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Posts tagged ‘Rule of Law’

Here’s A Big Tell Democrats Believe The FBI Works For Them


BY: JOY PULLMANN | MAY 24, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/24/heres-a-big-tell-democrats-believe-the-fbi-works-for-them/

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Democrats are communicating loud and clear that they support law enforcement so long as it abuses police power to serve their political goals. They want to defund police who enforce the law and expand police forces that use law as a political weapon on Democrats’ behalf.

One proof is that in last week’s hearing on FBI weaponization, support for the FBI was split exactly by political party. Democrats uniformly supported the FBI in face of evidence of gross and systemic abuse of power, while Republicans uniformly criticized it. This is a clear tell that Democrats consider the FBI to be working for them — a shocking and dangerous situation.

“Every single Republican on the Judiciary Committee is committed to fundamental change in how that [FBI secret warrant] process works,” Rep. Jim Jordan told Maria Bartiromo Sunday in a post-hearing interview. “…the FISA and the appropriations process is how you rein in this agency that targeted good men, like Garret O’Boyle, Stephen Friend, and Marcus Allen, who had the courage to come forward and testify this week and tell the American people what’s going on with their tax dollars in the Justice Department.”

The last week has surfaced numerous new facts about serious ongoing and systemic FBI abuses of law enforcement powers. Special Counsel John Durham’s report showed that the FBI acted in a clearly partisan manner in multiple situations, including protecting the Hillary Clinton campaign while placing informants and electronic wiretaps on the Trump campaign based on fabricated evidence their agents didn’t check.

In Thursday’s hearing, the three whistleblowers detailed the FBI’s cruel retaliation against themselves and their families when they filed legally protected ethics complaints about: the FBI surveilling parents who complained about Democrats’ education policies at school board meetings; the FBI pursuing a SWAT-style raid against a cooperative man who attended the Jan. 6, 2021 rally; and the FBI inflating “domestic terrorism” cases to bolster Democrats’ false and horrifying claim that their political opponents are terrorists.

Allen told the committee it appears the FBI is conducting a “purge” of conservatives. Michael Shellenberger and Madeleine Rowley reported, “No mainstream media journalist interviewed the FBI whistleblowers before demonizing them.”

During that hearing, it was also revealed that the Bank of America gave the FBI private banking information about any American who used BOA credit cards near the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, without any warrant, and regardless of whether those people committed any crimes or even were on the Capitol grounds that day.

“FBI leadership pressured agents to reclassify cases as domestic violent extremism (DVE), and even manufactured DVE cases where they may not otherwise exist, while manipulating its case categorization system to create the perception that DVE is organically rising around the country,” says a congressional staff report released May 18.

Saturday reporting on a secret court filing showed the FBI broke the law by spying on Americans 278,000 times, without any warrants, in 2021 alone. “For each American the FISA court permitted the FBI to target, the bureau illicitly surveilled almost 1,000 additional Americans,” reported the New York Post on Sunday. The whistleblowers noted that the FBI rewards agents for opening more warrantless surveillance and searches of Americans’ communications.

Then on Sunday a poll came out showing the majority of Americans believe the FBI covers up Democrats’ crimes — specifically those of the Biden family. It also showed that 70 percent of Americans are concerned the FBI and other intelligence agencies interfere with elections, and believe the agencies need “wide-ranging reform.”

Don’t forget, either, that the only former president’s home the FBI has ever raided was a Republican’s, while FBI officials bent over backward to avoid touching even convincing evidence of criminal behavior related to Clinton, according to Durham’s documentation. The FBI’s recent record is clearly partisan, and that’s why its support is also now partisan.

This partisanship is not just typical politics. It’s over fundamental issues, not differing ways to get to the same goal. It’s also very dangerous to our country.

When federal law enforcement becomes the shock troops of only one political party, you don’t have the rule of law anymore. Law is only legitimate if it is equally applied to all. When members of one party or set of political beliefs are above the law and use the law not for justice but as a weapon against their political enemies, that’s what we call a police state.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her just-published ebook is “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. Her many books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. Joy is also a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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The Unspoken Warning in the Durham Report: American Self-Government Is Collapsing


BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | MAY 18, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/18/the-unspoken-warning-in-the-durham-report-american-self-government-is-collapsing/

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Yesterday in these pages Margot Cleveland rightly noted that the most damning finding in the 306-page report from Special Counsel John Durham is not necessarily the FBI’s scandalous Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the Trump campaign in 2016, but that the egregious abuses of power detailed in the report cannot be remedied “absent a curing of the corrupted hearts and minds of law enforcement and intelligence agencies.”

For all the FBI’s blatant partisanship, its disregard of exculpatory evidence, and its outright deception to secure FISA warrants on Trump campaign associates, writes Cleveland, “what should terrify the country is not the catalog of malfeasance the special counsel recited — for mistakes and even gross failures can be corrected — but that Durham warned of corrupted hearts and minds, unfaithful to the people and their Constitution.”

