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Copyright © 2025 MEDIADC, All rights reserved.Washington Examiner | A MediaDC Publication 1152 15th Street NW Suite 200 | Washington, DC 20005 |
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Copyright © 2025 MEDIADC, All rights reserved.Washington Examiner | A MediaDC Publication 1152 15th Street NW Suite 200 | Washington, DC 20005 |
JANUARY 9, 2025
JOE BIDEN’S ENDURING DECEPTIONS.
As far as the press are concerned, Joe Biden has been the least accessible president in memory. There’s a reason for that. It’s been clear for a long time that the 82-year-old Biden is not mentally and physically up to the job. After it became politically safe for Democratic-supporting media outlets to report his infirmities — that was after his disastrous June 27, 2024, debate performance against President-elect Donald Trump — we learned that Biden’s staff went to great lengths to keep him away from the press. For whatever reason, many reporters happily steered clear of questioning the president’s condition.
An outgoing president often conducts final interviews with media outlets. Biden chose to do just one, with USA Today’s Susan Page. And three embarrassing blunders — or were they deceptions, or self-deceptions? — show why Biden’s aides have kept him away from interviews for so long.
First was Biden’s insistence that inflation was raging at 9% when he took office, when, in fact, inflation was a quite low 1.4% in January 2021. Biden first made the claim last May, when he was still in the campaign against Trump, telling CNN, “No president has had the run we’ve had in terms of creating jobs and bringing down inflation. It was 9% when I came to office. Nine percent.” Even though a bunch of media fact-checkers pointed out the error, Biden repeated it a week later.
Now, in the USA Today interview, Biden has done it again, although in somewhat garbled form. He was asked whether “you think you paid too little attention early on to the warning about inflation with the American Rescue Plan,” the giant $1.9 trillion stimulus he signed into law on March 11, 2021, “or failed to recognize soon enough how much this was affecting so many Americans’ lives?”
“I knew how much inflation was affecting their lives, but none of this had passed when inflation was at 9%,” Biden answered. It is totally unclear what he meant by that. Inflation, low when he took office, did not hit its peak, 9.1%, until July 2022, when Biden had been in office a year and a half. Biden then went on to brag that his policies did not result in a recession, as many had predicted. “The fact is that we had a soft landing, no recession, and the interest rate was 9% when we came into office in the beginning. It was down to 2.34% now.”
In the context of his entire statement, it appears that by “interest rate,” Biden meant “inflation rate.” So he seems to have again claimed that it was 9% when he took office. Perhaps Biden actually believes this, which could suggest that he does not have a firm grasp of what took place with inflation during his presidency.
The second blunder concerned Biden’s son, Hunter, who has pleaded guilty to tax charges, among other things. In the USA Today interview, Biden defended his decision to pardon his son, even after promising earlier that he would never do such a thing. Biden told Page that he changed his mind about pardoning Hunter because “I found out two factors. No. 1, that he had paid all his taxes. He paid them late. … He paid all his taxes. He paid the back taxes. He was late.”
The problem with that is that Hunter Biden did not pay his back taxes — a wealthy Hollywood lawyer and Joe Biden supporter paid his back taxes. Kevin Morris, sometimes referred to as Hunter Biden’s “sugar brother,” has acknowledged loaning him $6.5 million, millions of which went to paying his back taxes and penalties. As of the most recent reports, Hunter Biden has not repaid Morris.
The third blunder was Biden’s belief that he would have won reelection had he remained on the presidential ballot last year. “Do you believe you could have won in November?” Page asked. “It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think yes, based on the polling,” Biden answered.
Election observers of all stripes immediately flipped out. “I categorize Biden’s statement that he could have beaten Trump as flat-out bonkers,” CNN’s Harry Enten posted. “Biden was well behind Trump when he dropped out. Biden never led in all of 2024. And no incumbent president who was anywhere near as unpopular as Biden has ever won.”
It’s hard to argue with that. And it is safe to say that there was no chance in the world that Biden would defeat Trump had he stayed in the race. But the president can believe what he wants to believe, and at this point, there appears to be no convincing him otherwise.
Byron York’s Daily Memo: Now we know how many secret sources the FBI had on Jan. 6, but what did they do?
December 13, 2024
NOW WE KNOW HOW MANY SECRET SOURCES THE FBI HAD ON JAN. 6, BUT WHAT DID THEY DO? It took years, but now we know the number of secret informants the FBI had in Washington during the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021. What we don’t know is what they did.
