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IN FOCUS – Unequal Justice Under Law

Unequal Justice Under Law

In our mission and effort to protect and preserve our God-given rights and Constitutional Republic for our fellow Americans through information and education, America’s Future presents a series of “In Focus” articles on the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and its self-destruction over time. Many readers will be astonished that Bureau abuses are not new but have existed for decades. We introduce this series beginning with an outline of more recent activities causing grave concern to most Americans as signs of unequal, politicized treatment abounds.

A Series On The Self-Destruction Of The FBI — Part I

Over the entrance of the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. are inscribed the words, “Equal Justice Under Law.” Those words reflect a promise by our federal government that “We the People” will be treated equally by those entrusted with law enforcement, prosecutorial and judicial powers. It is our shared belief that there is one standard of justice that applies to us all, which has provided the glue that has held our nation together for over two centuries. Today that glue is dissolving before our eyes.

Consider, two dozen FBI agents had no qualms about conducting an armed raid on President Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago even though no former President had ever been treated in such a fashion. FBI agents have arrested Trump campaign officials in early morning raids on their own homes, placed them in handcuffs and leg irons, and seized their phones. At least thus far, it even appears that the role of the FBI has been more to protect the son of the current President of the United States than to investigate him.

Leftists Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) rioters were allowed to storm the federal courthouse in Portland, burn down stores, and kill without consequence, but election protesters welcomed into the Capitol by police on January 6, egged on by informants who have never been arrested, are treated as terrorists, hunted down by the FBI, locked down in solitary confinement, beaten by prison guards and prosecuted, many without adequate access to effective counsel. Those who break into stores are released without bond, while those who defend themselves and their property are arrested and prosecuted. We recently learned that the plot to kidnap the Governor of Michigan was largely concocted by FBI agents and informants. Could it get any worse?

Federal law enforcement has failed us. Government exists “for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of them that do well” (1 Peter 2:14), but in practice, it rewards evildoers and punishes those who do well.

This type of unequal justice is literally tearing America apart. The prophet Isaiah describes what happens when law enforcement acts corruptly: “Justice is turned back, And righteousness stands far away; For truth has stumbled in the street, And uprightness cannot enter.” (Isaiah 59:14.)

We at America’s Future are determined to stand against corrupt federal law enforcement. Until we know the true scope of the problem, we will be unable to correct it. We encourage you to continue reading our “In Focus” series in future newsletters to stay informed, and invite you to work with us to resist this evil that we may restore justice and righteousness to our land.

The Left’s Flip-Flop on the FBI – Part II

From its earliest days, the political Left in America has been highly critical of FBI abuses of civil liberties. With the advent of World War I and Congress’ enactment of the Espionage Act of 1917, the FBI began use of wiretapping and opening U.S. Mail as part of its nationwide surveillance of Americans. To be sure, the Bureau surveilled those thought to be German agents, but it also targeted political activists who were critical of U.S. entry into the war. As far back as 1924, an ACLU report described the FBI as “a secret police system of a political character.”

The Left’s criticism of the FBI intensified over the “Cointelpro” operation, which lasted from 1956 to 1971. There, the FBI targeted and disrupted political activities of American citizens viewed as troublemakers, particularly civil rights activists and the Black Panther Party. The FBI wiretapped, surveilled, and harassed Martin Luther King, Jr., and many believe at one point tried to drive him to commit suicide.

More recently, the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General examined the FBI in the years after 9/11, and its report showed the FBI had focused on left-leaning groups such as Greenpeace, Catholic Worker, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, violating its own policies while surveilling Americans. The Left objected when the Espionage Act was used against whistle blowers who revealed details of the NSA mass surveillance programs and the CIA’s use of torture to fight its war on terror.

All this changed during the Trump Era with the FBI’s protection of Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden while attacking anyone in the MAGA movement.

Some on the Left now are thrilled that the Espionage Act could be used to indict President Trump, as the search warrant used to justify the Mar-a-Lago raid asserted possible violations of that Act. The Left has made clear that they have no objections to a “secret police system” — it just needs to be their secret police. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich explains: “The arrogance, aggressiveness, and dishonesty of the FBI has turned it into the left-wing secret police.”

Congressional Democrats have attacked the FBI for decades, but when Republicans pushed back against the FBI raid, soon-to-be former Rep. Liz Cheney tweeted, “I have been ashamed to hear [Republicans] attacking the integrity of the FBI agents…. These are sickening comments…” Former FBI agent Peter Strzok told MSNBC, “Absolutely the American public should trust what the FBI is doing. It’s not that the FBI is targeting any one side or the other.” Really?

At America’s Future, we believe that everyone’s Constitutional rights must be protected — or we will have lost the rule of law. The FBI’s violation of the rights of Leftist activists is just as serious as its violation of the rights of Conservative activists. The nation cannot survive if federal law enforcement personnel who are entrusted to carry badges and guns act as the enforcement arm of those politicians currently in power.

The FBI Mostly Enforces Unconstitutional Federal Criminal Laws – Part III

Increasingly, Americans have become aware of the politicization of the FBI and its efforts to target and often terrorize the political enemies of the Biden Administration. Why is it that more people are not demanding we simply eliminate the threat by abolishing the FBI? One reason is that there is the notion that America needs the FBI to protect the nation from criminals. Is that really true? The FBI has never played a major role in law enforcement in the United States, which is handled at the state and local level. The FBI’s only criminal responsibilities is for federal crimes, but that raises the question as to why are there so many federal crimes. Was this the way it was supposed to be?

The truth is that the Founding Fathers never entrusted the federal government with the general power to criminalize behavior — called the “police power.” Only three provisions in the Constitution expressly authorize enactment of federal crimes. The Constitution’s Article I, Section 8 authorizes laws for “punishment of counterfeiting,” and to “define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations.” Article III, Section 3 authorizes the crime of treason. Only a handful of other constitutional provisions could be viewed as authorizing other types of crimes.

Consistent with that constitutional plan, until the Twentieth Century, there were only a handful of federal crimes. But in response to every tragic event, someone in Congress will urge a new crime be created — promising that a tragedy of that sort “would never happen again.” Those in Congress have demonstrated little respect for the limits the Constitution places on them, and government schools have dumbed down the American people so we don’t think about the danger of the federal government usurping criminal powers that states should exercise.

Similarly, the Supreme Court has failed to require Congress to legislate within the limits imposed by the Constitution. Courts find a way to discover vast authority in the “necessary and proper” clause or the power to regulate interstate commerce to create crimes or the notion of “implied” powers. Neither the Congress nor the Courts pay much attention to the Tenth Amendment, under which all “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

How bad is the problem? The American Bar Association has noted that “[s]o large is the present body of federal criminal law that there is no conveniently accessible, complete list of federal crimes.” According to one count made in 2015, America enforced “at least 5,000 federal criminal laws, with 10,000-300,000 regulations that can be enforced criminally.” These laws are not ignored by federal prosecutors.

The Founders would neither recognize nor countenance the modern federal criminal Leviathan that threatens the rights of Americans. American citizens should not countenance it either. And if the thousands of unconstitutional federal crimes were repealed, the need for the FBI would largely vanish as law enforcement would be returned to the states as the Framers of our Constitution intended.

The FBI’s Sense of Unbalanced Justice – Part IV

Since the 1930s, the FBI’s motto has been “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.” How well has today’s FBI lived up to that slogan? Has it been faithful to its duties? Does it follow high ethical standards? Or has it degenerated into the partisan, brutal enforcement arm of the ruling class? Let’s take a look at how the FBI treats key figures of the opposition party, and compare that to how it treats its friends.

In January 2019, the FBI stormed the home of long-time Trump confidant Roger Stone in a pre-dawn, military-style raid. Extensive video footage of the raid was broadcast by CNN, which the FBI apparently tipped off to arrive a half-hour early to cover the event to send a message to the American people. On cue, the deep state media fell into line in attacking Stone as a violent threat to everyone around him.

In 2021, in another early-morning show of force, the current administration’s FBI raided the home and office of former Trump attorney (and former U.S. Attorney) Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani was awakened by the agents. The FBI seized his cellphone and other devices and the computer at his office. In America, there has been a robust attorney-client privilege and protection of attorney work product, but now the FBI seizes everything lawyers have and reads everything, even if they can’t use everything as evidence in court. That’s no privilege at all.

On June 3, 2022, FBI agents arrested Trump Trade Advisor Peter Navarro on simple “contempt of Congress” charges for refusing to testify before the January 6 House Committee. Navarro explained: “[T]hey went with this shock and awe terrorist strategy…They let me go to the airport and then take me with five agents, like an Al Qaeda terrorist…and the next thing I know I’m in leg irons, handcuffs, strip-searched.”

After the raid on President Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago on August 8, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called the FBI an “American Stasi,” a reference to the brutal communist East German secret police. The main charges against Trump dealt with the Presidential Records Act, and were instigated by National Archives.

Recently, it stopped Trump attorney Professor John Eastman and seized his phone. This week, the FBI seized My Pillow owner Mike Lindell’s phone while driving through a Hardees, and reportedly the FBI has done the same with dozens of others investigating election fraud. Intimidation is the FBI’s calling card with the pace of seizures intensifying as the November 8th election draws closer.

Now, compare how the FBI treats its establishment allies.

Former Clinton Administration National Security Advisor Sandy Berger stole classified documents from the National Archives by stuffing them in his underwear. These records related to the government’s official investigation into the events of September 11, 2001 and thus their removal and destruction could have impeded that critical investigation. Berger was allowed to plead to a misdemeanor for unauthorized removal and retention of classified material and served no jail time.When Hillary Clinton transferred highly classified documents to her private email server, once again, the FBI and Justice Department had no interest. Some of those documents were classified at a higher level than “top secret.” Then FBI Director James Comey issued his famous statement exonerating Hillary Clinton, which Senators Grassley and Graham revealed had been drafted even before the FBI’s investigation was completed.

More recently, former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith admitted altering a document about Trump campaign aid Carter Page that was used to justify the FBI investigation into President Trump. He could have been sent to jail for five years, but he reached a plea deal, 12-month probation and 400 hours of community service.

Americans are waking up as they watch – in real time – the FBI betray its motto, bending the law and sink to the dark side of unbalanced justice. Is there room for reform of the FBI? Or is it time to dissolve it?

The FBI’s War Against Donald Trump – Part V

While most think of the FBI as an agency that investigates crime, its real function is to serve as an intelligence agency which discredits or “neutralizes” opponents of the Deep State.  Sometimes those who the FBI believes need to be neutralized are the very presidents and congressmen with responsibility to oversee the FBI.  How are these officials neutralized?  It’s been an open secret for decades.  Even the pro-government and government-funded Public Broadcasting System reported in a 1993 documentary that “For nearly 50 years, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover amassed secret files on America’s most prominent figures, files he used to smear and control presidents and politicians.”

The FBI’s misuse of the information it collects continues.  While still President-Elect, Donald Trump criticized the Intelligence Community, causing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to warn:  “if you take on the Intelligence Community they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.”  No truer words have ever been uttered by a politician.  Members of Congress often have their own secrets to hide and do not want to provoke an agency that has a secret file on their lives and careers. 

President Trump was not like those who came before him who were willing to make peace with the creatures who live in the D.C. Swamp.  Worried that a President Trump would be uncontrollable, the FBI began investigating Trump.  The FBI claimed the reason was to find out whether Russian agents were interfering in the 2016 election — but that was a lie.  Actually, it was the FBI that was spreading the Trump-Russian Collusion hoax.

The FBI’s anti-Trump operation, “Crossfire Hurricane,” was launched when the Trump Campaign was in high gear — July 2016, according to a Justice Department Inspector General Report (IG Report).  Providing fuel for the FBI operation was the now-infamous “Steele Dossier,” compiled by ex-British agent Christopher Steele.

Among the claims in the Steele Dossier was the claim that Naval Academy graduate Carter Page and a Trump advisor was a Russian agent.  That same IG Report demonstrates the FBI knew that story was not true.  (IG Report, p. viii.)  The FBI filed falsified information with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain authorization to wiretap Carter Page, thus providing access to much of the Trump Campaign.  The FBI concealed from congressional investigators, and the FISA Court, that Steele was being paid by Trump’s opponent — the Hillary Clinton campaign.

The FBI renewed its FISA surveillance request three more times.  By the fourth time, the agent who filed the sworn statement with the Court stated that he wanted a definite answer as to whether Page was a foreign agent before filing the statement.  So FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith took an email from another agency discussing Page’s actual involvement as a source for the CIA, added the words “not a source” to the discussion of Page’s work for the CIA, and forwarded it on for presentation to the FISA Court. (IG Report p. xi.)  So the FBI, knowing that Page was actually providing intelligence to the CIA, swore to the FISA Court that he was a Russian agent instead, in order to obtain permission to spy on the Trump campaign.

The FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” involved FBI agents at all levels of the Bureau. Whether you like Trump or not, the FBI’s leading role in the Russia hoax demonstrates that the agency has never stopped working to neutralize its opponents — up to and including the President of the United States — to preserve the grip of the Deep State over our nation.

The Roots of the FBI’s Suppression of Dissent – Part VI

With each day’s headlines, the American people are waking up to the fact that the FBI routinely works to silence the voices of those who oppose the policies of the Deep State.  What many do not realize is that this type of intimidation by federal “law enforcement” officers has deep roots that go back to the earliest days of the FBI.

A walk-through history reminds us that the agency’s culture of abuse is nothing new.

After much priming by the pro-war press, Congress declared war on April 6, 1917, bringing the nation into World War I.  On June 5, 1917, the registration of all men between the ages of 21 and 31 was ordered, and the reality of war was brought home, provoking significant opposition.  The government had legitimate concern about the possibility of German and other Axis agents operating in the United States.  However, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, it was also, perhaps even more, concerned about any form of opposition to the Wilson Administration from American citizens.

In 1919 and 1920, under the direction of a young agent named J. Edgar Hoover, President Wilson’s FBI carried out what are known as the “Palmer Raids.”  Thousands of citizens in numerous cities were arrested, often without warrants, sometimes holding them for months without charges or attorneys.  In Detroit, nearly 1,000 men were detained and starved for almost a week in a small area without windows on the top floor of the federal building, accused of being “radicals” and “anarchists.”  The raids swept up an estimated 3,000 to 10,000 persons deemed “radicals” and “anarchists.”  Many of those arrested were beaten and denied due process for nothing more than having a foreign accent.

At the time, a “group of legal scholars including future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Ernst Freund, and Harvard Law School Dean Roscoe Pound published a scathing critique of the raids, saying they lacked arrest warrants, directed officers to seize documents at will, and permitted unrestrained force.”

Future Supreme Court Justice Harlan Stone attacked the raids in his testimony before the Senate in 1921.  He argued that “any system” that permits law enforcement agencies to “restrain the liberty of individuals, without safeguards … will result in abuse of power.”  Stone argued that the FBI “maintained many activities which were without any authority and federal statutes and engaged in many practices which were brutal and tyrannical in the extreme,” including “indiscriminate arrest of the innocent with the guilty, unlawful seizures by federal detectives, intimidating preliminary interrogations of aliens held incommunicado, high-handed levying of excessive bail, and denial of counsel.”

In the face of widespread criticism, J. Edgar Hoover doggedly defended the Bureau’s illegal and abusive acts, even arguing that to allow the persons arrested to speak to lawyers would “defeat the ends of justice.”

Finally, a single courageous federal judge stood up against the illegal Palmer raids.  Ordering 13 prisoners freed, Circuit Court Judge George W. Anderson charged that the Wilson regime had created a “spy system” that “destroys trust and confidence and propagates hate.”  “A mob is a mob whether made up of government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals, loafers and the vicious classes,” he said. Judge Anderson had been nominated to the First Circuit by President Wilson, but he had the character to resist Wilson’ policies.  Only rarely have courageous judges sought to hold the FBI accountable to law.

Six decades later, in 1979, the Palmer raids were reviewed by the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations which scathingly noted that the Palmer raids had come to “symbolize the misuse of police power for a political purpose.” Yet, Congress did virtually nothing to bring the FBI under control.

The Palmer raids are a particularly grim warning today, as the FBI attacks the political opponents of the Biden regime, most recently demonstrated by a raid on and arrest of a pro-life Catholic activist in front of his seven children.  In response, 22 Congressional Republicans at least had the courage to send a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, stating that this latest raid “appears to be an extraordinary overreach for political ends.”  The question remains whether Congress will have the courage to actually restore the rule of law which requires a great deal more than just writing letters.

FBI Targeting of Pro-Life Activists – Part VII

In recent days, the FBI has concentrated its mammoth manpower on investigating and prosecuting those who came to Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021 to support honest elections.  Also, the FBI has long targeted gun owners, Constitutionalists, and various others perceived to be “Enemies of the State.”  What has been overlooked is that one of the FBI’s targets has been those in the pro-life movement.  Let’s review some of the special attention the FBI has devoted to pro-lifers.

In August 2010, the FBI and the Department of Justice co-sponsored a training seminar with national abortion organizations including Planned Parenthood, the Feminist Majority Foundation and the National Abortion Federation.  The FBI training defined as “violence” various common pro-life “activities such as praying, providing women outside abortion centers with alternatives information, and peaceful protesting or picketing.”  Imagine FBI agents being trained to spot those praying on street corners as especially deserving of investigation and prosecution.

In March 2022, FBI agents raided and arrested nine pro-life advocates on charges of blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic almost a year and a half previously — in October of 2020.  Some of the pro-lifers were rounded up in FBI raids of their homes and places of work.  Some were arrested in FBI raids on their homes in the dark of night, as video now shows.  The pro-lifers were charged with violations of the “Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act” (“FACE Act”), which carries potential prison sentences of 11 years.

Let’s pause to consider whether that aggressive enforcement has been even-handed.  After the leak of Justice Alito’s draft Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade, the nation suffered more than 50 attacks against churches, pro-life pregnancy centers, and other pro-life groups.  The FBI refused to respond for weeks.