For his part, Durham didn’t recommend any changes to FBI guidelines or policies, because no amount of reform will be sufficient if the people in charge feel free to disregard guidelines and policies whenever they see fit to do so. As such, wrote Durham, “the answer is not the creation of new rules but a renewed fidelity to the old. The promulgation of additional rules and regulations to be learned in yet more training sessions would likely prove to be a fruitless exercise if the FBI’s guiding principles of ‘Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity’ are not engrained in the hearts and minds of those sworn to meet the FBI’s mission of ‘Protect[ing] the American People and uphold[ing] the Constitution of the United States.’”

Durham is right, as is Cleveland. The abuse of power laid out in the report is terrifying, not just because what the FBI undertook in 2016 amounted to an attempted coup, but because it’s unclear how to prevent it from happening again. Indeed, we saw the same kind of abuse of power at play in 2020 when active and former CIA officials saw fit to interfere in the election by soliciting signatures for a letter designed to quash the Hunter Biden laptop story. There is every reason to believe that these kinds of abuses will happen again in 2024, and in every future presidential election. 

As I wrote earlier this week, such abuse in our law enforcement and intelligence agencies represents a mortal threat to the republic, and we should understand the Durham report in that light.

But Durham’s damning indictment of the DOJ and FBI goes beyond those particular agencies, and indeed beyond the federal government. That people like former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, along with the entire cast of villains and liars in the Durham report, rose to positions of such power, and then proceeded to abuse that power by arrogating to themselves the right to decide who should be president — a right that belongs solely to the American people — says something about the state of our republic.

What it says is this: We have produced, and are still producing, a totally corrupt elite bereft of any sense of “Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity,” to say nothing of moral virtue or the common good.

Put bluntly, an elite like that makes self-government in a republic of free citizens impossible. It also means that the elite will work to corrupt ordinary Americans, eroding their respect for the rule of law and fidelity to the Constitution. As the elites go, so eventually the entire country goes.

Seen in this light, the Durham report should be understood as a dire warning about the fate of our country. John Adams issued a similar warning when he penned his famous line, that “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” George Washington did the same in his farewell address when he said, “’Tis substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.”

The founders knew what we seem to have forgotten: Without a virtuous people, without citizens and leaders who believe in objective moral truth and understand themselves to be bound by it, we cannot be a free people, and we cannot sustain a republic. Laws alone, to say nothing of guidelines and policies, are not enough to support and sustain self-government. You need citizens who will respect and uphold the law, and leaders who actually believe in the principle of self-government — something our current crop of leaders clearly rejects.

Without a morally virtuous citizenry, the founders also knew we would eventually become a society not of free men and women, but of slaves to a tyrannical regime. That’s the real warning embedded in the Durham report. The corruption of the FBI, the CIA, and the entire federal intelligence community, which led to the Russia-collusion hoax and almost took down Trump’s campaign, and then his presidency, cannot be fixed with new rules and policies. It’s a moral failing, moral corruption, and it can only be fixed by a spiritual renewal in America, by a return to — let’s be honest — a civic culture shaped and guided by Christian moral virtue.

It’s easy to look at the Durham report and conclude that the problem is just with a handful of bad apples in the federal intelligence agencies. But the rot goes much deeper than that. People like Comey and Brennan and the legions of corrupt agents and bureaucrats under them were produced by an American society that has lost its way, that has become unmoored from the morality that sustains our system of government and inculcates virtue in our citizenry.

New rules and regulations won’t be enough. Nor will it be enough to defund or disband the FBI. Unless we rediscover the moral virtue necessary for self-government, we will descend, bit by bit, into tyranny. And one day we will look back at the Durham report and understand that it wasn’t just an indictment of the FBI but an indictment of us all — and a harbinger of the end of our republic.

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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Trump Refused To Prosecute Hillary Clinton. Democrats Have No Such Restraint


BY: JOY PULLMANN | APRIL 03, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/04/03/trump-refused-to-prosecute-hillary-clinton-democrats-have-no-such-restraint/

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton
If it is indeed ending democracy to jail political opponents, let’s be clear about which party is dragging the nation down that route.

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Bill and Hillary Clinton’s long, crooked political careers have been marked by multiple well-established high crimes and misdemeanors. Not the least of these was Hillary’s decision to commit what amounts to multiple felonies by using an insecure private email system to conduct top-secret public business while U.S. secretary of state under Barack Obama.

This criminal behavior that so-called U.S. justice systems openly and repeatedly refused to punish was undertaken to hide treasonous actions. Those include selling political access and favors to foreign adversaries, as journalist Peter Schweizer and others, including The Federalist and members of Congress, have repeatedly and thoroughly documented.