In a long-awaited report, Michael Horowitz, the inspector general of the Justice Department, revealed that 26 confidential human sources, or CHSs, “were in Washington, D.C., on January 6 in connection with the events of January 6.” Of that number, 17 went into the Capitol or into the restricted area around the Capitol. Of them, four went inside the Capitol, while 13 were on the restricted grounds. Beyond that number, there were nine CHSs who did not enter the Capitol or the restricted area. We don’t know where they were.
The FBI told Horowitz that most of the CHSs came to Washington on their own and not at the orders of or request of the FBI. But several of them, 13 in all, informed their FBI handlers that they were traveling to Washington. And three of the CHSs had, in fact, been assigned by FBI field offices to go to Washington. Of that group, one entered the Capitol, while the other two entered the restricted area. The report says that none of them were authorized by the FBI to enter those areas. Of the 23 other CHSs who were not assigned to go to Washington and instead came on their own initiative, three entered the Capitol, and 11 entered the restricted area.
None of the CHSs, including the total of four who went inside the Capitol and the 13 who entered the restricted area, has been prosecuted, the inspector general said.
The report goes through some of the CHSs’ interactions with various FBI field offices around the country. (The FBI has 55 field offices nationwide.) None of the CHSs were identified in the report, but some clearly had close connections inside two groups, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, that have been extensively prosecuted for their activities in the Capitol riot. Many of those CHSs did not travel to Washington for Jan. 6 but instead told their FBI handlers what they knew of the groups’ leaders’ plans. Other CHSs had access to online chats and communications in what the FBI calls “the RMVE and AGAAVE movements.” (RMVE refers to Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism, and AGAAVE refers to Anti-Government or Anti-Authority Violent Extremism.)
It should be noted that confidential human sources are not employees of the FBI. As for actual FBI agents, the report said, “The FBI did not have any undercover employees at the Ellipse, on the National Mall, or at the Capitol on January 6.”
On many occasions, the report states that this or that CHS, whether in Washington on FBI directions or not, “was not authorized to enter the Capitol or a restricted area, or to otherwise break the law on January 6, 2021.” There is a tone of defensive repetition throughout the report: The FBI wants you to know, over and over and over, that it didn’t authorize anyone to do anything bad.
What they don’t say is what the FBI confidential sources actually did, authorized or not. On a few occasions, the report gives the reader a bare-bones sketch of a confidential source’s activities but not enough information to draw any conclusions. For example, a source referred to as “Field Office 4 CHS” merits an entire subsection of the report. He is described as “well placed” and “with excellent access” in the RMVE and AGAAVE world. The source was apparently close to someone who was close to Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys. The source told the FBI field office that he was traveling to Washington for Jan. 6 — on his own, not at the FBI’s request.
The report says the Field Office 4 CHS “was not authorized to enter the Capitol or a restricted area, or to otherwise break the law on January 6, nor was the CHS directed by the FBI to encourage others to commit illegal acts on January 6.” So what did Field Office 4 CHS do? That is a little less clear.
After the rioting started, the CHS tried to contact his FBI handler four times, according to the report, which does not say whether any of those attempts were successful. And then, from the report: “Evidence we reviewed showed that Field Office 4 CHS entered the Capitol. The inspector general reviewed records indicating that, after January 6, Field Office 4 provided information from this CHS, including cellphone video from the Capitol, to the Washington Field Office. After reviewing this information, the Washington Field Office asked Field Office 4 to task the CHS with returning to DC for the inauguration. The inspector general reviewed additional records indicating that the CHS was reimbursed for the CHS’s travel on January 6 and for the inauguration, even though the CHS was only tasked with attending the inauguration and not the electoral certification on January 6.”
So, whatever Field Office 4 CHS did, the FBI was really happy with it. The bureau asked that the CHS return to Washington for the Jan. 20 inauguration and paid for both his trips, Jan. 6 and Jan. 20. The source apparently gave the FBI some cellphone video, but beyond that, we don’t know what Field Office 4 CHS did inside or outside the Capitol.
That was the most detailed account of any CHS’s activities in the report. The FBI was careful to say it never authorized Field Office 4 CHS to do anything illegal, but it never says whether the CHS actually did anything illegal. And that is the problem with the new report. Beyond the numbers — 26 CHSs in Washington for the events of Jan. 6, 17 of whom entered the Capitol or the restricted area — there’s just not much there.
We do know that none of them were prosecuted, but we don’t know what that means. The report quoted the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, which makes prosecution decisions, saying that it “generally has not charged those individuals whose only crime on January 6, 2021 was to enter the restricted grounds surrounding the Capitol, which has resulted in the office declining to charge hundreds of individuals; and we have treated the CHSs consistent with that approach.” OK, so what about the four who entered the Capitol? We don’t know.