On June 16, 2022, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton wrote a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, demanding that he investigate pro-abortion extremist group “Jane’s Revenge” for domestic terrorism after the group took responsibility for some of the attacks “including firebombings and grotesque acts of vandalism.”  Cotton wrote to Garland that “[i]f you are unwilling to protect Americans from these attacks, you should resign.”    Yet three months later, not a single arrest has been reported in the attacks on pro-life institutions.  Meanwhile, according to a report by the Catholic New Agency, the number of attacks on pro-life institutions has ballooned to nearly 100.

Most recently, on September 23, 2022, dozens of armed FBI agents with drawn guns executed an early-morning raid on the Pennsylvania home of Catholic pro-life advocate Mark Houck, arresting him at gunpoint in front of his seven children.  The FBI accuses Houck of violating the FACE Act, based on Houck’s involvement in a peaceful protest in October 2021. Apparently, a pro-abortion escort said crude and disgusting things to Houck’s minor son.  Houck defended his son and months later, the FBI raided his home and executed a SWAT-style arrest. Even Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, a Soros-backed prosecutor, declined to press charges against Houck.

The FBI appears to have little to no time to investigate the Hunter Biden laptop, or the claims of former Biden family business partner Tony Bobulinski, but found time to raid the home of a peaceful, law-abiding, pro-lifer.  This kind of FBI behavior is no accident — it is designed to send a warning to other pro-life advocates and sidewalk counselors not to use their First Amendment rights to persuade pregnant women not to have abortions.

Many have now realized that the nation’s premiere law enforcement agency long ago declared war on pro-lifers and their free-speech rights.  As the FBI targets champions for life in our nation, and ignores crimes by its crony politicians, more and more people are concluding that the FBI is not an institution in need of reform — it is one needing to be abolished.  

The FBI’s Unholy Alliance With Big Media – Part VIII

In May 2022, the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri filed suit against Joe Biden, Anthony Fauci, and other federal officials for directing Facebook (now Meta), Twitter and other social media giants to censor stories harmful to Democrats under the guise of combating misinformation.

Among the stories that were suppressed at the reported direction of the current administration was the Wuhan lab leak story and the worthlessness of masks.  However, the most significant spiked story was one which may have swung the November 2020 Presidential election to Biden.

In October 2020, New York Post exposed the politically damaging (and disgusting) contents of the Hunter Biden laptop.  There, the FBI told Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg that Hunter’s laptop was “Russian propaganda,” and he dutifully ensured few Facebook users would learn about its contents.  Polling has shown that, if the American People had known the truth about the laptop, it could have swung the election to President Trump.

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry asserted: “Ripped from the playbook of Stalin and his ilk, the Biden Administration has been colluding with Big Tech to censor free speech and propagandize the masses.”

Just this month, as more evidence about Deep State control of social media has been gathered, the Louisiana-Missouri lawsuit was expanded to name the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice as defendants.  Among the FBI officials censoring news were those working in the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force.  The techniques that the FBI has developed to combat “Foreign Influence” are now being employed to limit the influence of Americans on how we are ruled by keeping us ignorant about the lies we are regularly told by the Deep State.

Social media has been a dominant form of media only for about the past decade and a half.  Before that, the main source of news was the establishment press, and historians have proven that Big Media has been complicit in covering up FBI abuses for almost a century.  Much of this story is contained in a book by a Dean at Minnesota State University, Matthew Cecil.  His book, Hoover’s FBI and the Fourth Estate: The Campaign to Control the Press and the Bureau’s Image, rips the cover off many stories the FBI would rather keep private.

In the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt issued a secret order “authorizing” J.  Edgar Hoover’s FBI to wiretap American citizens without warrants, despite both federal law and Supreme Court decisions banning the practice.  FBI agents arrested a dozen citizens in February 1940, some without warrants, breaking down doors in a pre-dawn Detroit raid.  The accused were chained, paraded before photographers, and denied access to counsel until minutes before their initial hearing 12 hours later.  Civil libertarian critics denounced the FBI’s “third-degree” tactics, and Senator George Norris (D-TN) denounced the FBI for “taking the law into their own hands.”

In late 1939, Hoover admitted to a House subcommittee that the FBI had been wiretapping citizens for nearly a decade.  “Once again,” writes Dean Cecil, “Hoover’s FBI had been caught placing itself above the law – squarely in secret police territory….”  The liberal New Republic editorialized, “How long will Congress let Hoover run before it calls for a full disclosure of all the FBI lawlessness?”

In order to keep his actions from the attention of the American people, and keep pressure off Congress to investigate the FBI, Hoover relied on a mostly sycophantic press corps. Dean Cecil explains that “[j]ournalists were central to the FBI’s efforts to maintain its central position in American culture and government while legitimizing its existence through news columns produced by ‘objective’ and authoritative reporters.”  Hoover’s “supporters in the media published dozens of favorable editorials and columns in the months that followed,” the author reports, further stating, “Hoover leveraged his own iconic status and dominant position of power…designating the criticism a ‘smear campaign’ designed to discredit the Bureau and undermine American society.”

Only a handful of media critics “contradicted the Bureau’s preferred message of dispassionate and scientific law enforcement led by a steady and trustworthy director.”  Hoover responded to negative stories by removing critical media outlets from the FBI’s mailing lists — cutting them off from access to information.

Hoover routinely characterized the critics of FBI lawlessness as “un-American” and promoters of “misinformation.”  “The recent campaign… against the bureau was inspired by un-American forces and through the lies and misinformation which they distributed, well-meaning … persons were victimized by their falsehood,” he claimed.  Hoover asserted that his civil libertarian critics wanted to “undermine public confidence” in law enforcement.

In 1945, President Truman wrote worriedly, “We want no Gestapo or secret police F.B.I.”  It is high time for the American People to heed that warning and begin to envision a nation without a secret police — without an FBI.

FBI Lies While Prosecuting Americans for Lying – Part IX

Every day, it is getting more difficult for the FBI to persuade Americans that it is fighting “a never-ending battle for Truth, Justice, and the American Way.”  Every time the FBI is caught doing wrong, it doubles down, claiming to be pure and unspotted.  For example, after suffering heavy criticism of its unprecedented raid on former President Trump’s home, FBI Director Christopher Wray responded:  “Every day I see the men and women of the FBI doing their jobs professionally and with rigor, objectivity, and a fierce commitment to our mission of protecting the American people….”

The reality of the FBI is far different — and far more disturbing — than the image the FBI wants to project, especially in its commitment to “Truth.” As noted liberal Alan Dershowitz bluntly puts it in a recent interview, “The FBI’s work model is to lie to people, to tell them they have more evidence than they have, to tell them that their friends have decided to cooperate. Lying is very much a part, unfortunately, of dialogue between FBI agents and defendants.”

The FBI probably would not deny Dershowitz’ charge that it lies but would explain that it lies only to get “bad guys” to tell the truth.  Even assuming it is right for the FBI to lie to persons being interrogated, that’s not the end of the story.  The FBI also lies to prosecute Americans that are perceived as a threat to the ruling class.  Here’s how it does it.  

Unlike local law enforcement, which often videotapes its interviews of suspects, the FBI has a policy not to record the interview.  Instead, one agent takes notes on a “Form 302,” while another asks the questions.  Why would that be?  Certainly, it’s not a lack of resources, for if local police have the technology to conduct video and audio recordings, the FBI could do the same. 

One reason was detailed in a 2006 internal FBI memo.  The Bureau is afraid that if a jury was allowed to see and hear the FBI’s deceptive interrogation tactics, the jury might distrust the FBI more than the defendant.  As the FBI report put it:

[L]awful and acceptable interviewing techniques do not always come across in recorded fashion to lay persons as proper means of obtaining information from defendants. Initial resistance may be interpreted as involuntariness and misleading a defendant as to the quality of the evidence against him may appear to be unfair deceit.

Thus, writes civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate, “rather than risk such juror skepticism in response to a verbatim recording, the FBI feels that a jury will more likely be led to the FBI’s version of the truth by reading an FBI agent’s Form 302 than by listening to the actual interview.”

Even beyond its effort to withhold information from jurors is the FBI’s desire to be able to prosecute those it chooses under a very dangerous federal statute — 18 U.S.C. Section 1001 — the federal false statements law.  That statute makes it a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison, to make a material misstatement to any member of the federal government.

If interviews are recorded, the defendant can only be charged with lying based on the actual words that come out of his mouth.  However, if the only evidence of what the defendant stated is in the form of an FBI agent’s written notes on a Form 302, he can be prosecuted and convicted for what the agent wrote down — which may be very different from what the defendant said.  And if the defendant had been truthful, there is no recording available for him to use in his defense.

Lying to suspected criminals is bad enough, but the FBI has been exposed lying to federal courts, lying to Congress, and even falsifying documents in its political war against Donald Trump.

On August 19, 2020, former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty to falsifying an email used in a sworn affidavit to convince the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) Court to authorize it to surveil Trump campaign official Carter Page as a suspected “Russian agent.” The FBI had received an email proving that Page was a source for the CIA, not Russia, but Clinesmith added the words “not a source” to completely reverse the meaning of the email, and trick the FISA judge.  This pillar of FBI virtue pleaded guilty, getting probation, and community service.

FISA judge Rosemary Collyer blasted the FBI for its deliberate deception.  “[R]epresentations made by FBI personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession,” she wrote.  In other words, they intentionally deceived the court. “The FBI’s handling of the Carter Page applications…was antithetical to the heightened duty of candor,” Judge Collyer added.

The FBI lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee.  In a scathing rebuke, Senator Lindsey Graham stated that “[t]he FBI did to the Senate Intelligence Committee what the Department of Justice and FBI had previously done to the FISA Court: mischaracterize, mislead and lie.

Former FBI director James Comey denied for years that the FBI had spied on the Trump campaign.  “So it was all lies….No spying on the campaign,” Comey tweeted, adding in an op-ed piece that “those who attacked the FBI for two years should admit they were wrong.”  But the details of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the 2016 Trump Campaign have been widely exposed.

Juries and federal district court judges historically just have assumed FBI agents are telling the truth and have convicted defendants based on what the agent testified.  But as FBI lying is exposed, fewer and fewer jurors will accept the testimony of an FBI agent at face value.  There is a term for law enforcement officers lying during testimony that originated in New York City — “testilying.”  Increasingly, that term is used to describe the sworn testimony of FBI agents.

In August 2020, several House Republicans suggested that the FBI may have to be dismantled if it continues to use investigation and prosecution as political weapons.  We are not holding our breath, but let’s hope the day will come when the FBI’s days of lying to protect the Deep State are ended, once and for all.

FBI Declares War on Parents – Part X

In an earlier time, parents entrusting their children to the public school system could have assumed that the teachers and administrators shared their values.  Those days are long gone as the current generation of teachers and administrators has its own agenda. Actually, it’s been getting worse for 50 years.  Americans once learned to read using phonics, but now are taught with the “look say” method and similar nonsense.  Real math was replaced with the new math.  History classes now teach that America was built on racism.  Reading the Classics has been replaced by reading propaganda.

As government schools failed to educate, more and more parents shifted to homeschooling and private schools, but most of those who have stayed in the system remained passive. Parents only began to organize when they were horrified by school libraries filled with pornographic books, classes teaching “critical race theory,” girls’ rooms being visited by boys, “drag queen” shows, and now secretly encouraging young children to “transition to another sex.”  Concerned parents flocked to school board meetings to speak out and have been working to replace school board members at the polls.

What’s this got to do with the FBI?  A great deal.  The FBI is the enforcement arm of the ruling class in America.  If the ruling class wants to have teachers replace parents in raising children, they can count on the FBI to bring parents to heel — which is exactly what has happened.  The pushback from the left began with Child Protective Services and the local police but has now elevated to the FBI.  Consider a few illustrations that show this progression.

In Salinas, California, Jessica Konen was brought before her daughter’s principal and a teacher, and was told that her daughter was “trans fluid.”  “The teacher accused Konen of not being ‘emotionally supportive’ of her daughter, who was to be called by a new name and male pronouns and would be using the unisex restroom at school.”  The mother’s reaction was “I felt she completely coached my child.” A few days later, the police came to her home and told her that there had been a complaint made to Child Protective Services (CPS).  The police questioned her two children as to whether they wished to be removed from Konen’s home.  This all began with teachers coaching the child behind her mother’s back.

Parents in Loudoun County, Virginia, began appearing in large numbers at school board meetings after the board actively covered up the rape of a 9th-grade girl in the girls’ bathroom by a boy wearing a skirt.  The schools transferred the boy to another school where he committed another sexual assault.  And when the girl’s father showed up at a school board meeting to protest the “transgender bathroom” policy, he was arrested and charged by local law enforcement.

When the local authorities failed to stop the protests, the matter escalated to the national level.  On September 29, 2021, the National School Boards Association sent a letter to the Biden administration, asking for federal help to control concerned parents.  The letter compared parent speeches and protests at school board meetings to “domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”  The following week, on cue, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced in a memo to the FBI that the FBI would respond and begin investigating the “threat” posed by the parent protestors.

Garland testified before Congress that he drafted his memo to the FBI in response to the NSBA’s letter.  What he did not tell Congress, and was later uncovered, was that the NSBA’s letter was actually requested by Biden Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, to give Garland the pretext to enlist the FBI.

One mother, Stacy Langton, attacked books in the Fairfax County public school library that featured child pornography and pedophilia.  On October 17, 2021, Langton and many other parents participated in a “Parents are not Terrorists” protestoutside the Justice Department.  At the next school board meeting on October 21, 2021, federal agents, unmarked cars and a helicopter converged on the meeting, Langton said. “This is something that is incredible in America, and it’s ridiculously un-American,” Langton said.

Called to testify before Congress, Garland tried to deny that the FBI was using antiterrorism statutes such as the Patriot Act to target parents for exercising their First Amendment rights.  But FBI whistleblowers have since revealed that Garland and the FBI have targeted dozens of parents nationwide on the flimsiest of pretexts.

On the basis of the whistleblower revelation, Congressmen Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Mike Johnson (R-LA) wrote their own letter to Garland on May 11, 2022 calling him out for his false testimony and unmasking the FBI’s targeting:

[T]he FBI … interviewed a mom for allegedly telling a local school board “we are coming for you.” The complaint, which came into the FBI through the National Threat Operations Center snitch-line, alleged that the mom was a threat because she belonged to a “right wing mom’s group” known as “Moms for Liberty” and because she “is a gun owner.” When an FBI agent interviewed the mom, she told the agent that she was upset about the school board’s mask mandates and that her statement was a warning that her organization would seek to replace the school board with new members through the electoral process.

Another FBI office opened an investigation into Republican state elected officials over allegations from a state Democratic party official that the Republicans incited violence by expressing public displeasure with school districts’ vaccine mandates.

On October 17, 2022, House Judiciary Republicans sent a “preservation letter” to the White House, demanding that all communications to or from the administration relating to “terrorism” investigations of parents be preserved.  The letter warned that “Committee Republicans intend to continue to pursue this serious misuse of federal law-enforcement resources, including if necessary into the 118th Congress.”

There is no guarantee that Congressional Republicans will take any meaningful action even if they win in November, but they could and they should.  Congress has less authority over local Child Protective Services and local law enforcement, but it certainly can rein in the FBI.  What should be the strategy: first, exposure so that even more Americans know how corrupt the FBI has become; then, attach riders to appropriations bills limiting the FBI’s authority; and, finally, develop a plan to close down the FBI once and for all within one year.  (And, while we’re at it, let’s have Congress defund the corrupt Department of Education as well.) 

The FBI’s War on the First Amendment – Part XI

FBI agents are required to take an oath of office to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”  One would hope that the agents would understand that oath to include the First Amendment, but that raises the question — what rights do FBI agents think the First Amendment actually protects, if they think of it at all?

Properly understood, the First Amendment elevates the rights of the individual above the reach of the state.  It protects the rights of Americans to freedom of religion, speech, press, petition, and assembly.  Each of these First Amendment terms had an established meaning before they were written into the Constitution.  For example, freedom of speech had its origins in the right of members of Parliament to criticize the King without being sent to the Tower of London.  And, freedom of the press protected not Big Media, but every individual who wanted to lay his views before the public through pamphlets and the like.  Both of those speech and press rights protect robust criticism of government.

Now, government is changing the meaning of those constitutional terms.  Lawyers and judges, with no respect for truth, have made Swiss Cheese out of the First Amendment text.  No matter what the text of the First Amendment may require, they can find a way around its clear meaning.  Remember what Bill Clinton said when asked if he had been lying about his White House indiscretions?  He replied: “It depends on what the meaning of the word is, is.”  Clinton followed in the path of Humpty Dumpty who said:  “When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

The real problem is that protecting the constitutional rights of Americans is an afterthought when compared with one of the FBI’s central, but unspoken, responsibilities — to tamp down criticism of government.  How does it do that?  The way that it always has — by surveilling us and then instilling fear into the hearts of those who speak against government.  If our response is to fear the consequences of speaking out, we silence ourselves.  In that way, the FBI “chills” speech.

The groups that the FBI targets over the last century have moved from anti-World War I activists, communists, civil rights supporters, socialists, Vietnam War protestors, and draft dodgers.  Under the Obama and Biden administrations, their focus has been on militia members, “domestic terrorists,” MAGA Republicans, constitutionalists, gun rights advocates, and election protestors.  Under Obama and Biden, FBI efforts to suppress protected political speech have skyrocketed.

The FBI is making widespread use of private informants to report on their neighbors who have political views that differ from those of the administration.  The FBI has “wide leeway…to use informants when investigating citizens based on their ideological beliefs.”  As whistleblower Chris Stevens has revealed, during the Obama administration, he was asked to become an informant within the Northern California Militia.  The FBI asked Stevens to keep spying on the group even after his investigation failed to find any probable cause.  “I was just a human recording machine paid by the government to go into people’s lives and befriend them and find out what they were thinking,” Stevens said.  His infiltration of militia groups contradicts the FBI’s claims that federal law enforcement does not investigate Americans based on ideology alone.

Another whistleblower revealed that the FBI characterized a veteran-organized group called “American Contingency” as a “domestic violence extremist” group, continuing to do so even after concluding that the group “desires to assist Americans in preparing themselves for catastrophic events and not to overthrow the government.”  On September 14, 2022, House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jim Jordan (R-OH) wrote a letter to FBI director Christopher Wray to defend the group, noting that “the FBI opened an investigation into an American citizen — and deemed him a potential ‘threat’ — simply because he exercised his First Amendment right to speak out in protest of the government.”