Selling political favors to foreign opponents, including communist China and authoritarian Russia, is clearly treason. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “treason” as: “The betrayal of allegiance toward one’s own country, especially by committing hostile acts against it or aiding its enemies in committing such acts.” The Clintons got filthy rich from it.

Clinton then compounded that with more treasonous conduct when she lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump.

It is by now well-established that Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid various actors to lie to U.S. intelligence agencies about Trump in an operation that eventually essentially negated the 2016 election — including encouraging federal employees’ treasonous behavior and two falsely predicated impeachments — and helped lose Republicans the 2020 election. Her campaign even tacitly confirmed this by paying a slap-on-the-wrist Federal Election Commission fine while still refusing to admit guilt for it a few weeks ago, seven years after the fact.

Did FBI agents ever show up at Hillary Clinton’s house over her clearly criminal and treasonous “documents dispute”? Nope. The FBI’s director instead essentially confirmed she had committed multiple felonies but decided not to investigate or prosecute her for it because she was a presidential candidate for a major political party.

Hillary paid to have Trump falsely smeared as a traitor, laundering the slander through U.S. agencies that are supposed to provide equal justice under the law but now function as weapons to damage Democrats’ political opposition. In conjunction with others in the Obama administration that likely include Obama himself, she colluded with multiple security-state agencies to slander, undermine, hamper, and now threaten with jail time Democrats’ top political opponent.

That’s treason. It’s election erasure. It’s ongoing. And these traitors are all running about totally scot-free, while they jail their political opponents for what at best are misdemeanors, and for which they refuse to prosecute anyone on the left who perpetrates them — from street rioters all the way up to their presidential candidates.

My colleague Elle Purnell pointed out that when Trump countenanced chants of “lock her up” at his rallies over Clinton’s never-penalized repeat criminal behavior, Democrats lost their minds, and insisted this was the stuff of dictatorships, tyranny, and political repression.

“Dictatorships lock up the opposition, not democracies,” said Spygate intelligence official Michael McFaul. “Since when do Americans advocate jailing political opponents?” said top Spygate propagandist Julia Ioffe, then at Politico.

“In a democracy, you can’t threaten to jail your opponents,” Obama said in 2016. “We have fought against those kinds of things.” “In America, we don’t send our political opponents to jail,” tweeted an official Democratic National Committee Twitter account.

The Clintons are clearly traitors willing to endanger their nation for profit, and it would be fully just to prosecute them as such. Yet as president when he had the chance, Trump decided not to pursue it. According to Trump Attorney General Bill Barr’s recently published memoir, “Trump brought up the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and surprised Barr by saying that he had wanted the matter to be dropped after the 2016 election,” according to a review of Barr’s memoir in the fall 2022 Claremont Review of Books.

“‘Even if she were guilty,’ he told Barr, “for the election winner to seek prosecution of the loser would make the country look like a ‘banana republic.’”

Ever since riding down his golden escalator, Trump has been ceaselessly vilified as a tinpot dictator, an evil supervillain, an authoritarian, the second coming of Adolf Hitler. But Democrats cannot change the facts, which include that Trump had fully legitimate justification to prosecute his horribly corrupt political opponent and refused to do so. They can make no such argument for themselves.

So, if it is indeed the stuff of banana republics and ending democracies to jail one’s political opponents, let’s all be clear about which political party is dragging the nation down that route. And let all in authority who care about equal justice under the law begin fiercely applying Democrats’ standards to them until they stop perverting justice to destroy our country.

The no-holds-barred legal shutdown and prosecution of leftist insurrectionists filling state capitols in support of a transgender child murderer would be one such proportionate response.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her just-published ebook is “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. Her many books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. Joy is also a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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If ‘No One Is Above The Law,’ Democrats And Their Partisan Pawns Would Be Arraigned, Not Trump


BY: JORDAN BOYD | MARCH 31, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/31/if-no-one-is-above-the-law-democrats-and-their-partisan-pawns-would-be-arraigned-not-trump/

POTUS Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton
If Democrats truly valued rule of law, they would pursue cases against many more people before even considering indicting Trump.

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America’s two-tiered justice system status was solidified on Thursday after a Manhattan grand jury voted to hit former President Donald Trump with a felony indictment and the threat of imprisonment. Cue the chorus of Democrats and corporate media mouthpieces who spent all of Thursday night on Twitter condescendingly warning: “no one is above the law, not even the former president.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the anti-Trump Adams, former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, Rep. Adam Schiff, and even Trump’s ex-attorney Michael Cohen say Trump- or anyone else- doesn’t just get a free pass because he’s a 2024 presidential candidate. Yet, it doesn’t take an expert to know that the sole reason Trump ever faced indictment is because his political enemies requested it.

