was a securely blue state. So it was hardly surprising that the administration would seek to brand those citizens outraged by what was being done to their children as just another outbreak of the same insurrection they have been inveighing against all year.

Cornered by Republican senators, Garland asserted that his memo had not ordered investigations of angry parents as “domestic terrorists.” Yet his memo characterized criticisms of officials at public meetings as “harassment, intimidation and threats of violence.” In it, he stated plainly that Department of Justice would use its authority to “identify,” “discourage” and “prosecute” these alleged threats while maintaining “coordination and partnership with local enforcement.”

Even more disingenuously, he denied that the letter from the NSBA, which had been coordinated with the White House had prompted his directive. It labeled people like a Loudoun County parent whose daughter was allegedly raped by a boy in a girl’s bathroom then covered up by the school district as “domestic terrorists.”

‘Terrorists’ Have No Rights

Garland’s willingness to jump into that mess was predictable. Tellingly, earlier this month even after the truth had come out about the alleged rape and its coverup, Loudoun County Democratic Party Chair Lissa Savaglio called the parents “Republican insurrectionists.”

Republicans asked Garland about why the attempt to intimidate Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema into going along Biden’s spending spree when she was followed, harangued, and filmed in a bathroom wasn’t as worthy of investigation as incidents in which school board members were yelled at. Similarly, the invasion of the Department of the Interior earlier this month by a leftist mob demanding Biden adopt even more radical environmental policies didn’t make it onto his radar screen.

Nor is Garland or the mainstream media willing to admit that the hundreds of Black Lives Matter “mostly peaceful” riots in cities around the nation in the summer of 2020 were far more of a threat to public order and government authority than the misguided people who illegally entered the Capitol on Jan.6. But if we have learned anything in the last year, it should be this: Democrats will never stop talking about the insurrection.

In part, that’s because they actually believe their political foes don’t deserve constitutional rights. As we saw with their reaction to the fatal police shooting of Capitol protester Ashli Babbit and the treatment of those facing prosecution over their illegal behavior on Jan. 6, they believe insurrectionists have no rights, including those that guarantee due process.

Democrats also understand that labeling conservatives as domestic terrorists is key to their political survival as Biden’s presidency unravels in the face of domestic problems like the southern border crisis, the supply chain disaster, and feckless conduct abroad. Running on Biden’s record or defending efforts to impose woke ideology on children isn’t likely to bring them success. That means they will go on labeling anyone who questions their ideological hobby horses as Trumpist “traitors” so long as they think it will help them rally their voters to turn out and preserve their power.

Jonathan S. Tobin is a senior contributor to The Federalist, editor in chief of JNS.org, and a columnist for the New York Post. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.

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