It is past time for us as patriotic Americans to stop our self-censoring.  We need to speak up, to be loud and effective critics of government abuses.  True, the FBI may spy on us and hear what we say.  And the FBI may knock on our door, or worse.  So this is a good time to remind ourselves what God says: “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”  2 Timothy 1:7. Another translation puts it this way:  “God has not given us a spirit of cowardice….”  It’s time to put away fear and put away cowardice.  It is a certainty that if we don’t find the courage to use what Freedoms we now have, soon we will lose those as well.

We must recognize and accept the fact that the FBI doesn’t care about us — it serves those who seek to rule over us and control our lives.  The FBI has become the tip of the spear of the “enemies domestic,” which they promised to defend us against.  Until we can dismantle the FBI once and for all, we must stand for truth, and accept whatever the consequences may be.

As has been said before: “If not us, who? If not now, when?”

The FBI’s Manipulation of Social Media – Part XII

The FBI’s work in service to the nation’s ruling class is often conducted surreptitiously, and usually, Americans don’t learn of their nefarious deeds until years later.  Occasionally, however, the leaks come out more rapidly.  Earlier this year, it was discovered that only two years ago the FBI coordinated directly with social media giants to restrict political speech to help elect the Presidential candidate favored by the Deep State. 

During the summer of 2020, the FBI told Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to expect “some kind of dump” of “Russian propaganda.”  Then, when the Hunter Biden laptop story broke in October 2020, only weeks before the November election, the FBI sprang into action.  Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that, at the FBI’s request, he limited Facebook’s sharing of the New York Post’s reporting on the Biden laptop story, designating it as “misinformation.”

The question is why? Could it be that Zuckerberg wanted to avoid an FBI investigation into the $400 million he gave to election officials in 49 states to help turn out Democrat voters?  

During an interview with the New York Times Editorial Board in January of 2020, then-candidate Biden called for repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects Internet search engines and companies such as Facebook from liability for certain operations.  A transcript shows that Biden stated, “I’ve never been a big Zuckerberg fan.  I think he’s a real problem.”  Candidate Biden even suggested criminal prosecution of Internet search companies depending on the content of information they allow to be published: “[Zuckerberg] should be submitted to civil liability and his company to civil liability.”  

Once Biden took office, the Biden Administration’s pressure on social media ramped up.  On March 1, 2022, FBI Section Chief Laura Dehmlow warned in a meeting attended by Twitter executives that “we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable” for sharing “misinformation.”  The threat from the administration to Big Tech could hardly have been more clear.  

Earlier this month, on Nov. 4, the House Judiciary Committee’s Republican members released a 1050-page report detailing FBI abuses, highlighting how the FBI has indeed pressured social media companies to suppress stories in social media for purely political reasons. “An FBI directive that interferes in free and fair election-related public discourse raises significant risk of First Amendment violations through private-sector censorship at the government’s behest,” the Judiciary Republicans concluded.

And for once, a court is helping uncover FBI abuses.  

On May 5, 2022, the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana filed suit against the Biden regime for “working with social media giants such as Meta, Twitter, and Youtube to censor and suppress free speech, including truthful information, related to COVID-19, election integrity, and other topics, under the guise of combating ‘misinformation.’”  

Then, on October 21, 2022, the judge hearing the case ordered a deposition of FBI Supervisory Special Agent Elvis Chan, finding that “Chan has personal knowledge about … censorship across social media as it related to COVID-19,” and that “Chan was identified [by the plaintiffs] as the FBI Agent who communicated with Facebook to suppress a story about the Hunter Biden laptop.  If he did this, the Court ultimately finds there are reasons to believe that he has interfered in other ways, too.”  

The FBI control over social media is not a rare event, and systems have been set up to ensure quick responses to government demands.  “[T]here was a back channel to companies like Facebook and Twitter coming from agencies and they were sort of dropping the dime on people that they wanted to silence,” said George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley.  “What we’re seeing now is more and more evidence that there was censorship by surrogate and that some high-ranking government officials were part of that effort,” Turley said. 

In normal times, the press would investigate stories of government abuse, but these are not normal times.  These days, the FBI has as much control over the corporate media as it does social media, and neither has the incentive to tell the truth to the American people, and so the abuses continue.  We can only hope that one day enough Americans will so fully understand the corrupt role being played by the FBI to undermine the Constitution that they demand the candidates they support pledge to abolish that agency.

The FBI’s Ties to Organized Crime – Part XIII

The FBI wants us to believe it is the federal government’s premiere law enforcement agency combating organized crime.  The reality is otherwise.  Largely unknown to the American people is the FBI’s record of assisting some organized crime organizations, supposedly to target other crime families.  In the process, the FBI has committed innumerable crimes and then lied to the American people and the courts to cover up its crimes.

We now know that for years the FBI propped up the violent “Winter Hill Gang” — the Boston crime family led by the notorious James J. “Whitey” Bulger.  On June 23, 2011, the FBI announced that it had “captured Bulger – one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.” What the FBI press release did not acknowledge was that “from 1975 to 1990, in its quest to bring down the Italian mob, the FBI’s Boston office became partner in crime to Bulger’s ‘Winter Hill Gang.’” At one point, “at least six G-men were taking payoffs from organized crime,” according to Bulger’s partner-in-crime Stevie Flemmi, who eventually admitted in court to taking part in 50 murders.

While one can understand that undercover work can put law enforcement into compromising situations, consider the pain the FBI has inflicted on the American people and the rule of law.

FBI Allows the Bulger Gang to Murder

In 1982, informant Brian Halloran offered to implicate Bulger in the murder of an Oklahoma businessman.  The FBI rejected his offer because Bulger was informing the FBI about the activities of rival gangs.  Worse, Bulger’s FBI contact, agent John “Zip” Connolly, tipped Bulger off to Halloran’s offer.  As Halloran was riding in the car of his friend Michael Donahue, Bulger’s gang, including Bulger himself, riddled the car with bullets, murdering both the would-be informant Halloran and the innocent Donahue, who left behind a wife and three young boys.  The Donahues sued the government, and in 2007, Judge Reginald Lindsay finally ordered the Justice Department to stop denying the FBI’s involvement in the murder and to settle with the family.

 That same FBI agent Connolly was convicted of being an accessory in the Bulger gang murder of businessman John Callahan after Connolly tipped off Bulger that Callahan could implicate him in the murder of another businessman.  Agent Connolly was convicted in 2008, and released from prison in 2021 on medical grounds, supposedly being terminally ill.  It was reported as recently as February 2022 that Agent Connolly continues to collect his FBI pension. 

FBI Suborns Perjury to Keep Innocent Men in Prison

After the Bulger gang murdered another hoodlum, Teddy Deegan, the FBI pressured mob hitman Joseph Barboza to testify falsely that four innocent men participated in Deegan’s murder, and the jury believed the story, sending those men to jail.  The FBI’s role was covered up for years, including by then-FBI Director Robert Mueller.  In 2002, Mueller directed the Bureau to fight the granting of pardons to the men, in order to continue the FBI’s cover-up.  Two of the innocent men died in prison, and two finally were released after 35 years behind bars.  The press gave Mueller a pass for his cruelty and duplicity, and he later became famous as being the “squeaky-clean” Special Counsel investigating the myth of Russian collusion with President Trump in 2016.

The two survivors and the estates of the two deceased men sued, and in a scathing opinion, federal district judge Nancy Gertner excoriated the FBI.  Gertner found that the FBI not only knew that Barboza’s testimony was perjured, but actually suborned his perjured testimony. “They coddled him, nurtured him, debriefed him, protected him, and rewarded him — no matter how much he lied….  In word and in deed, the FBI condoned Barboza’s lies.”  Calling the FBI’s actions “absurd,” “shocking,” and “chilling,” the judge stated, “This case is about intentional misconduct, subornation of perjury, conspiracy, the framing of innocent men,” and awarded $102 million to the plaintiffs.  Your tax dollars at work, paying for the crimes of the FBI.  One Boston gangster testified to Congress that after the 1967 trial of one of the men, Louie Greco, one FBI agent bragged about framing Greco.

Judge Gertner noted that the FBI “continued to suppress exculpatory facts over the next thirty years.”  “[T]he FBI wanted them to rot in prison, so the scandal would not be revealed.  In the 1980s, two U.S. attorneys in Boston wrote letters to the state demanding that the innocent men not be released.”  “In 2001, the Bush administration invoked executive privilege for five months to shield FBI documents about the Bulger affair, in what then-Rep. Dan Burton called, “‘an utterly unprecedented’ attempt to drape DOJ in a ‘veil of secrecy.’”

On February 3, 2004, the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform issued a report entitled:  “Everything Secret Degenerates: The FBI’s Use of Murders as Informants.”  The Committee called the FBI’s complicity in Bulger’s gang activities “one of the greatest failures in federal law enforcement history.”  The Committee concluded: “Incalculable damage to the public’s respect for the rule of law” was caused by the FBI and Department of Justice.

As Lord Acton explained: “Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.”  It is time to end the secrecy covering the crimes of the FBI, and then end the FBI.

The FBI Turns a Blind Eye to Sex Crimes – Part XIV

In 2016, the world was shocked by reports of the largest case of sexual abuse in the history of American sports.  USA Gymnastics’ team physician, Dr. Larry Nassar, had sexually abused hundreds of young girls under his care.  Nassar is currently serving a 175-year prison sentence for his crimes.  However, just as shocking is how the FBI allowed this abuse to continue.  In July 2021, the Office of the Inspector General released a damning report, demonstrating that the FBI’s Indianapolis Field Office took no action for a full eight months after it was informed by USA Gymnastics of Nassar’s abuse.

Former U.S. gymnast McKayla Maroney testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, “After telling my entire story of abuse to the FBI in the summer of 2015, not only did the FBI not report my abuse, but when they eventually documented my report 17 months later, they made entirely false claims about what I said.”  Similarly, the OIG’s report showed that the FBI not only “failed to respond to the Nassar allegations with the utmost seriousness and urgency that they deserved and required,” but also “made numerous and fundamental errors when they did respond to them, and violated multiple FBI policies.”  As seems typical, the Justice Department never pursued charges against the agents who refused to investigate Nassar.

There may be a reason that the FBI turned a blind eye to these sex crimes.  The ranks of the FBI appear to have been riddled with hundreds of employees with their own records of sexual abuse.  And, making it even worse, the FBI as an institution has a practice of covering up sexual misconduct within its own ranks.

On October 5, 2022, Senator Charles Grassley, as ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, released excerpts from FBI documents obtained from a whistleblower.  These documents reveal that between 2004 and 2022, fully 665 FBI employees, including 45 Senior Executive Service-level employees, retired or resigned following OIG investigations into sexual misconduct.  Grassley wrote a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray, shredding the “systemic failure within the Justice Department and FBI to protect female employees from sexual harassment and sexual misconduct….”  Fed up, Grassley has demanded an OIG investigation of the FBI’s failure to clean up its own house of sexual harassment and assault.

The list of abuses is extensive and longstanding.  The following illustrations were all drawn from published sources.

  • In 2008, former agent Lt. Colonel John Parkinson tried to blow the whistle on two fellow agents who engaged in illicit sexual activities in FBI offices, and even used taxpayer-funded FBI aircraft to fly from Sacramento to Las Vegas to meet prostitutes.  When this agent exposed the sexual activities, his fellow agents made counter-allegations against him.  Parkinson was fired, while the offending agents were not.
  • A decade before the most recent expose by Senator Grassley, on September 27, 2012, he sent another letter detailing other sex offenses to then-FBI Director Robert Mueller.  Grassley demanded answers to substantiated allegations that an FBI agent on assignment in the Philippines had submitted expense reports for over $14,000 in expenses apparently related to payments he and “cooperating individuals” had paid prostitutes at Manila brothels.  Some of the prostitutes were believed to be minors.  The allegations were corroborated by an investigator with the federal public defender’s office.
  • In 2018, Roger C. Stanton, the FBI’s assistant director of the Insider Threat Office, abruptly retired after an investigation found he sexually harassed a female agent.

  • In 2020, an investigation determined that James Hendricks, the special agent in charge of the Albany, New York, office, had sexually harassed eight female subordinates.  “[C]olleagues labeled him a ‘skilled predator’ and the Justice Department’s internal watchdog found that his behavior marked one of the FBI’s most egregious known cases of sexual misconduct.”  Even after Hendricks committed some of those crimes, he was promoted to lead the FBI’s Albany field office.  When he finally retired after the facts came out, he was among “several senior FBI officials” who avoided discipline and retired with full taxpayer-funded benefits, despite substantiated sexual abuse allegations against them.
  • In 2021, FBI special agent David Harris faced charges in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas for child sexual abuse. Harris, the very agent who headed up “a regional division of the FBI that investigates online crimes against children,” was charged with aggravated crimes against nature and indecent behavior with children under the age of 13, and rape.  Talk about the fox guarding the hen house.
  • In August 2022, another FBI employee, Robert Smith, was arrested and charged with sexually abusing several young girls in Utah.  Smith was charged with “four 1st-degree felony counts of aggravated sexual abuse of a child, four class-A misdemeanor counts of lewdness involving a child, and two class-B misdemeanor counts of lewdness.”

Sometime charges are brought, but often the FBI lets these matters slide.  “Director Wray [has] not aggressively moved to solve the sexual misconduct problems at the FBI,” Grassley wrote in his October 5, 2022 letter.  “[H]igher-graded employees, especially supervisors, are more likely to [be] subjected to lesser penalties; whereas, lower-graded employees are seemingly more likely to be…dismissed for their sexual misconduct.  This may give the appearance the FBI is not holding its supervisors accountable for unwelcome sexual conduct,” Grassley added.

Rather than the FBI cleaning up its own ranks, its recent actions show how low of a priority sex crimes are.  In September 2022, House Judiciary Committee Republicans sent their own letter to FBI Director Wray, detailing an FBI whistleblower’s allegation that “FBI agents were moved off child sex abuse cases to work on political investigations,” perpetuating the FBI’s big lie that the greatest threat faced by the nation is “domestic violent extremism.”

The FBI has had multiple chances to fix the sexual abuse and corruption that exists within it, but it is beyond repair.  The FBI cannot be fixed; it must be closed down.

FBI Interference in American Elections – Part XV

For the last six years, the American people have been told their elections are being influenced by evil forces.  First, the leftwing media were obsessed with FBI claims of Russian “election interference.”  When Americans no longer responded to that lie, just days before the 2022 Congressional elections, the FBI joined in warning about a new threat — that “domestic violent extremists pose heightened threat to midterm elections.”  Well, it turned out that this threat was no more real than that posed by Russia.  Hiding in plain sight is the fact that the most significant interference in the last several federal election cycles has come from those who claimed to be protecting us — the FBI.

2016 Presidential Election.  In mid-2016, the FBI terminated a legitimate investigation in Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified materials in order to remove the threat of an “FBI investigation” from looming over her during the months leading up to the November 2016 election.’

Then, in August 2016, supposedly non-political, supposedly independent, supposedly highly professional FBI employees were scheming to stop Donald Trump from being elected President.  Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page were exchanging texts sharing their hatred for Trump and commitment to ensuring he lost the election.  “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right?  Right?!” texted Page, to which Strzok responded, “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”  They did their best.  Under the name “Operation Crossfire Hurricane,” the FBI concocted a story that the Donald Trump campaign had “colluded” with Russia to (somehow) influence the 2016 election.

In reality, the FBI’s “investigation” relied almost entirely on the now discredited “Christopher Steele dossier.”  Years later, a December 9, 2019 Department of Justice Inspector General report revealed that Steele had actually been paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign to develop “opposition research” on Trump.  When the FBI couldn’t corroborate the allegations in Steele’s “dossier,” it then offered Steele $1 million to develop some corroboration. Your tax dollars in the hands of the FBI were hard at work — to undermine our elections.

2018 Congressional Election.  The “Russia collusion” hoax was not limited to the 2016 Presidential election.  It continued well into the 2018 midterm election cycle.  In May 2017, shortly after President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as Special Counsel to investigate Russian involvement in President Trump’s election.  “The 22-month-long Mueller investigation cast a shadow over the first two years of Trump’s presidency and loomed large over the 2018 midterm elections.”  Of course, the Mueller team included Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.

2020 Presidential Election.  The FBI went back to its book of “dirty tricks” to affect the 2020 Presidential Election to cover up the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.  It was not until much later that Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) released information from FBI whistleblowers showing that in 2020, “FBI officials sought to falsely portray as disinformation evidence acquired from multiple sources that provided the FBI derogatory information related to Hunter Biden’s financial and foreign business activities, even though some of that information had already been or could be verified.”  Unfortunately, the whistleblower information was not released until July 2022 — well after the 2020 election.

Computer repairman John Paul Mac Isaac became alarmed at the information he saw on Hunter Biden’s laptop.  He became even more alarmed when he reported what he found to the FBI, and was warned by an FBI agent to remain silent about what he had found.  The Agent “turned around and told me that, in their experience, nothing ever happens to people that don’t talk about these things,” Mac Isaac said.

The FBI not only refused to investigate the laptop, but went to great lengths to portray the Hunter Biden story as “misinformation,” all the while knowing it was true.  And the Bureau brought others into its conspiracy.  On August 25, 2016, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the social media giant suppressed stories about the Hunter Biden laptopafter the FBI advised Facebook that “there was a lot of Russian propaganda on the [prior] 2016 election,” and that “basically there’s about to be some kind of dump similar to that” related to the laptop.

Later polls revealed that nearly 30 percent of voters would have been less likely to vote for Biden — including 15 percent of Democrats — had they known that Biden likely lied about Hunter Biden’s business dealings with Ukraine.  Thus, it is highly likely that the FBI — the enforcement arm of the Deep State — “elected” Joe Biden as President of the United States.

2022 Congressional Election.  Just three months before the mid-term elections, on August 7, 2022, about 30 federal agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, a totally unprecedented raid of the home of a former President.  The full story of the FBI plan for the search is not yet known, so speculation abounds.  By one report, “The FBI’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence was aimed at finding evidence…which Democrats want to blame on Mr. Trump ahead of the midterms in November and the 2024 presidential election.”  Former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz believed the raid was a fishing expedition and “a cover story to find information to prosecute or indict Trump on other issues.”