In addition to suggesting that Trump is not “above the law,” former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi claimed that the former president has the opportunity to “prove innocence” in court. Of course, the law, smugly touted by Pelosi, dictates that defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty- not the other way around.

Whether Pelosi’s “innocence” comment was a Freudian slip or a genuine assertion, we may never know. What we do know is that for years, Democrats have operated under the belief that their party members and their partisan allies are above the law.

1. The Criminals Alvin Bragg Refused To Prosecute

While Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg was busy searching for ways to indict Trump, violent criminals were taking over New York City streets.

During Bragg’s first year in office, major crime in New York City increased by 22 percent. Since then, the DA has made a career out of reducing charges for armed robbers, freeing cop-beaters, relaxing bail, and letting violent antisemites off.

Bragg’s soft-on-crime policies may have earned him left-wing billionaire financier George Soros’ favor and dollars, but even Democrat-voting New Yorkers know that he’s no stranger to giving better treatment to convicts than law-abiding people like this bodega owner who defended himself against a murderous criminal.

https://twitter.com/mtgreenee/status/1638938371639615499?s=20

2. Hillary Clinton

If Democrats truly cared about campaign finance law violations, they would have already prosecuted several members of their party, including Hillary Clinton.

In 2022, the Federal Elections Commission fined Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign for falsely attributing the money that the Democrat used to orchestrate the Russian collusion hoax. If Trump is guilty of intent to conceal a campaign finance crime, a motivated prosecutor might look at the DNC and Clinton campaign’s efforts to hide their involvement in the so-called Steele “dossier” and find they were guilty of the same crime.

In addition to her election meddling, Clinton and her staff mishandled highly classified information, which resulted in at least 91 security violations. Instead of raiding her house and asking the DOJ to prosecute her, 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.”

Clinton also played a central role in the decision to abandon four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, where they were murdered by terrorists.

3. Barack Obama

Before Clinton was forced to pay for her scheming, President Barack Obama faced “one of the largest fees ever levied against a presidential campaign,” $375,000, for “campaign reporting violations.” Instead of facing calls for prison time, Obama received years of protection from the corporate media and fake fact-checkers who repeatedly downplayed his violation as a proportionally small infraction compared to the billion dollars he raised on the campaign trail.

4. Election Law-Breakers Like Marc Elias

Marc Elias has repeatedly tried to undermine U.S. elections. He 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.

5. 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.

6. 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 from places like China.

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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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 taken by the U.S. intelligence apparatus to justify spying on American citizens.

10. 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.

[Read: “Democrats Say ‘No One Is Above The Law,’ But This List Of Their Corrupt Allies Proves Otherwise”]

The same people 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. If Democrats truly valued rule of law, illegal border crossers, Russia hoaxers, Jeffrey Epstein’s clients, pro-abortion vandals, rioters, and the people who run corrupt government agencies like the Department of Justice, the FBI, the NSA, and the Manhattan DA’s office would be the ones standing in court next week, not Trump.

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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Classified Documents Are a New Potential Trap for Any Politician Who Crosses the Deep State


BY: JOY PULLMANN | JANUARY 30, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/30/classified-documents-are-a-new-potential-trap-for-any-politician-who-crosses-the-deep-state/

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The Trump years saw a massive acceleration in the trend of unelected bureaucrats exercising power over elected officials, including by weaponizing classified information.

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Procedural complaints about classified documents are quickly turning into a catch-all trap that can depose duly elected officials, especially those tasked with oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies. Last August, an unprecedented classified document complaint provided a pretext for an FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s home, in an eerie echo of the use of police and military resources against opposing politicians typical of banana republics.

That administrative power flex has now been turned into the unprecedented appointment of three special counsels, most recently against the deeply unpopular current Democrat Party figurehead, Joe Biden. This all reverses the American structure of elected officials maintaining oversight of unelected permanent administrators. Instead, we now have unelected bureaucrats performing selective “oversight” of elected officials.

Of course, that pattern erases Americans’ deepest political birthright: government of the people, by the people, and for the people. A government not ultimately controlled by elected representatives of the citizenry is not a republic, nor is it any kind of democracy. Without elections truly affecting government policies, the original United States is no more, and its elections are a sham.

The subversion of elected representative government via weaponized intelligence has been expanding for some time. The Trump presidential years saw a massive acceleration in this pre-existing trend of unelected bureaucrats exercising increasing power over elected officials, including by weaponizing classified information, usually via highly selective leaks to leftist media.

Recall that Michael Flynn, a would-be reformer of U.S. intelligence, was neatly precluded from becoming Trump’s national security advisor via leaks of classified intel to the media that a (still) gullible Vice President Mike Pence bought hook, line, and sinker. Rather than the leaker being sought, caught, and punished, Flynn was. The selective and deceptive leaks were shanghaied into a Justice Department investigation that ended with Flynn narrowly escaping jail time and professional repercussions for his son so long as he promised to disappear from public view.