2024 Presidential Election.  On November 15, 2022, one week after the midterm elections, President Trump announced he would run for President in the 2024 election.  It did not take long for the FBI election machine to swing into action.  Only three days later, on November 18, 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed John Smith as a Special Counsel to investigate efforts by President Trump and his allies to challenge the results of the 2020 Presidential Election.

Even Justice Department supporters admit that Trump’s 2024 announcement affected the DOJ’s timeline to seek charges with the aid of documents seized by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago.  “With the 2024 primaries in mind, the Justice Department likely has a ‘target end date of 2023’” for bringing any charges against Trump, noted former Obama federal prosecutor Barb McQuade — even while attempting to characterize the bringing of charges before the primaries as somehow staying out of the election cycle.

If America is to continue as a Constitutional Republic, this election interference from the FBI cannot be allowed to continue.  If the American people want to prevent the FBI from deciding who will be elected President in 2024, the new majority in the House of Representatives — which has the power of the purse — will need to totally defund the FBI and bring an end to the FBI’s undermining of American elections.

The FBI’s Bloody Role in the “Fast and Furious” Scandal – Part XVI

The FBI is viewed as the nation’s premiere “law enforcement” agency.  That would cause many to assume that if the FBI learned that another government agency had developed a plan to violate federal law, the FBI would stop it in its tracks.  You certainly would not expect the FBI to participate in a criminal conspiracy that would lead to the murder of others.  Well, that expectation would be a mistake.

Most Americans recall “Operation Fast and Furious” as the handiwork of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), but not everyone knows how the FBI played a key role in that bloody scandal, with deadly repercussions around the globe.

Beginning in 2009, during the Obama Administration, the Phoenix office of the ATF developed a plan to allow unauthorized purchasers to buy guns in the United States to “walk” them into Mexico knowing many would be sold to powerful drug cartels, so they could later trace the firearms. As it turns out, there is no evidence that ATF did much to trace the guns, but we do know that many were used to commit crimes by Mexican drug cartels and terrorists.

If tracing the guns was never the plan, what was its purpose?  Many believe that the Obama Administration wanted to find an excuse to crack down on Second Amendment rights, reasoning that an ATF and FBI-fueled crime wave could help push Congress to enact more gun control laws.

In 2010, the ATF program became known as “Operation Fast and Furious,” and transitioned from a local ATF operation to one run by a combination of federal agencies including the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and, not surprisingly, the FBI.  In fact, future FBI Director and later Trump Special Counsel Robert Mueller was apparently involved in the planning stages of the “Operation.”

It is a crime to buy a firearm from a Federal Firearms Licensee (FFL) on behalf of another person — punishable as a felony known as a “straw purchase.”  By June 2010, more than 1,600 weapons had been sold through suspected straw purchases surveilled but permitted by the FBI and other agencies, at a cost of more than $1 million.  Over 300 of these weapons were later found at crime scenes — 179 in Mexico and 130 in the United States.  Before the project was over, more than 2,000 guns were allowed to be trafficked illegally.

On Dec. 14, 2010, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed by suspected operatives of a Mexican drug-smuggling organization. Two rifles found at the scene were tied to Fast and Furious. After Agent Terry’s murder, ATF agent John Dodson decided to blow the whistle on the program.  He testified to Congress and revealed that “the Mexican bandits who gunned down Terry were working for FBI operatives and had been sent to the border to do a ‘drug rip-off.’” Dodson revealed that the DEA was aware a large shipment of drugs would be sent through the canyon the night Terry was killed.  The DEA advised the FBI, who then “advised criminal informants from another cartel that the load would be ‘theirs for the taking.’”

On July 11, 2011, Senator Chuck Grassley and Congressman Darrell Issa wrote to FBI Director Mueller for information about the FBI’s role in Operation Fast and Furious through its Phoenix, Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, and El Paso, Texas offices.  They had learned that “at least one individual who is allegedly an FBI informant might have been in communication with, and was perhaps even conspiring with, at least one suspect whom ATF was monitoring.”  They asked FBI Director Mueller: “How many paid FBI informants, prospective informants assigned an informant number, or cooperating defendants (‘informants’) were in communication with any of the ATF suspects … under Operation Fast and Furious.”

Senator Grassley followed up with another letter in July 2011 stating:  “The evidence we have gathered raises the disturbing possibility that the Justice Department not only allowed criminals to smuggle weapons but that taxpayer dollars from other agencies may have financed those engaging in such activities.”  As is routinely the case, the response of the FBI is unknown, and the American people continued to be kept in the dark about these illegal FBI activities.  In a memorandum dated February 1, 2012, Grassley and Issa wrote that, with Fast and Furious, the ATF was unknowingly targeting FBI assets.

When federal crimes are committed, often it is the FBI that leads the investigation.  But when the FBI has been complicit in the crime, can the American people trust the results of any investigation?  It is no surprise that Americans believe that there never will be any accountability for crimes committed by employees at the U.S. Department of Justice, including the FBI.

As of 2013, it was reported that at least 1,400 of the more than 2,000 guns trafficked under “Fast and Furious” were still unaccounted for, so the death toll of the FBI’s gunrunning scandal may still not be final.  However, a postscript to the bloody gunrunning tale can be added.  In November 2015, a team of 10 Islamic terrorists carried out a wave of shootings across Paris, France, and 130 people died in the deadliest peacetime attack in French history.  One of the weapons used in the attack was tied to Fast and Furious.

America could do nicely without law enforcement agencies that create such mayhem, and the ATF and the FBI should be the first to be axed.

Twitter Files Reveal FBI Violations of the First Amendment – Part XVII

There was a time when most Americans naively believed the primary activity of the FBI was to uphold federal laws. Over the course of the last four weeks of 2022, the American people have been shown, beyond a doubt, that one of the FBI’s primary activities has been knowingly to violate the federal Constitution to ensure the Deep State’s continued control over the nation.

During December 2022, the American people learned why the Deep State and its media friends have been so distraught by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. It turns out those dark forces that run our nation were not just worried about Musk allowing differing political opinions on his Twitter platform. Their greater concern was that the American people would learn how the FBI and other Deep State agencies have worked for years to control public debate on controversial issues and influence federal elections.

Under Musk, Twitter granted access to several reporters to investigate its internal files so they could independently report on what secrets they contained. The only condition imposed on the journalists was that any news stories had to be released first on the Twitter platform. In agreement with this condition, the select reporters made “data dumps” releasing documents demonstrating the degree to which the Deep State has conspired with Big Tech to suppress the views of its critics and promote the views of its friends.

This proof of Deep State manipulation of American politics started to unfold on December 2, 2022, when independent journalist Matt Taibbi began reporting on the “Twitter Files,”, which was followed by a second installment by journalist Bari Weiss on December 8, 2022. Among the initial revelations was how the Deep State pressured Twitter to suppress the New York Post’s October 14, 2020 coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story showing Biden family corruption involving Ukraine.

On December 16, 2022, Taibbi released “The Twitter Files: Part Six — Twitter, the FBI Subsidiary.” It revealed how Twitter’s head of “Safety and Trust” Yoel Roth was in frequent contact with the FBI, particularly an agent in San Francisco named Elvis Chan. Chan was used by Washington as the primary conduit for sending its directives to Twitter.

This communication developed into a partnership where the FBI could send offending tweets or entire accounts to Twitter claiming that they should be examined for violations of Twitter’s terms of service. Although Twitter employees frequently could not identify specific violations, they were pressured by the FBI into suppressing dissident voices.

Not only was Twitter working with current FBI employees, but it also acted as a revolving door to former FBI employees. Twitter’s Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker had been FBI General Counsel where he was a major figure in the Russiangate Hoax pushing false information from the Hillary campaign to investigators inside the agency. He ultimately left the FBI after he was caught leaking information to corporate press. “As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — ‘Bu alumni’ — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals.”

On December 19, 2022, reporter Michael Shellenberger posted “Twitter Files: Part 7 — The FBI & the Hunter Biden Laptop.” Those files demonstrated how the FBI knew about Hunter Biden’s laptop in December 2019 when they acquired a warrant and seized the laptop from the Mac repair shop in Delaware. In other words, fully 11 months before the November 2020 election, the FBI knew that the Hunter Biden laptop was real, but decided not to investigate.

The FBI also knew that a copy of the laptop had been provided to lawyers and journalists, so the FBI began an operation to prepare Twitter and other Big Tech companies to expect “Russian disinformation” in the form of a fake Hunter Biden laptop dump. Mark Zuckerberg has stated in an interview that the FBI conducted the same type of preparation for Facebook. In September 2020, FBI and other agencies even conducted a table-top exercise for a hypothetical hack-and-dump operation of, just for example, a Hunter Biden laptop!

The FBI’s psychological operation worked. By the time the New York Post published its story on the laptop on October 14, 2020, Big Tech was already on the lookout for this supposed Russian activity and was more than happy to take the FBI’s word for it so that it could help the Biden campaign. The FBI conducted a classified briefing to none other than FBI alum Jim Baker to assure Twitter employees that the Hunter Biden laptop story wasn’t real, so they should take action to suppress it.

And that’s what Twitter did. “[W]ithin hours, Twitter and other social media companies censor [sic] the NY Post article, preventing it from spreading and, more importantly, undermining its credibility in the minds of many Americans.” By this one action, the FBI, working with Twitter and other social media companies, likely elected Joe Biden President.

Why are Twitter and other Big Tech companies doing the bidding of the FBI? Although most of them are glad to help their cronies on the Left, they are also under pressure to keep their immunity from liability under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. And both candidate Biden and the Biden Administration threatened to remove that liability to get Big Tech to toe the line. On December 7, 2022, America’s Future explained all this in an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in Gonzalez v. Google.

And how did the FBI respond to Twitter’s revelations? The FBI used one of the standard plays from its worn out playbook claiming to be the victim, putting out a statement: “The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public… It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

Before the release of the Twitter Files, any discussion of federal government involvement in the censorship of users by Big Tech was decried as “conspiracy theory,” but what had been called “conspiracy theory” has now been proven to be “conspiracy fact.”

It would be difficult to imagine a more serious violation of the First Amendment’s prohibition against “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” than what has been revealed in the “Twitter Files.” Since many of those whose dissident views were suppressed were conservative Christians, the prohibition on interference with the “free exercise” of religion was also breached. The FBI also prevented the ability of Americans to “assemble” together online, as well as petition government “for a redress of grievances.”

And we now know that it was not just rank-and-file Americans whose views were suppressed by Twitter. President Trump was banned the day after former First Lady Michelle Obama pressured Twitter, demanding: “Now is the time for Silicon Valley companies to stop enabling this monstrous behavior — and go even further than they have already by permanently banning this man from their platforms and putting in place policies to prevent their technologies from being used by the nation’s leaders to fuel insurrection.”

The FBI has no respect for the American people, the U.S. Constitution, or the rule of law. If the FBI is allowed to continue to exist, there is little hope for fair elections, or the survival of our Constitutional Republic.

Expanded DOJ-FBI Series

A New “Church Committee” Is Needed to Expose Abuses by the U.S. Department of Justice and FBI – Part I

With this article below, we transition to addressing corruption in the U.S. Department of Justice.  Since the FBI is a component of the Department of Justice, this expanded series will continue to cover the FBI’s misdeeds as required.

In order to enforce federal criminal laws, the original concept was that Special Agents at the FBI would be responsible to investigate crimes, turning over their work product to lawyers at the Justice Department who would decide whether criminal charges should be brought.  If a grand jury returned an indictment, the FBI agents would testify honestly about their investigation, and the juries would be trusted to return an honest verdict.  The goal would be justice, not just prosecutorial victories.  As prior articles have demonstrated, it is no longer possible to believe that the system currently works as once planned.

When Hillary Clinton willfully violated federal law and Department of State rules by using her own personal non-classified email server, thereby exposing classified documents to unauthorized persons, the Department of Justice should have prosecuted her.  However, any prosecution was rendered impossible when former FBI Director James Comey held a press conference to announce his views on the case.  He chose to usurp the function of prosecutors, absolving Hillary Clinton of any meaningful wrongdoing by announcing:  “My conclusion was, and remains, no reasonable prosecutor would bring this case.”  Then, there were still professionals at the Justice Department, and one closely involved with the investigation of Clinton’s emails told Fox News that “career agents and attorneys on the case unanimously believed the Democratic presidential nominee should have been charged.”

When the FBI believed classified documents may have been mishandled by a Republican, it raided former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in August 2022.  Does that look like “Equal Justice Under Law?”

Experienced journalist Jonathan Tobin shared his observation that the federal bureaucracy generally has become overwhelmingly leftist in its makeup. “For decades, the federal service has increasingly become a bastion for liberal Democrats.  Every study shows that its members are almost uniformly on the left.  To give just one example: 95% of federal bureaucrats who donated to a candidate in the 2016 presidential election gave to Hillary Clinton…The worst corruption in Washington is the ability of those with lifetime tenure and no legal mandate to thwart the verdict of democracy as they tried to do after 2016 or, as we saw in Mar-a-Lago.”

With all the scandalous behavior of FBI employees in pushing Russiagate, it is difficult to know whether the FBI or the Justice Department is more compromised.  It may be that the Leftist lawyers at the Justice Department have corrupted those in supervisory roles at the FBI, but the result is the same:  Leftists now control both the federal investigatory and prosecutorial functions in America.

On July 18, 2022, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray, stating. “I remain very concerned that political bias by a select group of Justice Department and FBI officials has infected the Justice Department’s and FBI’s usual process and procedure to open and pursue high-profile and politically charged investigations.” 

In October 2022, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) revealed that FBI whistleblowers have told Congress that the Justice Department seeks to “purge” politically conservative FBI agents, emphasizing that “You cannot have a political Justice Department and a free society, a free country.”

On November 4, 2022, House Judiciary Committee Republicans released a report “describ[ing] the FBI … as being ‘rotted at its core,’ maintaining a ‘systemic culture of unaccountability,’ and full of ‘rampant corruption, manipulation, and abuse,’” concluding that “FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland have injected politics into the FBI, so much so that it is now fundamentally broken.”

It is highly significant that just days ago, on January 3, 2023, former FBI Assistant Director Christopher Swecker, the Bureau’s retired chief of criminal investigations, called for the creation of an independent commission modeled after the 1970s-era Church Committee. Swecker suggests the committee’s work, this time, be focused on investigating the politicization of the FBI and proposed reforms.

“[I]t’s basically a wholesale takeover by the Department of Justice, which is filled with political appointees in every top position,” Swecker said. Swecker noted that the Justice Department’s ranks are laden with lawyers who “have made a career out of bouncing in and out of silk-stocking law firms, between the Department of Justice and then these law firms.” He added, “I have to say they are incredibly liberal in their politics. And that has now sort of taken over the FBI, and they are inserting that ideology into their high-profile investigations.”

Swecker argued that far-left ideologues with the administration at the Justice Department have pressed FBI agents into suppression of ideas unfavorable to the Biden administration, and into spying on American citizens.  He pointed to the recent Twitter files release as evidence that the politicization of the FBI has trampled constitutional freedoms.  “The FBI has an industry outreach program to help exchange information with industry, helping in the counterintelligence efforts of the FBI. This has gone well beyond that,” Swecker said. “This is nothing but domestic spying, and this is nothing but suppression of First Amendment rights and ideas.”

Swecker is not alone in his call for a Congressional investigation.  The former FBI Assistant Director for Intelligence, Kevin Brock, also has argued that a new Church Committee “would be great for the FBI.” More importantly, it is necessary to prevent future violations of the constitutional freedoms that the DOJ’s politicization of the FBI has endangered.

Justice is no longer blind.  These two highly credible former FBI Assistant Directors have described how leftist political appointees in the Department of Justice have coopted the law enforcement mission of the FBI, turning agents into political enforcers for the Biden regime.  The new House of Representatives has the opportunity to expose how our own government has been subverted and defund the wrongdoers.  If the House fails that mission, there is little hope our Republic can survive.

The best way the House could carry out its duty to the American People is to appoint a Church Committee to investigate the politicization and weaponization of the FBI and the entire Department of Justice.  America’s Future calls on them to do just that.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government – Part II

For once, there is reason to believe that the lawless special agents at the FBI and the politicized lawyers at the Justice Department may pull in their horns a bit and become less abusive of the rights of Americans — at least for a while.  Why?  Because there is a new Sheriff in town.  In the nation’s capital, where bureaucrats have been immune from accountability, things may be about to change. The new GOP House majority moved quickly to implement promises made by Speaker McCarthy to investigate a myriad of abuses by the Department of Justice (DOJ), the FBI, and other federal agencies.  On January 10, 2023, the House approved the creation of the “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government” under the Judiciary Committee.  Established as a Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, this new investigatory body is patterned after a Senate Committee established in 1975 to investigate abuses by these same Deep State agencies that was chaired by liberal Senator Frank Church (D-ID). The new Subcommittee’s membership of nine Republicans and six Democrats has not yet been chosen, but it will be appointed by Judiciary Committee Chairman Constitutionalist Jim Jordan (OH).  Chairman Jordan will choose the Subcommittee’s Republican members from a list of other Constitutional stalwarts serving on the Judiciary Committee, including Ken Buck (CO), Matt Gaetz (FL), Mike Johnson (LA), Andy Biggs (AZ), Tom Massie (KY), Chip Roy (TX), and Dan Bishop (NC).  Several of these members of the House Judiciary Committee are the very same members of the House Freedom Caucus who demanded the Committee be created as a concession from incoming Speaker Kevin McCarthy.  Reports have circulated that the Subcommittee will be chaired by Judiciary Chairman Jordan himself. Jordan’s floor statement held back nothing in assailing Deep State Agencies: “Your right to practice your faith, your right to assemble, right to petition the government, freedom of the press, freedom of speech. Every single one’s been attacked in the last two years.” H. Res. 12 establishes the Committee and gives it a broad investigative scope, including:

how executive branch agencies work with…non-profit entities, or other government agencies to facilitate action against American citizens, including the extent, if any, to which illegal or improper, unconstitutional, or unethical activities were engaged in by the executive branch or private sector against citizens of the United States…how executive branch agencies collect, compile, analyze, use, or disseminate information about citizens of the United States…[and] any other issues related to the violation of the civil liberties of citizens of the United States…

The Subcommittee faces a target-rich environment, including the FBI efforts to influence a series of recent Presidential and Congressional elections, politicized prosecutions of January 6 election protestors, control of social media companies by the Deep State, the Justice Department’s abusive treatment of parents seeking to change their local school boards and the Department of Homeland Security’s failed effort to create a Disinformation Governance Board. According to Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX), the Committee will have the same funding and staff resources as the Democrats’ January 6 committee.  The Committee will have exceptional access, including the “authority to have subpoena power to receive information on intelligence-related activity that’s typically only shared with the House Intelligence Committee.” The New York Times is understandably panicked over the likely direction of the Committee, claiming that:

The text of the resolution would also grant Mr. Jordan’s panel the power to receive the same highly classified information that intelligence agencies make available to their oversight committee, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Intelligence Committee members have access to some of the most sensitive secrets in the government, including information about covert actions, which are not shared with other lawmakers.

The Subcommittee will face determined opposition by those who want to protect the Deep State from public exposure of its illegal and unconstitutional activities.  As journalist Glenn Greenwald puts it: “A core plank of the Dem Party is unifying state and corporate power to censor their adversaries and critics from the internet. But an equally high priority is to shield the US Security State from investigative scrutiny because they perceive – accurately – they’re their allies.”

The manners in which the Subcommittee will operate are not yet set, but they will likely determine how successful it will be.  Will the Subcommittee hearings be held in secret, with only occasional press statements being made by its members?  Or will the hearings be made public so that Americans can see over a period of months the depth of the corruption?  Will witnesses have immunity from prosecution for their testimony?  Will witnesses who perjure themselves be held accountable?  How will Congress hold three-letter agencies accountable for implementing reforms?  Will any of these agencies that have been lawless since their creation be abolished?

The concept is excellent, and the right people seem to be in place.  The American people must now support these efforts to reveal the true depth of the Deep State swamp, and then implement a workable plan to drain it!

 

Department of Justice January 6 Lies and Abuses – Part III

Attorney General Merrick Garland used the occasion of the second anniversary of the events of January 6, 2021, to ramp-up his threats against opponents of the Biden Administration.  He issued a press release to warn that “the investigation and prosecution of those responsible for the attack continues to move forward at an unprecedented speed and scale.” 

The Department of Justice (DOJ) always describes the January 6 riot as an “insurrection” that “interfered with…the peaceful transfer of power” so that it can justify abusing the constitutional rights – not just of those few who actually acted aggressively that day – but all others who also supported President Trump and harbored concerns over 2020 election irregularities.  The “insurrection” claim allows the federal government to vastly expand its powers to confront the ostensible “emergency” of the “insurrection.”  It allows DOJ to do much more than arrest the guilty or “round up the usual suspects.

The only problem is that DOJ’s “insurrection” narrative is completely false.

The foundation of the DOJ’s “insurrection” argument collapses on examination.  January 6 will go down as likely the only unarmed “insurrection” in the history of the world.  Out of nearly 1,000 people charged, only five were charged with possessing a firearm somewhere in DC, and none of those were charged with using firearms during the riot.

The only person shot on January 6 was a Trump supporter, Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by Capitol Police despite herself being unarmed.  Four people actually died at the Capitol that day, all Trump supporters.  Besides Babbitt, two died of heart attacks, and one of a drug overdose.

The DOJ, and Democrat shills like new House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, constantly imply that five or sometimes six Capitol Police officers lost their lives “due to the events of January 6.”  They speak of officers who “are no longer with us.”  Yet the facts refute the claim.  Actually, only one officer died in the 24 hours following the riot, and many lies surround his death.

CNN and MSNBC repeatedly reported that he was beaten to death by Trump supporters with a fire extinguisher.  The New York Times reported the same.  Yet in reality, Officer Sicknick texted his family the night of the riot to tell them that he had been pepper sprayed but was in good spirits.  Not until three months later did the D.C. medical examiner admit that Sicknick had actually suffered two strokes the day after the riot, and died of natural causes.  A lengthy and brilliant expose by Glenn Greenwald demonstrated the conspiracy of lies between Capitol Police, Congressional Democrats, and the Controlled Media that have convinced Americans that Officer Sicknick was killed by a pro-Trump mob.

The other four officers cited by Jeffries were all suicides.  One killed himself three days after the riots, another two weeks afterward, and two in July, some six months afterward. Yet the Left, in its desperation to exaggerate the riot into an “insurrection,” is more than happy to add even the July suicides to its January “body count” — when in reality, not a single officer died of injuries sustained in the so-called “insurrection.” 

Why were these lies critical to “the narrative?”  It certainly would not support the myth of an insurrection if the public were to be told that only one person died that day — a female U.S. Air Force Veteran Trump supporter, and her death came while she was unarmed and offering no threat to anyone, came at the hands of a Capitol police officer, Lt. Michael Byrd.  Documents reveal there was no good reason to justify this shooting.

As the FBI uses Chinese Communist Party-style surveillance techniques to identify those who were anywhere near the Capitol that day, it ignores persons like Ray Epps, who tried to get protestors “to go into the Capitol.”  Epps was immediately identified as a troublemaker by the pro-Trump crowd. “Fed, Fed, Fed,” they shouted as he provoked the crowd. The fact that neither the January 6 Committee or the FBI had any problem with Epps’ rousing outbursts speaks volumes about the dark forces for which he was working.

The truth is that many governments have used agent-provocateurs to infiltrate the ranks of protests to encourage the commission of illegal acts so that the government has an excuse to retaliate against peaceful protesters. The FBI was caught using this technique in May 1970 when an FBI informant burned down a building at the University of Alabama to give the government an excuse to arrest 150 protestors.

Indeed, there was no good reason for any of the events of January 6.  The Deep State wanted an attack on the Capitol, as demonstrated by the rabble-rousing of people like Ray Epps.  The FBI knew everything about whatever may have been planned as it has acknowledged that it had infiltrated the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and Oath Keepers.  Importantly, Department of Defense Chief of Staff Kash Patel has revealed that President Trump authorized 20,000 National Guard to support local law enforcement in defense of the Capitol, if requested, two days before January 6, but no request, as required by law, came from the Capitol police or from D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.

With the false narrative of the insurrection, the Biden Administration was able to go on the offense against MAGA Republicans, saying “Democracy was attacked during the January 6 insurrection.” 

President Biden even claimed the middle-of-the night “assault” on Paul Pelosi by a leftist Green Party supporter and nudist activist in October 2022, was a continuation of the events of January 6, to demonize all his political opponents: “the mob when they stormed the United States Capitol on January the 6th when they broke windows, kicked in the doors, brutally attacked law enforcement, roamed the corridors hunting for officials, and erected gallows to hang the former Vice President, Mike Pence…whipped up into a frenzy by a President repeating over and over again the Big Lie that the election of 2020 had been stolen…a lie that fueled the dangerous rise in political violence and voter intimidation….”  Horse feathers!

Two years after the January 6, 2021 riot, the DOJ has been fully weaponized to punish and intimidate the political opponents of the Biden Administration, having arranged for more than 900 arrests, nearly 500 guilty pleas entered by terrified Americans, and the DOJ claims “[a]t least 250 suspects wanted by the bureau on accusations that they assaulted officers on Jan. 6, 2021, are still at large.”  This is exactly the type of weaponization of government that the House Judiciary Committee’s SubCommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government must investigate and find a way to end before we lose our Republic forever.

Department of Justice Mistreats January 6 Political Prisoners – Part IV

Generally, prison is for those convicted of crimes, not those only accused.  Under normal conditions, most who commit non-violent federal crimes, who are first offenders, and who do not present a flight risk are released before trial.  All of those descriptions apply to most of the persons arrested in connection with the events of January 6, but these special defendants are being held before trial for many months, some even without indictments having been issued by grand juries.  The Biden Department of Justice appears determined to make a special example of these MAGA prisoners.

Many may not realize it, but the federal Bureau of Prisons is an agency in the Department of Justice and therefore under the control of Attorney General Merrick Garland.  The Bureau of Prisons is a deeply troubled agency in the best of times.  (Only weeks ago, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a 68-page report entitled “Sexual Abuse of Female Inmates While in Federal Prisons.”).

However, the Justice Department is reserving some of its harshest treatment for January 6 prisoners who are being held in the notoriously brutal District of Columbia jail.  In October 2022, 34 of these prisoners wrote a letter detailing the harsh conditions they have endured.  Many report being denied visits from family, and even from their attorneys.  Indeed, those prisoners actually requested a transfer to Guantanamo Bay prison, where at least prisoners are given exercise, time outdoors, access to religious services, and medical care.  According to the letter, they have been denied religious services.  Prisoners who have refused to take the dangerous COVID injection are treated even more harshly.  Some describe beatings by prison guards.

January 6 prisoner Todd Gardner agreed to a guilty plea to avoid the notoriously anti-Trump District of Columbia juries.  He is now awaiting sentencing, which has been delayed for seven months.  He recently wrote an “open letter,” published on the AmericanGulag.com website, detailing the abysmal conditions in the D.C. jails. 

As a J6 defendant, I am treated poorly, harassed and physically abused.  We get fed terrible food in portions smaller than elementary school.  I have to constantly ask for money from my mom to get food from the commissary.  I have been denied my medications and toilet paper.  I have also been denied basic human necessities like water and kept from communicating with my attorney. 

In June 2021, journalist Julie Kelly, author of the exposé book entitled, January 6, exposed on television the inhumane conditions in “Biden’s ‘Deplorable Jail.’”  Those January 6 prisoners who spoke with Kelly, and laid bare the jail’s Third World conditions, later reported how they were retaliated against by being locked down, including 24 hours of solitary confinement.  One prisoner messaged his family, “We just found out they are locking us down for an entire week in retaliation for that [television exposé], with no phone calls, no rec time, 5 min showers, and 24 hours in our cells.”

On July 8, 2021, Obama-appointed federal judge Randolph Moss declared “absolutely unacceptable” the D.C. jail’s refusal to allow a prisoner to see the evidence against him.  The judge declared that the jail’s actions were “not consistent with due process.”

On October 13, 2021, Reagan-appointed federal judge Royce Lamberth “held the District of Columbia’s corrections director and jail warden in contempt of court” for mistreating prisoners, and asked the DOJ to investigate potential violations of civil rights.  The DOJ claimed that prisoner Christopher Worrell, who suffered hand injuries and a lack of treatment for cancer, had “invented” his medical needs.  Eventually, Judge Lamberth ordered Worrell released for treatment, citing “deplorable” conditions in the D.C. jail, and stating that the court had “‘zero confidence’ that the D.C. jail would provide proper treatment and not retaliate against Worrell.”

More often than not, however, judges presiding over January 6 criminal trials appear to be accepting the allegations filed by DOJ lawyers as true and some judges have both attacked President Trump and reprimanded attorneys representing January 6 defendants.

In sentencing January 6 defendant Kyle Young, Obama-appointed judge Amy Berman Jackson accused former President Trump of “trying to subvert” the Constitution, and stated that “[t]he judiciary, of all people, must make it clear that it is not patriotism, it is not standing up for America” for the defendant to stand up for Trump.

Obama-appointed Judge Tanya Chutkan blasted defense suggestions that January 6 defendants were treated unfairly compared to BLM rioters.  She stated that it was false equivalence “to compare the actions of people protesting, mostly peacefully, for civil rights” to the rioters “trying to overthrow the government.”  She said the riot posed a very real danger to “the foundation of our democracy.”

Obama-appointed Judge Amit Mehta rebuked a defense attorney for arguing that January 6 defendants could not get a fair trial in D.C. because many of its residents “despise…traditional values…,” Mehta said, adding “This brief … reads less like a legal brief than something you might read on a blog…. And that’s not acceptable.”

The D.C. jail even repeatedly refused to allow a congressional visit to a constituent of then-Congressman Louie Gohmert, who reported that a jail supervisor “said she won’t talk anymore and that we’re trespassers.”  Calling it like he sees it, Rep. Gohmert added, “We’re in totalitarian, Marxist territory here.”

For the leftwing leaders at the DOJ of what reporter Julie Kelly calls “a war on terror against the political right,” third-world treatment of their political opponents appears to be a premeditated strategy — and the constitutional concepts of due process of law and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment are the latest casualties in that war.

Now that the Republicans have assumed control over the House of Representatives, with the constitutional “power of the purse,” the only question is how long it will take for them to use that power to end the Department of Justice’s abusive treatment of the political opponents of the Biden regime.

DOJ Collusion with the House Select Committee on January 6 – Part V

The “House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol” labored for 18 months to convince the American people that MAGA Republicans were an existential threat to America.  Vice President Kamala Harrispushed this ridiculous narrative when she identified the three days when “our democracy came under assault” as “December 7th, 1941, September 11th, 2001, and January 6th, 2021.”  How absurd!

The good news is that the January 6 Committee disbanded as the Republicans took over the House of Representatives last month, ending the show trials and “made-for-TV” broadcasts of disinformation and this chest-thumping charade.  Now, House Republicans have promised to release the January 6 videos that Democrats withheld, giving Americans a chance to learn what Paul Harvey used to call — “the rest of the story.” 

First, the nation should pause to give thanks that Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) — the only two Republicans appointed by Nancy Pelosi to serve on the January 6 Committee — are no longer in Congress.  Cheney lost her effort at re-election, gathering only 29 percent of the vote in a Republican primary, but now pondering a run for President in 2024.  Kinzinger, seeing the writing on the wall, declined to seek re-election, but he too refuses to go away, as he seamlessly transitioned to the role of a CNN political pundit.

Certainly, the Committee’s effort to spread the lie that unarmed Americans tried to topple the federal government on January 6 has been accepted by those who Rush Limbaugh used to call “low information voters.”  But one of the most dangerous precedents established by the January 6 Committee may be its work acting on behalf of the Department of Justice.

On January 3, 2022, the New York Times described the Committee’s work as looking for evidence that crimes were committed:

[A]s the committee and its dozens of investigators issue subpoenas for documents, phone records and bank records, the panel is closely looking for evidence of criminality that the Justice Department might not have unearthed… [G]iven that the Jan. 6 committee’s staff is led by a…pair of former U.S. attorneys, any recommendation they make would most likely be taken seriously by federal prosecutors.  Investigators are looking into whether a range of crimes were committed…

Was that a legitimate goal for the Committee?  While the Democrats were still in charge of the House, one of their last actions was to try to prevent the American people from accessing the files of the January 6 Committee.  “[T]he vast majority of raw information the panel collected [was] slated to be sent to the National Archives, to be locked away for up to 50 years.”  It seems likely that the Committee did not want its close ties to DOJ to be revealed.  Fortunately, incoming Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s new House rules required the January 6 Committee to instead turn over all records to the House Committee on Administration, and also ordered the National Archives to return any records already in its possession.

When the Justice Department investigates people, there are many rules it must follow in obtaining evidence.  Targets of Grand Juries must be advised they are targets.  There are rules about subpoenas to lawyers and members of the press.  These rules were developed to protect the Constitutional rights of Americans.  But those rules do not apply to Congressional committees, and thus it is tempting for the Department of Justice to collude with Congressional committees to gather evidence not for any legislative purpose, but for DOJ lawyers to use in prosecutions.  There are many indications this happened.

When a legitimate Congressional investigation discovers evidence of a crime, it can make a “referral” to the Justice Department to investigate and, if required, prosecute.  It is quite another thing for a Congressional committee to work behind the scenes with DOJ to collect information that DOJ could not collect directly, thus circumventing the procedural protections afforded Americans during a criminal investigation.

After the January 6 Committee was in operations for nearly a year, in May 2022, the DOJ requested certain transcripts of interviews and depositions collected by the January 6 Committee.  The request stated that those transcripts “may contain information relevant to a criminal investigation we are conducting.”  In response, Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) was reported to have agreed to share the information they created, holding back only their draft report.  Eventually the Committee apparently shared evidence from its 1,000 witness interviews and thousands of documents.  It seems likely these files have also been shared with the Special Counsel appointed in November 2022 by Attorney General Garland to investigate the “transfer of power” following the 2020 Presidential election.

The Committee final report was issued on December 22, 2022, only days before Republicans took control.  The report’s Executive Summary (pages 98-112) contains criminal referrals against President Trump and numerous other persons.  Having gathered evidence without the need to comply with DOJ rules, the report is described as “an exhaustive legal roadmap” for the DOJ lawyers to pursue criminal charges.  Those charges center around challenging the certification of election votes – exactly what Democrats had done in prior elections.

When the January 6 Committee was attacking Trump, the establishment press was cheering them on.  Now that House Republicans are looking into misdeeds of Democrats, establishment “legal experts” are warning that the “Republicans’ roving investigation could do significant damage to criminal matters.”

Since Attorney General Garland has now appointed a Special Counsel to investigate President Trump on two separate matters, perhaps he could appoint just one Special Counsel to investigate his own Justice Department.  Americans deserve to know whether the Deep State’s agents in Congress have been doing the bidding of the Deep State at the Justice Department.

Before he was appointed to the Supreme Court, Justice Robert Jackson served as Attorney General under President Franklin Roosevelt.  In 1940, Jackson addressed the nation’s federal prosecutors, explaining that their duty was not to win cases, but to do justice: “Although the government technically loses its case, it has really won if justice has been done.”  The prosecutors in the Biden Justice Department would do well to heed Jackson’s advice.  And any DOJ prosecutors who may have conspired to have the January 6 Committee collect evidence on their behalf should be identified, exposed, and held to account.

The Justice Department’s Prosecution of Pro-Life Activists – Part VI

Our nation’s charter, the Declaration of Independence, begins with the recognition that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”  Although no effort to set out a complete list of those rights is made in that document, three rights are specifically identified:  “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”  The Declaration explains that it is “to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men….”   Thus, the lawyers at the U.S. Department of Justice work for a government that was formed to secure the right to life, but now they have come to act as the enforcement arm of the abortion industry.  Not only do these government prosecutors show no respect whatsoever for the Right to Life, they are conducting a shameful war against Life and those who seek to defend it.