The same pattern occurred in multiple cycles with Spygate, the wholly manufactured projection of treasonous collusion with Russia from the Democratic Party onto Trump. Rep. Adam Schiff, who has been recently kicked off the House Intelligence Committee, repeatedly used his access to classified intelligence to fan the Spygate flames as well as the two impeachments of Trump. So did multiple other deep-state actors, including the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Notice there’s no probe into Schiff’s blatant and repeated misuse of the classified information he was privileged to receive on the House Intelligence Committee. But there could be if he stopped being such a useful Democrat.

This is how, as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer threatened Trump early in the latter’s term, intelligence agencies “have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” It is how the intelligence tail can — and now does — wag the congressional dog. This has been ongoing now for decades and is perpetually expanding its reach.

This allows the document-holders to function as a shadow government that essentially controls the elected government by picking what bits of information to release to achieve its own ends rather than the priorities of American voters. This selective deployment of intelligence has been even used to goad the United States into wars it doesn’t win that expand the military-industrial complex and distract U.S. officials while defenestrating U.S. national interests. It was used to lie to Trump about U.S. military activities and prevent him from exercising his due presidential authority over U.S. military affairs.

Those who presented unreliable, counterproductive, and false intelligence to presidents from George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Trump have not been punished, nor often even identified. Neither has the person who compromised the safety and collegiality of the U.S. Supreme Court by leaking the pro-life Dobbs decision last May.

Curiously, neither have there been any administrative-state leaks about the many connections between the Biden family and the Chinese Communist Party. This is not a tool to be applied equally, you see, or in service of the public good. It’s only yet another knife to pull out against those who cross the wrong people.

That’s how expansive, vague, and proliferating laws, regulations, and bureaucracies all work: as tools of selective prosecution to be wielded at the whims of the powerful against those who threaten their power. The erasure of self-government and the rule of law go hand in hand, collapsed by the administrative state’s erasure of the separation of powers that protect individual liberty and justice for all.

This expanding weaponization of classified intel into selective probes of those who have access to at least some of it allows deep-state entities even more control over elected officials. This standard of probes for possessing “unauthorized” classified documents can be applied to any current or former president, as well as many other officials.

As a Project for Government Oversight lawyer told USA Today: “I’d bet you that if they go back to all of the living presidents and root through their homes and their libraries and their warehouses and garages, they’re going to unearth some classified documents there.” Other presidential experts told USA Today that essentially every presidential administration since 1978 has mishandled classified documents.

The same applies to numerous other elected and unelected officials, such as those on House and Senate military intelligence committees and in the executive branch. This is partly because U.S. intelligence agencies improperly classify “millions” of materials, partly to hide their activities by lying that materials elected representatives seek implicate “national security.” It’s a convenient, unfalsifiable excuse that allows U.S. intelligence agencies to function as poisonous self-licking ice cream cones.

U.S. intelligence agencies improperly classify “millions” of materials, partly to hide their activities by lying that materials elected representatives seek implicate “national security.” It’s a convenient, unfalsifiable excuse that allows U.S. intelligence agencies to function as poisonous self-licking ice cream cones.

This all recalls one of the famous lines of one of the world’s most famous of secret police, Joseph Stalin’s NKVD chief, Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” That is how secret police function. It is how U.S. intelligence agencies function now, with help from their administrative-state allies such as the Department of So-Called Justice. Their use of selective prosecutions and investigations to hamstring and punish their enemies may not be unlimited now, but it is expanding.

All members of Congress must be aware of this and use all the powers at their disposal to fight it, for as the administrative apparatus strengthens, the American republic dissolves.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her just-published ebook is “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. Her many books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. Joy is also a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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Dirtbag Andrew Weissmann SUFFERS MELTDOWN After Florida Judge Respects Rule of Law and Blocks Lawless DOJ in Their Assault on Trump


By Jim Hoft | Published September 5, 2022

Read more at https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/09/dirtbag-andrew-weissmann-suffers-meltdown-florida-judge-respects-rule-law-blocks-lawless-doj-assault-trump/

Earlier today, Judge Aileen Cannon granted President Trump’s request for a Special Master review of the material confiscated by the Biden DOJ during their raid on his home at Mar-a-Lago.

Judge Cannon also ‘temporarily enjoins’ or forbids the Biden regime from ‘reviewing and using the seized materials’ pending the completion of the review.

This decision by the Florida judge enraged the lawless left who is accustomed to running roughshod over the US Constitution in their ongoing attempts to destroy President Donald Trump. Andrew Weissman, the former Justice official who ran the Mueller special counsel and is now a contributor on the fake news channels, suffered a meltdown following the decision. Sal Greco, a politically persecuted and fired NYPD officer, responded to Weissman’s temper tantrum.