At 6:45 on the morning of September 23, 2022, pro-life activist Mark Houck, a father of seven, awakened to a hammering on his door.  When he opened it, he saw 10-15 marked and unmarked cars, and five federal agents with assault rifles.  “They said they were going to break in if he didn’t open [the door].  And then they had about five guns pointed at my husband, myself, and basically at my kids,” recalled Houck’s wife, Ryan-Marie.  “Okay, I’m gonna open the door. Stay calm. I have seven babies in here,” Houck urged the agents.  “The kids were all just screaming.  It was all just very scary and traumatic,” Ryan-Marie said.

Houck was arrested at gunpoint.  When Houck’s wife asked for the arrest warrant, “We’re taking him with or without a warrant.”  Houck was “shackled at the waist and feet once he arrived at ‘the federal building.’”

The raid occurred despite Houck’s attorney, former federal prosecutor Matt Heffron, having offered U.S. Attorney Anita Eve:  “[i]f the government decides to go forward…I will accept a summons on my client’s behalf, rather put Mr. Houck and his family through needless disruption.”  But the federal prosecutors wanted disruption.  They wanted to put Mr. Houck and his family through the terror of an early morning raid.  And even more importantly, they wanted to use the Houck raid to instill fear into the hearts of pro-life activists.

The lawyers at the Justice Department charged Houck with violating the “Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act” (FACE), which was introduced by Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and then-Congressman Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and signed into law by President Clinton in 1994.  In the Senate, 17 Republicans voted for this vague and dangerous bill, including current Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

What terrible conduct must Houck have engaged in to deserve the type of treatment formerly reserved for drug kingpins and members of organized crime?  In court, 14-year-old Mark Houck, Jr. testified of the events for which his dad was charged.  Abortion clinic escort Bruce Love repeatedly harassed Mark, Jr., as he and his father peacefully protested outside a Philadelphia abortion “clinic,” telling him, “Your dad’s a bad person and your dad’s harassing women.”  Court documents revealed that Love “repeatedly initiated profanity-laced verbal confrontations with Houck and his son, Mark Houck Jr.”  At one point, Love tried to provoke Houk by telling the Roman Catholic Houck, “Why don’t you go home and masturbate?  Go be with your pedophile priests.”  When Love approached Mark, Jr, his father, Mark, Sr. finally shoved him away.  For that “assault,” the DOJ raided and prosecuted  Houck — almost a full year after the incident occurred.

Twenty-two members of Congress wrote a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, denouncing the “excessive level of force,” and attacking the DOJ’s “extraordinary overreach for political ends.”  Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX), who spearheaded the letter, charged that “Attorney General Merrick Garland oversees an increasingly politicized FBI that seems hell-bent on making examples of average American citizens who don’t align politically with the administration.”

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) also sent a letter to Garland, noting the DOJ’s vast disproportion in enforcement, given that the DOJ “turned a blind eye to the epidemic of violence across the country by pro-abortion extremists against pregnancy resource centers, houses of worship, and pro-life Americans – violent acts that are prohibited by the very same law” under which Houck was charged.

“Biden’s DOJ…treated Mark like a domestic terrorist because of his faith.  This type of intimidation has no place in America,” said Congressman Andy Biggs (R-AZ).

When Houck’s case went to trial, the jury reached a unanimous “not guilty” verdict. “This is a win for Mark and the entire pro-life movement,” said Peter Breen of the Thomas More Society, which defended Houck.  “The Biden Department of Justice’s intimidation against pro-life people and people of faith has been put in its place.”

Houck has announced he would sue the FBI for the abuse he suffered, but the courts have made such suits extraordinarily difficult.

An editorial in the Washington Examiner decried the Biden Justice Department’s “anti-religious bigotry and its willingness to stretch the law to meet its ideological ends.”

The Wall Street Journal denounced Houck’s prosecution as “a case that never should have been brought,” noting that  “The FBI’s decision to arrest Mr. Houck as though he were John Dillinger also suggested a political stunt.” Even the trial judge asked the DOJ prosecutor if federal law didn’t “seem to be stretched a little thin here.”  The Journal noted that “the raid appeared calculated to send a political message…less than two months before the midterm elections.”

Now that the House Republicans’ newly created “Weaponization Subcommittee” has promised to investigate the DOJ’s out-of-control terror tactics, we shall see if Congress does something more effective than letters and press releases.

But the real lesson of the Houck case is that DOJ prosecutors cannot get convictions unless juries cooperate.  In this case, the trial was held in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and the jury refused to believe DOJ prosecutors who tried mightily to convict an innocent man.  The trials of January 6 defendants in Washington, D.C. courts have almost uniformly shown that D.C. juries seem to hate Donald Trump so much that almost always they will do whatever told to do by Biden prosecutors — hardly the type of “impartial jury” guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment.  In trials held outside of D.C., results may be very different.

While we can hope that the House Republicans will reign in a weaponized Department of Justice, the hope that is within our control is that the People will realize that prosecutions initiated by the Biden DOJ are often political persecutions, and in such cases, the duty falls on jurors to acquit.

 

DOJ Uses the Espionage Act to Control Political Opponents – Part VII

In August of 2022, after the FBI seized documents from his Mar-a-Lago home, liberal media outlets reported that former President Trump could be imprisoned for up to 10 years for violations of the “Espionage Act.”  Not surprisingly, when then-Vice President Biden was found to have taken classified documents, some conservative media personalities were happy to encourage similar Espionage Act charges be brought against Biden.  If every President is now to be threatened by this law, it is time to learn its pedigree.

The Espionage Act of 1917 is one of the tools government prosecutors use to threaten Americans.  That law, like other such laws, are usually enacted in wartime when constitutional liberties go out the window.  Woodrow Wilson was re-elected President in 1916 using the slogan “He Kept Us Out Of War.”  A few months later, in April 1917, he dragged America into the First World War.  Two months after that, on June 15, 1917, he persuaded Congress to enact The Espionage Act.  That law was made even worse the next year when it was amended by the Sedition Act of 1918.  Those laws were applied with a heavy hand by the Wilson Justice Department to punish Americans who opposed America’s entry into World War I, opposed the draft, or otherwise dissented from Wilson’s policies. 

The Espionage Act was written in vague terms to prevent gathering information about national defense, obstructing enlistment in the armed forces, or encouraging dissension within the military.  It declared certain writings that urged “treason” to be unmailable — which Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson used to deny mailing “privileges” to 74 newspapers.  In “late 1917, Wilson’s Attorney General Thomas Gregory warned dissenters not to expect mercy from ‘an outraged people’ and ‘an avenging government.’

A highly regarded history by Stanford University Professor David M. Kennedy, Over Here: the First World War and American Society (Oxford University Press: 1982) catalogues the abuses of power by the Justice Department.  AG Gregory “favored broad construction and vigorous application of the Espionage Act, on one occasion publicly chastised a federal judge who had instructed a jury to acquit a man for calling the President a “‘Wall Street tool.’”  The courts vigorously applied the Espionage Act, in one case convicting a man for questioning the constitutionality of the wartime draft.  AG Gregory even sought “an amendment [to the Act] that would allow him to prosecute ‘disloyal utterances.’”  AG Gregory happily reported that “scores of thousands of men are under constant observation throughout the country.  AG Gregory claimed to have recruited several hundred thousand private citizens keeping an eye on disloyal individuals and making reports of disloyal utterances.  All this sounds quite familiar to those living through the Biden regime.  Truly, “there is nothing new under the sun.”  Ecclesiastes 1:9.

Thousands were indicted under the Espionage Act, and nearly 45 percent were convicted.  Justice Department lawyers delayed appeals, fearing that the Supreme Court would strike down the laws they were applying.  As “disloyalty” prosecutions began to ramp up, it was said that federal prosecutors had the power of “an angel of life and death clothed with the power to walk up and down in his district, saying, ‘This one will I spare, and this one will I smite.’” 

One of those Justice Department prosecutions targeted Charles Schenck, who was accused of mailing socialist pamphlets to recent draftees which compared the draft to involuntary servitude and urging men to express their resistance to the draft.  Schenck’s conviction was affirmed unanimously by the Supreme Court just as the war was ending.  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes fashioned the now-famous phrase, “[t]he most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”  Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47, 52 (1919) (emphasis added).  Today, that one sentence is repeatedly invoked by leftists to demonstrate that the First Amendment is not absolute, and certainly does not protect conservative political voices.  (Interestingly, when leftists invoke that statement, they uniformly omit the word “falsely.”)

In that same 1918 term of court, the Supreme Court upheld a similar conviction for “disloyalty,” reasoning that the defendant’s newspaper articles criticizing U.S. military involvement might be circulated in quarters where a little breath would be enough to kindle a flame.  Frohwerk v. United States, 249 U.S. 204, 209 (1919).  A third case in this trilogy was Debs v. United States, 249 U.S. 211 (1919), where the Court upheld a conviction for a speech inciting a refusal of duty in the military and the recruiting and enlistment service.

It only took until the next term of the Supreme Court for Justice Holmes to begin to reverse his position:  “It is only the present danger of immediate evil or an intent to bring it about that warrants Congress in setting a limit to the expression of opinion where private rights are not concerned.  Congress certainly cannot forbid all effort to change the mind of the country.”  Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919) (emphasis added).  Holmes moved even further away from authoritarianism, dissenting in Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925).

Finally, in Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444, 447-448 (1969), the Court overturned Schenck, explaining:

[T]he constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action….  A statute which fails to draw this distinction impermissibly intrudes upon the freedoms guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments.  [Emphasis added.]

Today, rogue Justice Department prosecutors are again becoming “an angel of life and death clothed with the power to walk up and down in his district, saying, ‘This one will I spare, and this one will I smite.’”  Donald Trump draws an FBI swat team, while Joe Biden’s stolen documents don’t even draw flies.  The Espionage Act needs to be buried in the grave along with Schenck, its judicial progeny.  Americans of all political stripes should demand that the First Amendment again mean what it says — “Congress shall make no law.

When the judiciary met a runaway Justice Department power in 1919, America was the loser.  Rarely do nations get second chances.  Rather than wait for the Courts, The Espionage Act of 1917 should be stricken from the weapons arsenal of federal prosecutors.  

Justice Department Targets Traditional Catholics as Domestic Terrorists – Part VIII

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) represents on its website that it upholds four values:

  • Independence and Impartiality.  We work each day to earn the public’s trust by following the facts and the law wherever they may lead, without prejudice or improper influence.
  • Honesty and Integrity.  Our employees adhere to the highest standards of ethical behavior, mindful that as public servants we must work to earn the trust of, and inspire confidence in, the public we serve.
  • Respect.  Our employees value differences in people and in ideas and treat everyone with fairness, dignity, and compassion.
  • Excellence.  We work every day to provide the highest level of service to the American people and to be a responsible steward of the taxpayers’ dollars.

Let’s examine one recent leaked analysis to evaluate how well the DOJ has been doing thus far in 2023 according to the standards it sets for itself.

An FBI whistleblower revealed that the FBI’s Richmond, Virginia Field Office completed an “intelligence” analysis dated January 23, 2023 that describes:

the increasingly observed interest of racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) in radical-traditionalist Catholic (RTC) ideology almost certainly presents opportunities for threat mitigation through the exploration of new avenues for tripwires and source development.  [Emphasis added.]

The FBI document accused Catholics of “an over-emphasis in white US nationalism.”  The FBI further describes these dangerous Catholics as having rejected “the Second Vatican Council” and finds that a preference for the Catholic Mass in Latin instead of the vernacular is a warning sign.  

The FBI’s conclusion that “Traditionalist Catholics” are tied to “violent extremists” was based in part on the work of the discredited, leftist Southern Poverty Law Center.

Let’s compare these slurs on Traditionalist Catholics to the DOJ’s values:  Does DOJ show “impartiality” without “prejudice?”  Does DOJ inspire the “confidence” of the American People?  Is DOJ treating people with “respect?”  Is citing the discredited SPLC evidence of “excellence?”  With its vitriol against Roman Catholics, DOJ has sunk to new lows by every standard.

While there have always been serious problems at DOJ, during the last Administration, there was a commitment made to religious freedom.  On October 20, 2017, the DOJ issued guidance for all Executive Departments and Agencies interpreting the religious liberty protections in federal law.  That guidance was directed by President Trump’s Executive Order No. 13798.  The prior Justice Department’s guidance sources Religious Liberty to our Creator, giving it the high and lofty position it should hold in our pantheon of rights:

Religious liberty is a foundational principle of enduring importance in America, enshrined in our Constitution and other sources of federal law.  As James Madison explained in his Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, the free exercise of religion “is in its nature an unalienable right” because the duty owed to one’s Creator “is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.”

It only took a little over five years for the Justice Department to move from promising to protect Americans who are exercising their religious freedom, to targeting those same people as “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics.”

Digging deeper into the report, we see the FBI’s politics revealed in its concern that RTCs might have common interests such as opposition to abortion rights, affirmative action, immigration, and “LGBT protections.”  If people of faith oppose the leftist political agenda, they must be violent extremists.

It is not just abortion that has gotten the Church in Biden’s crosshairs.  The memo also cited an article in the far-left magazine, “The Atlantic,” which “slammed Catholic rosary beads for increasingly being associated with right-wing Christians, especially those who are gun owners” as ammunition for its assault on Catholics.

The Biden Administration may have other reasons to target Catholics.  On June 18, 2021, America’s Catholic bishops approved a document instructing Catholic churches to deny Holy Communion to pro-abortion elected officials.  One such elected official, of course, is President Joe Biden, nominally the second Catholic President.  During his 2020 campaign, the St. Anthony Catholic Church in South Carolina denied communion to candidate Biden for the same reason.  But for whatever reasons, the “Catholic” President’s administration seems to have practicing Catholics squarely in its crosshairs.  His Justice Department attorneys recently did their best to jail pro-life Catholic father Mark Houck for peacefully protesting at abortion clinics, discussed in our article last week.

On February 10, 2023, a coalition of 20 state attorneys general wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray to protest.  It complained that the report extolled “opportunities for threat mitigation through the exploration of new avenues for tripwire and source development.”  In plain English, it was a recommendation that the DOJ send FBI spies into Catholic churches in a witch hunt for “traditional Catholics” among apparently more “politically correct” “non-traditional” Catholics.

The letter blasted the DOJ for the “un-American and unconstitutional memorandum,” demanding that Garland and Wray “immediately and unequivocally order agency personnel not to target Americans based on their religious beliefs and practices.” Emphasizing that “anti-Catholic bigotry appears to be festering,” the attorneys general wrote, “[S]pying on Catholics in their churches and cathedrals is an absurd use of federal law-enforcement and counterintelligence resources.” The letter demanded that DOJ reveal to the American public the extent to which they have engaged in infiltrating and collecting intelligence on Traditional Catholics.

New York Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, chair of the U.S. bishops’ religious liberty committee, blistered the memo’s “religious profiling” of Catholics.  “A preference for traditional forms of worship and holding closely to the Church’s teachings on marriage, family, human sexuality, and the dignity of the human person does not equate with extremism,”

Bishop Barry Knestout of the Diocese of Richmond, in perhaps the understatement of the month, stated: “The leaked document should be troubling and offensive to all communities of faith, as well as all Americans.”  Indeed, it should, and it must if the nation is to survive.

DOJ Lawyers Lie Without Consequence – Part IX

Former veteran federal prosecutor and criminal defense attorney Sidney Powell created quite a stir in 2014 when she published her book Licensed to Lie exposing how federal prosecutors routinely lie and abuse their power.  Her book addressed the prosecutions of U.S. Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK), Arthur Anderson, and Merrill Lynch executives, and others.  Americans need to understand that there is real truth in the title, and that the problem continues.

While federal officials, including prosecutors, lie routinely, ordinary Americans dare not lie to the federal government.  In 1948, Congress made it a federal crime, “in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States,” to make “any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation.”  18 U.S. Code § 1001 (emphasis added).  False statements carry up to a five-year prison term.  While that statute could be read to apply to federal prosecutors as well, it should be no surprise that federal prosecutors do not prosecute other federal prosecutors who lie.

In 2016, Texas and other states sued the Obama Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over its handling of “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)” immigration cases.  For months, Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers defending DHS lied to the court and to the plaintiff states, assuring them that the new DACA processing guidelines would not take effect until February 2015.  However, by January 2015, DHS had already processed more than 100,000 aliens under the new guidelines.  After catching DOJ lawyers repeatedly lying, District Court Judge Andrew Hanen was critical, but restrained, in response:

The … Department of Justice … has now admitted making statements that clearly did not match the facts.  It has admitted that the lawyers who made these statements had knowledge of the truth when they made these misstatements…  These misrepresentations were made on multiple occasions starting with the very first hearing this Court held.  This Court would be remiss if it left such unseemly and unprofessional conduct unaddressed.  [Texas v. United States, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 79546, at *9-10.]

If Judge Hanen really had thought lying by DOJ attorneys was a serious matter, surely he would have taken strong action.  But he didn’t.  In fact, Judge Hanen did not report the DOJ lawyers for ethics violations to the bar, or to those at the DOJ who are supposed to monitor lawyer ethics.  Judge Hansen only ordered the lawyers to take ethics classes.  Not surprisingly, the DOJ resisted even this minimal rebuke.

In 2020, DOJ lawyers admitted in emails “Yeah, we lied“ in refusing to disclose exculpatory evidence in a money-laundering prosecution against Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad.  One DOJ attorney suggested hiding the exculpatory evidence.  “I’m wondering if we should wait until tomorrow [to turn it over to the defense] and bury it in some other documents,” the lawyer suggested.  Having witnessed this malfeasance, District Court Judge Allison Nathan verbally castigated the DOJ attorneys.  “The trial team’s failure to promptly investigate the origins of [the key document] and to communicate about discovery with other governmental agencies reflects a systematic disregard of their disclosure obligations,” she stated. “Prosecutors then compounded these missteps through a sustained pattern of refusing to fess up.”  Even though they had already obtained a conviction, federal prosecutors dropped the case rather than being required to retry it in the wake of revelations of prosecutorial misconduct.

Justice Department attorneys rarely receive the severe discipline private attorneys would expect if caught committing similar misconduct.  One review of DOJ lawyers has concluded: 

[M]any federal prosecutors handling cases ranging from drug trafficking to white-collar crime walk away largely unscathed from misconduct charges, even after judges determine and describe in published opinions how they committed serious offenses, such as intentionally hiding evidence and allowing witnesses to lie to juries.  But in their rulings, judges almost always omit the name of the prosecutor. And even if the prosecutor’s alleged misconduct is so grave that the [Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility] ends up investigating, the agency goes to great lengths to conceal anything that could possibly identify them.

For decades, the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has been accused of covering up — or at least failing to address — misconduct by DOJ attorneys.  As far back as 1995, a report by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) found numerous failures in OPR investigations, The GAO report “found several OPR monitored cases with instructions from OPR management to simply “open, count and close.”

Two decades later the problem had not improved.  A December 2014 GAO report concluded:  “DOJ has not implemented its plan to … ensure that discipline for professional misconduct is applied consistently and in a timely manner for all department attorneys.  Aside from the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, “no other DOJ component has similar procedures or mechanisms in place to ensure that discipline for professional misconduct is implemented.”

Doubtless the most infamous case of the DOJ lying to courts is the saga of falsified affidavits submitted by DOJ attorneys to the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Court to obtain permission to spy on President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign staffer Carter Page, despite the DOJ’s knowledge that the affidavits lacked probable cause.  The FISA statute requires that “the Attorney General certif[y] in writing under oath that … the electronic surveillance is solely directed at … the acquisition of the contents of communications transmitted by means of communications used exclusively between or among foreign powers….” 50 U.S. Code § 1802(a).

FISA Court Judge James Boasberg found that the affidavits contained “material misstatements and omissions.” Fellow FISA Court Judge Rosemary Collyer wrote in a scathing order that “[t]he FBI’s handling of the Carter Page applications, as portrayed in the OIG report, was antithetical to the heightened duty of candor” required in ex parte surveillance applications. But the falsified affidavits were also signed off on by then-acting Attorney General Dana Boente and then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.  The corruption at DOJ goes to the highest levels.

Nothing destroys the faith of the American people in their government more quickly than the realization that government officials are not our servants, but our rulers.  All too many DOJ attorneys have shown again and again that they do not uphold the rule of law, but have contempt for the law.  They operate based on the rule: “Perjury for thee, but not for me.”

How DOJ Lawyers Protect the Biden Family – Part X

In October 2022, even the Washington Post reported that federal prosecutors likely had enough evidence to charge President Biden’s son Hunter Biden with both gun and tax charges.  Attorney General Merrick Garland has promised Congress that the U.S. Attorney for Delaware who had been appointed for President Trump had “full authority” to prosecute Hunter.  Yet nearly a half-year later, no charges have been brought.

Just this month, AG Garland admitted that he would need to “authorize” any prosecution of Hunter Biden, but he assured Congress that he would do so if asked.  If AG Garland would need to “authorize” the prosecution of the son of the President who appointed him, and to whom he reports, doesn’t that sound like a conflict of interest?

This is certainly not the first time the Justice Department lawyers have found themselves in a compromising position when asked to investigate the potential criminal actions of a President, a Vice President, or their family members.  A procedure exists to handle such a situation — the appointment of a Special Counsel.  A federal regulation, 28 C.F.R. § 600.1, requires: “The Attorney General, or in cases in which the Attorney General is recused, the Acting Attorney General will appoint a Special Counsel when he or she determines that criminal investigation… is warranted, and [that] investigation or prosecution…would present a conflict of interest for the Department….” (Emphasis added.)

As to the gun charges, Hunter Biden asserted on a federal firearms purchase form (ATF 4473) that he was not currently using illegal drugs, when, in fact, he was doing so, which he seems to have admitted.  By denying use of illegal drugs, Hunter Biden was able to obtain a gun that would have been illegal for him to purchase had he provided true information.  A false answer on that ATF form is the basis for a felony charge.

As to the tax charges, the problem stems from reports that Hunter Biden failed to report income he received from foreign sources on his federal income tax return.

And Hunter is not the only member of the Biden family under federal investigation.  The president’s brother, James Biden, is also the target of a federal investigation.  James Biden is alleged to have made a half-million dollars in loans to himself from the now-defunct Americore Health hospital business, which have not been repaid.

On October 17, 2022, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) sent a letter to AG Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, alleging that FBI whistleblowers had uncovered evidence of “significant, impactful and voluminous evidence with respect to potential criminal conduct by Hunter Biden and James Biden.”  Grassley attached a contract to his letter indicating $5 million was to be paid from the Chinese  government-connected company to Hunter and James Biden for work done while Joe Biden was Vice President.

Despite the seriousness of these charges, and unlike the DOJ’s investigation of President Trump, thus far, the DOJ has flatly refused to appoint a Special Counsel to investigate the Bidens.  On September 16, 2022, Senators John Cornyn (R-TX), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Grassley and 27 others wrote a letter to Garland demanding that Weiss be given special counsel powers.  But other Senators wonder if giving U.S. Attorney Weiss Special Counsel status would solve the problem, as it was Weiss who decided to pause a criminal investigation of Hunter Biden months before the 2020 election.

Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, also called out the DOJ’s special counsel double standard.  He wrote to AG Garland questioning why “you have declined to appoint a special counsel in this matter, despite appointing special counsels in other investigations. Your refusal to appoint a special counsel here is conspicuous in this context.”

As recently as October 12, 2022, when confronted by the fact his son may be indicted, President Biden doubled down, telling CNN:  “I’m proud of my son.”  While that may be a natural, human response, it provides even more reason for AG Garland to appoint a truly independent Special Counsel.

If AG Garland, a U.S. Attorney, and other DOJ lawyers are allowed to stall and allow the statute of limitations on Biden family crimes to run out, there will be little reason for Americans to trust anything that federal prosecutors say, and we can expect more and more juries to simply acquit anyone charged with a crime by the Biden “Justice” Department.

Department of Justice Lawyers Weaponize the Voting Rights Act – Part XI

Serious disputes over the manner in which both the 2020 elections and 2022 elections were conducted continue to this day.  “Liberalized” voting practices that were implemented to allow voting by mail, use of drop boxes, and other devices led to serious questions about the integrity of those federal and state elections.  Some of those election challenges are still being litigated.  One of those challenges was filed by Kari Lake, the 2022 Republican candidate for Governor of Arizona, against Katie Hobbs, the former Arizona Secretary of State, who conveniently established and administered the rules for an election which declared her the victor.

To implement those liberalized voting practices, Democrat lawyers filed more than 200 pre-election lawsuits to undermine election law security practices in order to tilt the election results to Democrats.  The Democrats attacked election laws in state after state, demanding wholesale, judicially-imposed changes to the laws passed by the elected representatives of the people.  (Records show that during the 2020 election cycle, the Democrat Party paid more than $40 million to its favorite election lawfare firm, Perkins Coie.)

What is less well known is that in some cases, these state election laws are being overturned by judges at the request not of Democrat Party-funded lawyers, but U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers funded by taxpayers.

The Voting Rights Act

The DOJ has limited authority to review state election laws under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  The Act contains a wide range of protections for racial minorities, as well as certain other minority groups.  It provides protections against state laws which might disproportionately hinder minority voting, such as literacy tests that once had been used for that purpose.  While Congress intended the Voting Rights Act to protect racial and even what are termed “language minority groups,” it is not surprising the powers entrusted to DOJ lawyers and appointees of the President, could be abused to achieve political objectives.

For example, in July of 2021, the DOJ sent a threatening memo to states warning them not to reverse pandemic-era exceptions to election security laws, despite the original plan that the exceptions be only a temporary COVID measure. 

DOJ Attacks Voting Integrity Laws In Red States

In 2015, the Obama Justice Department sued North Carolina over the state’s decision to shorten the early voting period, and to end same-day voter registration.  Is there a national requirement that states allow same-day voter registration?  Apparently not, as Massachusetts and New York, two heavily Democrat states, do not have same-day registration.  But neither the Obama nor the Biden DOJ has seen fit to sue Massachusetts or New York.

In June 2021, the Biden DOJ sued Georgia over its voter integrity law, arguing that requiring a photo ID to vote is racist and discriminatory.  The DOJ complaint against Georgia was full of references to nooses and racial slurs.  Is there a national requirement that bans states from requiring photo ID’s?  Apparently not, as Minnesota has the requirement, despite having a Democrat governor, legislature, and Secretary of State.  But the DOJ has not sued Minnesota.

On November 4, 2021, the DOJ sued Texas over its recently enacted voter integrity law that required mail-in ballots to contain the voter’s Social Security number for vote integrity purposes.  Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton defiantly tweeted in response:  “Ensuring Texas has safe, secure, and transparent elections is a top priority of mine.  I will see you in court, Biden!#ElectionIntegrity.”

DOJ Attacks Redistricting Plans In Red States

After every national census, states re-examine the districts from which public officials are elected at every level of government.  According to the establishment press, when Democrats adjust those lines, it is called redistricting.  When Republicans adjust those lines, it is described using the pejorative “gerrymandering.” 

It should come as no surprise that the DOJ has sued conservative states over their redistricting plans.  In 2021, the DOJ sued Texas, arguing that because the 2020 redistricting created white majorities in the state’s two new congressional districts, the plan automatically was racist and illegal.  “The Department of Justice’s absurd lawsuit against our state is the Biden Administration’s latest ploy to control Texas voters,” tweeted Paxton.  Meanwhile, the DOJ has turned a blind eye toward extreme gerrymanders to disenfranchise Republican voters in Democrat states such as New York and Maryland.

Blue States Get A Pass

It is certainly not true that redistricting abuses never occur when Democrats are in control.  In March, 2022, New York courts threw out the Democrat legislature’s congressional gerrymandering plan, noting that “the map was ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ illegally enacted with ‘political bias’ in violation of the state constitution.”  Another state court threw out the legislature’s state senate map as well, noting that the redistricting process was “incapable of legislative cure.”  However, the Justice Department appeared unperturbed at a process that tilted the playing field on behalf of Democrats in New York.

Maryland’s Democrat-controlled redistricting is also infamous for gerrymandering.  “In the past, experts have agreed that Maryland has one of the worst cases of gerrymandering in the entire country.  A federal judge once said the current map looked like a ‘broken-winged pterodactyl, lying prostrate across the center of the state.’”

Faith in elections is so low among Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, that fully 55 percent of voters support forensic audits of election results to ensure there was no vote fraud, with only 29 percent opposing such audits. 

It is bad enough when taxpayer-funded judges abuse their power to invalidate state election laws designed to ensure fair elections.  It is even worse when the taxpayer-funded lawyers are the ones who file the suits to get those judges to require election laws which undermine election integrity.

DOJ Fingerprints on Manhattan DA Investigation of Trump – Part XII

On March 18, 2023, former President Trump posted on his social media website that based on leaks from the office of the Manhattan District Attorney, he expected to be arrested the following Tuesday.  Every day since, there have been an endless number of reports out of that District Attorney’s office that an indictment should be forthcoming, with commentators discussing the legal and political issues.  The coverage truly has been “wall-to-wall.”  What should Americans think of this non-stop coverage?  We offer two thoughts.

First, when a story is covered incessantly by the press, Americans should first consider whether this is an artificial effort to divert the public’s attention from some other matter — often government corruption.  The list of topics that the government does not want the People to focus on about is long.  At the moment, it certainly includes whether government policies are causing the collapse of the banking system to ease the way to the adoption of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) which would give total control over our lives to the federal government.  And the government certainly suppressed the revelations by the House Oversight Committee into Communist China-connected sources paying billions to the Biden Family. 

Beyond that, there is a second question we should ask — did some prior federal government action contribute to the present crisis?  All the stories about the anticipated Trump indictment focus on the leftist Manhattan District Attorney and the Manhattan grand jury.  There is almost no press attention paid to how the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) teed up the criminal case for the Manhattan DA.

But what exactly is the crime Trump could be indicted for?  According to the rumors, the allegations relate to so-called “hush money” payments made in 2016 by the Trump organization relating to Stormy Daniels.  It is unclear precisely what state crimes Trump might be indicted for, but they relate to a federal case previously brought against Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen.  Daniels sold the exclusive rights to her salacious story of an affair — which Donald Trump denies — to the National Enquirer.  In turn, Cohen purchased the story from the National Enquirer for the Trump Organization to prevent it from being published and becoming a publicity distraction.

In 2018, Cohen plead guilty to a federal campaign finance law violation,.  At the time, Cohen was facing dozens of federal criminal charges unrelated to Trump, such as tax evasion and bank loan fraud.  However, DOJ lawyers allowed Cohen to plead guilty to violating federal election law.  The claim was that Cohen had facilitated a “corporate contribution” to be made in order to “prevent [the story] from influencing the election.”  The indictment referred to an unidentified person who the media says was Trump, making him guilty by association.  But since Trump was not charged, he never had a chance to defend himself.  Thus, the DOJ lawyers wrapped salacious charges around Trump’s neck before the 2020 election with no way for him to absolve himself.

There’s one small problem — Cohen pled guilty to something that was not a crime.  It can’t be illegal to make the payments personally if the payments could not have been made by the campaign.  If the payment to Daniels had been made by the Trump campaign, it would have violated the law as payments made for a “personal use.

Second, and significantly, federal courts have interpreted the statutory terms “contribution” and “expenditure” and “coordinated expenditures” very narrowly to avoid criminalizing activities which are exercises of First Amendment protected rights.  Paying someone not to publish a story is not even close to being the same as making a corporate expenditure to disseminate express advocacy to support or oppose a candidate.

DOJ lawyers attempted a similar strategy only once before when Senator John Edwards had helped support his mistress to keep his affair quiet and prevent it from hurting his political aspirations.  He was charged with four campaign finance violations, acquitted on one charge, and the other charges were later dropped.  Thus, the DOJ legal theory has never previously been successfully used during FECA’s 50-plus years in existence, and certainly has not been subjected to judicial scrutiny.

But by incentivizing Cohen to “roll over” (i.e., plead guilty) to the campaign finance charge in exchange for dropping other charges, it allowed the judge to look the other way, never being required to write an opinion concluding that Trump’s purchase of the Daniels’ story was prohibited by the Federal Election Campaign Act.

If that same legal theory were applied across the political spectrum, Twitter’s former head of “Trust & Safety,” Yoel Roth, and others at Twitter would be facing federal criminal charges for using corporate resources when it suppressed the circulation of legitimate news stories such as the Hunter Biden laptop story in October 2020.  But in the United States, DOJ lawyers have unbridled discretion who to prosecute and who to let off.  Regardless of their high-sounding rhetoric, “by their deeds you may know them.”  Matthew 7:16.

So it may seem that the charges against Trump are being investigated by the Manhattan DA, but those charges were based on shameless acts by DOJ lawyers before the 2020 election, and are now being recycled to thwart another presidential run by Trump in 2024.

DOJ Informant Found in January 6 Defense Team – Part XIII

Just when we thought the persecution of January 6 defendants by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) couldn’t get any worse — it did.

Jen Loh

Exactly one day before she was to testify as a defense witness for defendant Zachary Rehl, DOJ lawyers disclosed to Rehl’s attorneys that their defense witness was actually an FBI informant.  The New York Times identified that informant as Jen Loh, a Texas-based activist who once ran “Latinos for Trump.”  (Extending the deception further, Loh apparently is not this informant’s real name.)

Loh had been an FBI informant since April 2021, well before Rehl’s trial even began.  The worst aspect of the story is not just that Loh had agreed to be a defense witness.  Loh had embedded herself into the defense team.  She had spent the past year “talking with the members of the [Proud Boys] group and their defense counsel about the case and suggesting possible witnesses and attorneys who could help. All the while, [she] was also a paid FBI informant.”

The DOJ had known since at least December that Rehl’s defense team trusted Loh so much it

included her in meetings with the lawyers formulating defense strategy.  Compounding that breach of law and ethics, DOJ lawyers failed to reveal the information to defense attorneys for another three months.

And Loh did not confine her dirty work to the Rehl case.  Loh was “involved with multiple defendants in the case [and] their lawyers as well.”  The DOJ spy went so far as to attend prayer meetings with the political prisoners’ families. Imagine the kind of person who would do that?  

DOJ lawyers deny they ever asked her to spy, but at this point it certainly looks like Loh’s contacts with the defendants and their attorneys compromised their constitutional rights — including attorney-client confidentiality and the Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

Access to Privileged Emails

Apparently the DOJ had many ways of spying on the January 6 defendants.  Nicole Miller, a lead FBI investigator assigned to Rehl’s case, discussed with another investigator “the content of emails exchanged between Zachary Rehl … and his former lawyer.”  Miller texted the other investigator:  “I need to find other emails, but this one email definitely indicates that they want to go to trial.”  In another thread, another agent messaged Miller, “Found an email thread with Rehl and his attorney….The attorney raised some interesting points.”  Not explained is how the investigator gained access to confidential and privileged attorney-client communications.  “Another agent told Miller an FBI supervisor instructed the unidentified agent to destroy ‘338 items of evidence.’  To which Miller reacted, ‘OMG INSANE.’”  

Rehl’s defense lawyers have now asserted in court filings that they believe the government “doctored internal reports, destroyed evidence, and tipped off prosecutors about defense strategy on the government’s highest-profile January 6 case.” 

The DOJ has bitterly fought defense efforts to admit evidence of the spying by agents of the FBI and DOJ on legally protected, confidential defense communications.  Even when evidence has been submitted, it has been in the form of vast “document dumps” of mostly irrelevant information, with no specificity as to what information the government actually intends to use as evidence.  Defense attorneys, often overworked and understaffed public defenders, have been forced to file multiple motions asking the court to require the government even to identify the information it intends to use as evidence.

District Court Judge

If there had been even a hint that a defense attorney sent a spy into a U.S. Attorney’s office to learn prosecution strategy, or had intercepted privileged emails, almost any federal district judge would have had the defense attorney taken out of the courtroom in chains.  Is that what happened here?  Not exactly.  