Via Sal Greco.

After violating the civil rights of mob victims, the Enron defendants ( who’s convictions were overturned because of his misconduct ) and Paul Manafort; Andrew Weissmann ranting about “the rule of law “is a joke.

Andrew Weismann is in a lavender rage because an honest and courageous judge has delayed the politicized DOJ effort to destroy @realDonaldTrump while holding him to a different standard then Barrack Obama.

For the second time in his legal career, Andrew Weismann comes across a judge that actually respects the rule of law. The last time was the when his Enron convictions were overturned for his prosecutorial misconduct.

Here are a few of the twitter rants by Andrew Weissmann.

Jim Hoft

Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.

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Wisconsin Elections Commission ‘Shattered’ Laws By Telling Nursing Home Staffers To Illegally Cast Ballots For Residents


Reported By Kylee Zempel | OCTOBER 29, 2021

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/29/wisconsin-elections-commission-shattered-laws-by-telling-nursing-home-staffers-to-illegally-cast-ballots-for-residents/

Photo Spc. Miguel Pena/U.S. Army20/20

Racine County, Wisconsin law enforcement blew the 2020 election integrity question wide open on Thursday after an investigation into one nursing home. It revealed not only that state election officials flagrantly broke the law and ordered health-care employees to help them, but that the problem likely runs much deeper throughout the swing state’s other 71 counties.

An “election statute was in fact not just broken, but shattered by members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission,” Sheriff Christopher Schmaling said during a Thursday press conference in which he and Sgt. Michael Luell detailed the findings of an investigation into Ridgewood Care Facility. The investigation came about when a woman named Judy signed a sworn affidavit with the Wisconsin Elections Commission after she discovered that her mother, who had died on Oct. 9, 2020 after a period of severe cognitive decline, had voted in the 2020 presidential election. The affidavit was later passed along as a complaint to the county district attorney. Judy alleged that her mother Shirley’s mental state had deteriorated so far that she was having hallucinations and wasn’t able to recall what she had eaten during a day or even what day it was. According to Judy, her mother couldn’t see — her glasses were broken, and she couldn’t even recognize her own daughter — so even if she were of a sound mind, she wouldn’t have known whether someone assisting her with a ballot had voted according to her wishes.

Luell, who led the investigation at the request of the district attorney, found an unusual spike in voting at this care facility: 42 people had voted in the 2020 presidential election. That number is usually 10. Furthermore, in 2020, 38 people had requested absentee ballots, up from the usual 0-3 in normal years.

When Luell attempted to contact the families of these voters to check whether their loved ones had the cognitive capacity to cast a vote, seven replied no, and almost all of them hadn’t voted since 2012. One of the family members said his mother would ask him who he was, meaning she didn’t recognize her own son. She hadn’t voted since 2012 — yet MyVote Wisconsin revealed she voted twice in 2020.

This surge in voting was the result of Wisconsin Elections Commission officials breaking state law. The commission — which is made up of six commissioners, including three Democrats and three Republicans, who are appointed by legislative leaders or the governor and serve as an agency in the executive branch under the governor — authorized nursing home employees to help residents vote, which Luell noted “is a direct violation of law.” According to Luell, employees would ask residents how they voted in the past and then vote according to that party. In other words, if Judy’s mother “could only recall JFK,” staff would vote Democrat for her.

According to state law, however, nursing home staff can’t assist residents with voting. In fact, nobody can help the voter other than a relative or “special voting deputies,” which are people appointed by municipal clerks or elections boards to conduct absentee voting at care facilities. In March, however, the Wisconsin Elections Commission sent out a letter mandating that municipalities should not use the “special voting deputy process.”

“Ladies and gentleman, it’s not a process. It’s the law,” Luell said, citing state Statute 6.875.

The original letter was issued under the guise of COVID guidelines. Nevertheless, in September, after the governors’ lockdown orders had expired and the initial shock of the pandemic had passed, the Wisconsin Elections Commission sent a letter to all residential care facilities telling the workers how to help residents vote, including even marking the ballot for them, in direct violation of state law. Racine law enforcement looked at 2020 visitor logs and found that other visitors were let into the nursing home throughout the pandemic, about 900 times between the decision in March not to use special voting deputies and November 2020. Those visitors included someone to clean the fish tanks and birdcages and even DoorDash delivery people.

“Those people were allowed into the Ridgewood Care Facility, but heaven forbid we make an exception for special voting deputies,” Luell said.

Under Wisconsin state statute 12.13, breaking these laws about special voting deputies constitutes “election fraud,” which is a felony.

“We’re just one of 72 counties, Racine County,” Schmaling noted. “Ridgeland is one of 11 facilities within our county. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of these facilities throughout the entire state of Wisconsin. We would be foolish, we would be foolish to think for a moment that this integrity issue, this violation of the statute, occurred to just this small group of people at one care facility in one county in the entire state. I would submit to you that this needs the attorney general’s investigation,” the sheriff said, calling for the AG to launch an immediate probe into the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

This bombshell investigation is only the latest in the long list of malfeasant actions by the Wisconsin Elections Commission, especially regarding the 2020 election. As Wisconsin radio host and lawyer Dan O’Donnell put it, the commission “was downright derelict in its duty to fairly and impartially oversee an election.”

As O’Donnell documented, the commission unlawfully allowed clerks to “cure” ballots, illegally permitted clerks to go home on election night and return to finish counting in the morning, and illegally told clerks they could relocate polling locations in the weeks before the election.

Furthermore, the commission failed to issue relevant laws and rules for training municipal election workers, special voting deputies, and election inspections. Worse, it failed to investigate voter rolls for the hundreds of thousands there incorrectly, including more than 45,000 first-time voters whose names didn’t match Department of Transportation records, among other issues.

As The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway outlines in her new book “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections,” the Wisconsin Elections Commission also wrongly kept third-party candidates off the ballot, including Kanye West and the Green Party’s Howie Hawkins. Third parties can significantly affect elections in the Dairy State.

“Following the [Legislative Audit Bureau] report, what Sheriff Schmaling has uncovered + disclosed might only be tip of the iceberg of fraud in the 2020 election. The Legislature must be given the time, resources, and cooperation of election officials to conduct a complete investigation of allegations,” tweeted Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin following the Racine press conference. “Using elderly residents with cognitive decline to commit election fraud is reprehensible, and should concern every Wisconsinite and American.”

Johnson continued: “If Democrats will stoop this low to impact elections, one can only imagine what else they’re willing to do.”

Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

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America’s Openly Gay Ambassadors Boast: ObamaTrade ‘Will Export’ LGBT Agenda


waving flagby Dr. Susan Berry15 Jun 2015

AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic

AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic

 

The nation’s openly gay ambassadors and a State Department envoy say President Obama’s proposed trade agreements “will export our values of equality and tolerance,” and “promote greater justice beyond our borders.” In an op-ed at The Advocate.com, which also ran at White House.gov, the eight openly gay U.S. representatives abroad say “trade policy” is one of the “most promising tools” to advance the meme that the LGBT agenda is the agenda that expresses America’s “values.”Liberalism a mental disorder 2

The op-ed’s authors state that they are already promoting the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) abroad. “In speaking about these agreements, we often use the word ‘values,’” they write. “We promote transparency, public participation, accountability and the rule of law, and we advocate for our host countries to join us in setting the global standard.”Bull

They continue:

After all, an export is more than just an item we are shipping overseas. It is also a product of the values of the people who created it, which it represents. And while the United States has made important progress in promoting and protecting the human rights of all of its residents, we are constantly reminded of the challenges LGBTI persons continue to face in countries around the world.

We are proud to be part of an Administration that remains deeply committed to the advancement of human rights for all, including LGBTI persons. President Obama recently said that “all people deserve to live free from fear, violence, and discrimination, regardless of who they are or whom they love.” The Administration has backed up those words with actions, including through the issuance of a Presidential Memorandum to advance the human rights of LGBTI persons worldwide. This commitment is also clear in trade priorities like TPP, which would represent a significant expansion of enforceable labor rights, and would support the elimination of discrimination with respect to employment.

The op-ed is signed by the following openly gay ambassadors:

Daniel B. Baer, U.S. Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe

John Berry, U.S. Ambassador to Australia

Randy Berry, Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTI Persons

James W. Brewster, U.S. Ambassador to Dominican Republic

James Costos, U.S. Ambassador to Spain

Rufus Gifford, U.S. Ambassador to Denmark

Robert Holleyman, Deputy United States Trade Representative

Ted Osius, U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam

As “Breitbart News reported last week, President Obama also said the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) bill will advance his climate change agenda – and plans some “leverage” of his own. During an interview with Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace, Obama said, “If we want to solve something like climate change, which is one of my highest priorities, then I’ve got to be able to get into places like Malaysia, and say to them, this is in your interest.”

“What leverage do I have to get them to stop deforestation?” he asked. “Well part of the leverage is, if I’m in a trade relationship with them, that allows me to raise standards, now they have to start thinking about how quick they’re chopping down their forests and what kinds of standards they need to apply to environmental conservation.”Picture1

freedom combo 2

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About those Executive Orders…


Read more at http://joeforamerica.com/2014/07/about-those-executive-orders/#iHp9TUqmM8GwJR5a.99

Posted by on Jul 25, 2014

14-0724-Executive-Order

Imperial President Obamakingobamafingerconstitution-300x204

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Article collective closing

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Schumer Blames Rep. Steve King for Blocking Immigration Reform


http://cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/schumer-blames-rep-steve-king-blocking-immigration-reform

May 14, 2014 – 11:42 AM

By Susan Jones

schumer

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) (AP File Photo)Obamabot

 

(CNSNews.com) – Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday named Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) as the main Republican impediment to “immigration reform” in the House of Representatives.