Reporter Julie Kelly authored the book, January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right.  Ms. Kelly has covered this story extensively.  She reported that the team led by DOJ attorney Matthew Graves not only misled, but “continues to mislead court and defendants about actual number of FBI informants.”  But the judge in the case, District Judge Timothy Kelly, is a former prosecutor, who Julie Kelly reported “folded to nearly every government demand.  He accepted at face value the explanation that the destroyed evidence pertained to an old criminal case and was not relevant to the Proud Boys’ trial.  He also refused to take up arguments about violations of the defendants’ Sixth Amendment rights….”  

Defense attorneys have tried to fight back, despite the slanted playing field.  “The principle is well established that surreptitious invasions by the government into meetings between attorneys and their clients or witnesses are forbidden, as is any attempt to stealthily uncover the defense’s trial strategy,” said Rehl defense attorney Carmen Hernandez.

Defense counsel Hernandez demanded that the DOJ immediately release the names of any more informants still on assignment within the defense team.  She noted that the DOJ’s conduct raises “serious and substantiated allegations of governmental misconduct” involving “surreptitious invasion and interference of the defense team by the government.”  She filed a motion to dismiss charges, arguing that the DOJ’s misconduct is “a clear and flagrant Sixth Amendment violation”that “screams for a dismissal.”  

As this article is being finalized, Judge Kelly refused to allow the defense to raise Loh’s history as a FBI informant in court, so the defense decided not to call her as a witness.  The final story about what the DOJ did or did not do here is still to be revealed, but at the moment it looks bad.  

It is no longer fashionable to quote Scripture in court, but judges should read Ecclesiastes 8:11:  “Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil.”  If federal judges allow DOJ lawyers to abuse the justice system, the innocent will go to prison and we all will suffer the consequences as our “justice” system collapses before our eyes.

DOJ Refuses to Protect Pro-Life Justice – Part XIV

The Declaration of Independence, our nation’s charter, declares that the national government was formed to secure certain rights — including the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  Do these ancient values still constitute our shared values?  Sadly, these values are contested at every turn by the Left.

Probably what the Left hates most about these values is that the Declaration makes clear that we are “endowed” with those rights by “our Creator” — not by our government.  If these rights come from the Creator, they are beyond the authority of the government to take away.

  • Today, the Left hates “liberty” as it moves us to a totalitarian society where, as T.H. White described it:  “Everything not forbidden is compulsory.”

  • The Left’s vision of the “pursuit of happiness” is reflected in World Economic Forum Chairman Klaus Schwab’s reported prediction of the Great Reset:  “In 10 years, they will own nothing — and be happy with it.”

  • And, the Left’s view of “life” is reflected in the Women’s Health Protection Act which would protect abortion in every state up to the moment of birth (with the sanction of a doctor) — a bill that passed the House, but failed in the Senate last year by a razor-thin margin of 51-49.

With the new Republican House majority, the death cult of abortion pins its hopes not on Congress but on the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), which has turned into the de facto legal arm of Planned Parenthood.  The Supreme Court’s decision last year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was intended to return the issue of abortion to the states, but the DOJ nonetheless continues to insist on imposing the federal government’s will on pro-life states.  In case after case, DOJ’s taxpayer-funded litigators have declared war on pro-life laws being enacted in conservative states that seek to protect innocent life. 

DOJ Sues Texas Over Its “Heartbeat Bill”

In 2021, DOJ lawyers sued to block Texas’ “heartbeat bill” which prohibited abortions once an unborn baby has a detectable heartbeat.  Stunningly, the DOJ asked the court to recognize the right of the United States government to sue any state over any state law that the administration in power believes to be unconstitutional — even if no other party would have standing to challenge the state law.  When the suit reached the Supreme Court, the Court dismissed it on an 8-1 vote.  (United States v. Texas, 142 S. Ct. 522 (2021)).  In filing suit (before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision), Attorney General Merrick Garland announced:  “The Act is clearly unconstitutional under longstanding Supreme Court precedent … in the words of Planned Parenthood v. Casey….”

The implications of the DOJ’s suit were clear:  if a state passes a law out of line with the administration’s leftwing policy preferences, the federal government will attack the law in court.  If DOJ were to prevail in such lawsuits, it would “open the door wide to DOJ’s bringing all sorts of individual-rights constitutional claims against whatever state laws offend the current Administration.”

DOJ Sues Idaho Over its Pro-Life Bill

In August 2022, Merrick Garland announced that the DOJ had filed suit against Idaho over its pro-life law.  The Idaho law allows abortions to save the mother’s life or in cases of rape or incest.  That is not enough abortion for DOJ attorneys.  “On the day Roe and Casey were overturned, we promised that the Justice Department would work tirelessly to protect and advance [abortion],” Garland announced.  

Idaho’s Gov. Brad Little responded, “Our nation’s highest court returned the issue of abortion to the states to regulate — end of story.  The U.S. Justice Department’s interference with Idaho’s pro-life law is another example of Biden overreaching yet again while he continues to ignore…crushing inflation and the open border with Mexico.” 

The Idaho Supreme Court upheld the law’s constitutionality in January 2023, noting that “the relevant history and traditions of Idaho show abortion was viewed as an immoral act and treated as a crime.”  The Justice Department now is proceeding in federal court against the state.

DOJ Threatens to Sue Other States That Pass Pro-Life Legislation

In January 2023, the Justice Department announced that it is prepared to attack other state laws that attempt to preserve unborn life.  “We’ve obviously been very active in monitoring what’s happening in the states and locally, and given that most state legislatures now are coming back into session, we’ll be continuing to do so and looking at any laws that may get passed that infringe on federal protections,” said former ACLU lawyer and now Associate Attorney General, Vanita Gupta, who leads the DOJ’s “reproductive rights task force.” 

The battle for the values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence is being waged everywhere, and DOJ lawyers are on the wrong side of every battle.  

Where is the resistance to the Leftists in charge of the DOJ? In January 2023, House Republicans assumed total control of the purse strings of the federal government — which gives them the power to defund any component of the Executive Branch that they choose.  They must use that power.  They must do more than hold hearings, give floor speeches, and write letters to people like Merrick Garland who could care less what they think.  How about cutting the budget of the DOJ by 50 percent?  The nation would not just survive — it would prosper.  And, as a bonus if that were to happen, the lawless lawyers employed at the DOJ would be required to find an honorable way to make a living — for a change. 

DOJ Wages War On Pro-Life State Laws – Part XV

This is the fifteen entry in our expanded IN FOCUS section addressing corruption in the U.S. Department of Justice and the self-destruction of the FBI. Readers will find the compilation of the complete series of articles at Unequal Justice Under Law.

The Biden Department of Justice (DOJ) has had time to identify and investigate thousands of January 6 Capitol trespassers or visitors — and prosecute 1,000 of them so far, found time to investigate mothers in Loudoun County, Virginia, and even made time to go after a pro-life dad in Pennsylvania who dared to protest at an abortion clinic.  But DOJ has had no interest whatsoever in enforcing a federal law to protect the lives of conservative Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.

On May 2, 2022, Politico published an article entitled “Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows.”  That article was based on a leak of the draft Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org., 142 S. Ct. 2228 (2022), which 53 days later would be finalized and issued, overturning Roe v. Wade. 

In response, the Left exploded in rage against Justice Alito who was identified as the opinion’s author, as well as against the justices who were believed to have joined him (Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett).  As usual, no one could know how Chief Justice Roberts would vote, but it was a certainty that the Democrat-appointees (Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan) would dissent.  (Roberts eventually concurred in the Court’s judgment upholding the Mississippi law which banned most abortions after 15 weeks, but refused to join Justice Alito’s opinion overturning both Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.)

Justice Samuel Alito later described the justices as “targets for assassination” as leftwing activists apparently believed they could stop the release of the Dobbs decision by killing one or more conservative justices.  A leftist activist from California, Nicholas Roske, traveled to Washington armed with a pistol, ammunition, and a knife, and was arrested outside the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh.  On social media, Roske stated, “I could get at least one, which would change the votes for decades to come, and I am shooting for 3.”  (Many press outlets refused to report that Roske was not just an abortion enthusiast, but “frequently portrayed himself online as a transgender woman named Sophie….” and as an “Mtf” meaning male-to-female.)

Roske was not the only threat.  “U.S. Supreme Court Police … reported a ‘significant increase in violent threats’ that include social media posts directed at sitting justices and the Supreme Court building.”  Social media posts suggested “burning down or storming the U.S. Supreme Court and murdering justices and their clerks.”  Protests occurred daily at the homes of the pro-life justices.

In response, the Biden Justice department did little to protect the pro-life justices away from the Supreme Court, even though it is a violation of federal law to attempt to picket or parade in an effort to intimidate a judge at the judge’s home:

Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty, pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer…. shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.  [18 U.S.C. § 1507 (emphasis added).] 

If the protests had occurred outside the homes of pro-abortion Justices Breyer, Kagan, or Sotomayor, how would DOJ have reacted?  We don’t know, but the DOJ couldn’t be bothered to take action to protect the pro-life justices.  If the refusal to enforce the law had been based on a view the law was overbroad and likely unconstitutional — a position taken by Professor Jonathan Turley — that would be one thing.  But no such reason was given.

Attorney General Merrick Garland first “blamed the U.S. Marshals … for not making any arrests during his sworn testimony before Congress,” but last month Alabama Senator Katie Britt broke the news that DOJ whistleblowers revealed that the DOJ had “discouraged the U.S. Marshals Service from arresting protesters illegally demonstrating at the homes of the Supreme Court justices.”  Shockingly, the DOJ warned federal marshals that “it would be ‘counterproductive’ for the marshals to make arrests on cases that the DOJ ‘will not charge and prosecute.’”  In other words, Garland not only refused to enforce the law, but lied to Congress when he blamed the Marshals Service.

As usual, the response of Republicans was to write letters to Biden appointees who either do not read those letters, or do not care what they read.

On May 11, 2022, a group of 50 House Republicans led by Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY) wrote a scathing letter to AG Garland, expressing their “profound concern and deep dismay as the rule of law in the United States is completely eroded under [Garland’s] leadership.”  The representatives decried the DOJ’s “failure to act [as] a shameless and implicit endorsement of mob rule in America.”  Also on May 11, 2022, governors Larry Hogan of Maryland and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia sent a letter to Garland asking the DOJ to “provide appropriate resources to safeguard the Justices and enforce the law as it is written.” 

On June 23, 2022, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) wrote a letter “demanding U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland turn over documents that could explain why the Department of Justice has repeatedly refused to prosecute any threats against Republican-nominated Supreme Court justices.”

Last month, Senator Britt reported that as of March 28, 2023 “not a single person has been prosecuted for illegally harassing Supreme Court justices outside of their homes.  The reason is crystal clear: the Department of Justice has willfully chosen not to enforce federal law.”

When the Dobbs decision was finally released on June 24, 2022, it was clear that the threats had not worked and the protests began to die down.  However, no one can know what will be the long-term effects of these protests.  With the Garland precedent of non-enforcement of laws protecting justices established, one wonders if conservative justices will respond by becoming more timid in their decision making, fearing retaliation against their family members.

It is also considered curious that Chief Justice Roberts refused to ask for the help of any federal law enforcement agency to investigate the leak, but rather gave the job to the Marshal of the Supreme Court, who reports to him directly.  The Marshal proceeded to engage the firm of former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, widely regarded a Deep State operative based on his role in writing the PATRIOT Act.  On January 19, 2023, the Court issued a Statement “Concerning the Leak Investigation,” explaining that the investigation turned up nothing – and it was not possible to know who “disclosed the document or how the draft opinion ended up with Politico.”

In the wake of the release of evidence of the DOJ’s telling U.S. Marshals to stand down, and AG Garland’s lying to Congress about it, a few have called for Garland’s impeachment.  But it appears that there is no will among House Republicans to impeach Garland, or to impeach Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas who has let the border leak like a sieve, or impeach President Biden who by now could be impeached on a half-dozen different bases.  Sending strongly worded letters will not restrain the Deep State.  The House Republicans control the purse strings of government, and can defund any agency or program they want, but so far have refused to do even that.  Increasingly Americans are viewing House Republicans as inept at best, or possibly part of the problem.

Merrick Garland’s Continuing Leftist Jihad – Part XVI

This is the sixteenth entry in our expanded IN FOCUS section addressing corruption in the U.S. Department of Justice and the self-destruction of the FBI. Readers will find the compilation of the complete series of articles at Unequal Justice Under Law.

Merrick Garland’s record as Attorney General of the United States has been that of a radical leftist who has politicized and weaponized the Justice Department to a degree that undermines any notion of “equal justice under law.”  Repeatedly, Garland has demonstrated contempt for the Constitutional rights of Americans.  He is the Attorney General who has directed the FBI to investigate parents of school children for disagreeing with government school policies, placed agents in Catholic churches, refused to examine election fraud, ruthlessly prosecuted those near the Capitol on January 6, refused to investigate Hunter Biden’s laptop, pushed for abortion on demand up to birth, worked with social media to censor conservatives, raided the home of former President Trump, allowed the ATF to abuse Second Amendment rights of Americans, and the list goes on.  (These and other abuses have been detailed in earlier articles in this series.)

Other than strongly worded letters, where is the Republican opposition?  Part of the problem is that on March 10, 2021, Garland was confirmed by the Senate for Attorney General on a 70-30 vote.  Amazingly, 20 Senate Republicans supported Garland’s confirmation:  Blunt (MO), Burr (NC), Capito (WV), Cassiday (LA), Collins (ME), Cornyn (TX), Ernst (IA), Graham (SC), Grassley (IA), Inhofe (OK), Johnson (WI), Lankford (OK), McConnell (KY), Moran (KA), Murkowski (AK), Portman (OH), Romney (UT), Rounds (SD), Thune (SD), and Tillis (NC).  

When these 20 Republican Senators portray themselves as constitutional conservatives, they should be reminded that they voted to confirm the most lawless, Leftist Attorney General in history. And if they didn’t know who he really was, they should have known.  Garland’s record had been totally exposed when President Obama thrust him on the national stage five years earlier.

On February 13, 2016, the nation’s most distinguished conservative lawyer and jurist, Antonin Scalia, was found dead in bed while visiting the ranch of a Texas millionaire in a remote location in Texas.  It is not a stretch to say he was the most powerful conservative in America at the time of his death.  Justice Scalia had no medical conditions and no terminal illness, and there was no reason to believe he would suffer a sudden death.  Nevertheless, there was no autopsy causing even CNN to write about his “unexamined death.”  The Atlantic, the leading mouthpiece of the nation’s ruling elites, was quick to label any effort to learn his cause of death a “conspiracy theory,” even though his removal from the Court could be expected to tip its balance against conservatives on scores of issues, such as abortion, gun control, federalism, and homosexual rights.  

In one sense, no one could replace Justice Scalia.  Making it worse was that the President of the United States at that time was no friend of conservatives.  President Obama would certainly not nominate another Scalia or Thomas, but if he nominated another Breyer or Ginsburg, it would radically re-shape the Court.  Who would President Obama nominate?  

President Barack Obama’s selection of D.C. Circuit Court Judge Merrick Garland was greeted by a wave of plaudits from the mainstream media choosing a “moderate.”  The Washington Post hailed Garland’s “instinct for the middle” and “centrist reputation.”  The Los Angeles Times called him “the most moderate Supreme Court nominee anyone could expect from a Democratic president…with a cautious, centrist record.”  USA Today “reported,” that “Garland appears to be a safe (that is to say, centrist) choice.”  

To be sure, the establishment media routinely characterizes committed leftists as “moderates,” and described all the recent far-left Democrat Supreme Court nominees in the same glowing language.  For example, the New York Times lauded Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s “resolutely centrist judicial style,” and Stephen Breyer as “a judge of moderate leanings.”  The Washington Post said of Sonia Sotomayor, “her record is clearly that of a moderate,” and the New York Times called Elena Kagan a “pragmatic centrist.”  So, the effort of trying to “sell” Garland as a “moderate” was no surprise.  

veryone but 20 Senate Republicans saw through the “con-job” to portray Garland as a moderate.  Juanita Duggan of the National Federation of Independent Business wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “This is the first time in the NFIB’s 73-year history that we will weigh in on a Supreme Court nominee…. In 16 major labor decisions of Judge Garland’s that we examined, he ruled 16-0 in favor of the [government].”

As to the First Amendment, Politico varied from the standard liberal media script enough to admit, “Invoking First Amendment rights has become a common vehicle for conservatives to challenge agency regulations, but Garland has shown little receptivity to that argument.”  Garland never viewed the Constitution as imposing a limitation on executive branch power.

As to the Second Amendment, in 2000, Garland sided with Leftist Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno, allowing the DOJ to maintain possession of gun purchase records for six months, despite clear federal law prohibiting maintenance of a gun registry.  Garland, while on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, voted in favor of the District of Columbia’s near-total handgun ban later struck down by the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008). 

A Wall Street Journal editorial noted that “Judge Garland’s 19-year tenure on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals demonstrates a reliable vote for progressive causes.”  Given that Obama trusted Garland enough to nominate him to the Supreme Court, his leftwing extremism should come as no surprise.  One looks in vain for “moderates” among Obama nominations.  

Garland had clerked for the far-left Justice William Brennan, who he later cited as a primary influence on his philosophy along with the infamous “living Constitution” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.  His name repeatedly pops up in the administrations of far-left Democrats.  He served in the Justice Department and was nominated to the D.C. Circuit by President Clinton.  One looks in vain for any evidence of “moderation” in Garland’s history.  Were the Senate Republicans not paying attention?  

In his confirmation hearings for Attorney General, Garland refused to say whether illegal alien entry into the United States should continue to be a crime.  Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton noted that “when he did answer questions, he sounded more like a liberal ideologue who would embrace the radical agenda of the Democratic party’s far left base.”  Also during those hearings, Garland argued that Black Lives Matter attacks on a federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon might not count as domestic terrorism because they happened at night when the courts were closed.  Yet 20 Republican Senators still voted to confirm Garland as Attorney General.  

As Elle Purnell wrote in The Federalist, “[t]he 20 Republican Senators who voted to confirm Merrick Garland owe America an apology.”  An apology would be nice, but action would be better.  Now that we have a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, with the power of the purse, House Republicans actually could and must act to defund the agencies and programs that Garland has politicized.  Nothing less will do.

 

Check back for future articles in this series.

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