It’s the second time in two weeks that Schumer has demonized King for opposing amnesty for 11 million people who came to this country illegally.

“It is time for the House Republican leadership to decide whether they stand with the majority of the American people and the supposed majority of their conference, or if they’re really going to let Steve King continue to dictate the policy of the Republican Party on immigration. Just to be clear, right now Steve King is winning,” Schumer said.

schumer

Schumer also set an August deadline for House Republicans to pass an immigration bill; and he said if nothing is done by then, President Obama “would be more than justified” in making “whatever changes he feels necessary” to fix the system for people who are “unfairly burdened.”

“Allow me to interpret; If you Republicans don’t go along with what we want, how we want it, and when we want it, we’ll get Emperor Obama to just change the law Himself and force our Socialist approach down your throats.” Got it” JB

In a speech on the Senate floor, Schumer said it’s been 320 days since the Senate passed an immigration reform bill, but House Republicans have done nothing except hand the gavel to “far-right extremists like Steve King.”

Schumer said Republicans must act between early June and the August recess: “If immigration reform is not passed during this window, Republicans will have to admit that Steve King controls the Republican Party platform on immigration. If nothing happens during this window, it is clear that this has occurred because Steve King calls the shots and he has won the immigration debate among the House Republicans.”Tyranney Alert

And if Republicans don’t act before the midterm election, “the president would be more than justified in acting any time after recess begins to take whatever changes he feels necessary to make our immigration system work better for those unfairly burdened by our broken laws. If House Republicans refuse to act, it is incumbent on all of us to look at all the areas where we can act administratively….”

Rep. King says he is fighting to preserve the rule of law. “Why would we reward people for breaking our laws?” he asked in April. “Rewarding law breakers produces more law breakers.”

“Rewarding law breakers produces more law breakers.” Representative Peter King (R-NY)

Resist Amnesty

King said Schumer knows that passing an amnesty bill “would destroy Republican unity and our opportunity to gain the majority in the Senate this Fall.”

VOTE 02

 

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Eric Holder in hot water with federal judge over drug sentencing guidelines


http://washingtonexaminer.com/eric-holder-in-hot-water-with-federal-judge-over-drug-sentencing-guidelines/article/2547091

By Mark Tapscott | APRIL 11, 2014 AT 9:00 AM

holder-congress-constitution-300x204Attorney General Eric Holder is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, so his job is to enforce laws duly passed by Congress and signed by the president.

Nowhere in his job description does the AG get to decide unilaterally to reduce federal drug sentencing guidelines. Don’t expect Holder to be deterred by that fact, however.

After appearing several months ago before the U.S. Sentencing Commission to endorse a proposal it was then considering to reduce penalties in a variety of federal drug crimes, Holder effectively preempted both the commission, which is an independent agency within the judicial branch, and the Congress by instructing all U.S. assistant attorneys to not object when defense lawyers ask that their convicted clients be punished under the proposed guidelines.

Until yesterday, the commission had not yet officially endorsed the proposal. Congress has until Nov. 1, 2014, to decide whether it approves of it.

Appeals Court judge not pleased

William B. Pryor is an 11th Circuit Court of Appeals judge. He’s also a member of the sentencing commission. What he is not is pleased with Holder’s action.

Pryor blasted Holder Thursday, saying Holder’s “unprecedented instruction disrespected our statutory role, ‘as an independent commission in the judicial branch,’ to establish sentencing policies and practices under the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, 28 U.S.C. § 991(a), (b), and the role of Congress, as the legislative branch, to decide whether to revise, modify, or disapprove our proposed amendment, id. § 994(p).”

Pryor added that “the law provides the executive [branch] no authority to establish national sentencing policies based on speculation about how we and Congress might vote on a proposed amendment.”

Rule of law?

Georgetown University Professor of Law William G. Otis knows a bit about the issue, having served more than a decade as a member the AG’s advisory committee on sentencing guidelines.

The issue now, according to Otis, is this:

“For those committed to the rule of law, the question now goes beyond whether reducing sentences for dealers in dangerous drugs is wise. It’s whether the attorney general … is committed to following the law as it exists, or, instead, as he wants and speculates it might become.

“One way to consider this question is to ask whether, if the attorney general ordered prosecutors to seek increased sentences that were, at the time, only preliminary, those applauding Mr. Holder’s actions would be as enthusiastic as they are today.”

Hmmm. The “rule of law.” Wasn’t there something in those dusty old history books public-school students used to have to read about “a government of laws, not men?”

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