I asked William Shipley, a former federal prosecutor who has defended more than 50 Jan. 6 defendants and who posts on X under the name @Shipwreckedcrew. “It is correct in my experience that the DOJ is not charging people who were inside the restricted area but remained outside the Capitol,” he responded via email. “There were tens of thousands of people in the crowd but only 1,500 have been charged. With a handful of exceptions, those who have been charged either went inside, or they fought with the police outside. The vast majority of the crowd remained outside and watched the spectacle unfold in real time. If they didn’t do anything else — even if they were inside the perimeter — they have not been charged.”
That does not, of course, cover the four CHSs, including the highly popular Field Office 4 CHS, who went inside the Capitol. After all, the Justice Department, which has been hyperaggressive in pursuing Jan. 6 participants, knows who they are and knows they went inside the Capitol. Shipley speculates that the FBI might have made a “policy call” to give the CHSs a break on the grounds that the sources might have mistakenly believed their FBI handlers would have wanted them to go inside and check things out. Or maybe the bureau thought that prosecuting CHSs would make it harder to recruit new CHSs in the future. Or maybe the FBI did not want a messy prosecution that would inevitably reveal a lot about the FBI’s activities.
Whatever the case, it still means the FBI, which stonewalled Republicans in Congress on all sorts of issues during the first Trump administration, is being far less than transparent about what some of its secret informants did on Jan. 6. We know enough, for example, to know that the bureau was very happy with the work of Field Office 4 CHS, but we don’t know things like: How did he get into the Capitol? How long was he there? Who was he with? What did he do?
There are other things we don’t know as well. The report covers the FBI, which is under the purview of the Justice Department inspector general. But it does not cover the activities of the Capitol Police or the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, which are not part of the Justice Department. Did they have confidential sources or undercover agents? We also don’t know, as law professor Jonathan Turley has pointed out, whether the presence of the secret FBI sources was “revealed to the defense in the hundreds of prosecutions.”
Friday morning, reporter and DOJ critic Julie Kelly posted, “It struck me that not a single text between an FBI handler and CHS is included in the Horowitz report. No comms whatsoever. How is that an investigative work product?” Kelly also pointed out that Inspector General Horowitz could only review what the FBI gave him. Whether you think that is acceptable or not depends on your degree of trust in the FBI, which is quite low among Republicans these days.
So, there is a lot more to know about the FBI and its secret sources on Jan. 6. Yes, it’s good to know a specific number. But that’s not the whole story.
THE CASE FOR MASS DEPORTATIONS.
November 11, 2024. Washington Examiner
President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to “launch the largest deportation of criminals in American history.” That is a quote from a Nov. 2 rally in Salem, Virginia, but Trump has said precisely the same thing dozens of times. Still, through the course of a long campaign, with his improvisational style, Trump has occasionally worded his pledge differently. For example, at his Madison Square Garden rally, Trump said, “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out.” At an Oct. 25 event in Austin, Texas, Trump said he “will launch the largest deportation program in American history” before adding, “We have no choice. We have got to get all of these criminals, these murderers, and drug dealers, and everything, we’re getting them out.” Back on May 24, at his rally in the South Bronx, Trump pledged to “immediately begin the largest criminal deportation operation in our country’s history.” So, variations in wording aside, when Trump talks about mass deportation, he is talking about the mass deportation of criminals.
It’s hard to imagine opposing Trump’s proposal. Who would want to help murderers and drug dealers who entered the country illegally remain in the United States? Yet we have seen much talk that Trump deportation plans go far, far beyond criminals and will ultimately lead to 10 million, 15 million, or perhaps even 20 million people being removed from the country. Part of this is media hysteria. But part of it comes from loose talk by Trump and his advisers. In a Time magazine interview in April, in particular, the interviewer appeared to want Trump to announce that he would herd migrants into detention camps. After several questions, Trump finally said, “I would not rule out anything.” That, of course, led to speculation that Trump would herd migrants into detention camps.
But the Trump plan has been visible in plain sight for quite a while. First, the new administration will seek to deport quickly those illegal immigrants who are deemed national security threats. At the same time, it will pursue illegal immigrants with criminal records, either in the U.S. or some other country. And all the while, it will assign priority to the illegal migrants whose cases have already been adjudicated and ordered removed.
“You concentrate on the public safety threats and the national security threats first because those are the worst of the worst,” Tom Homan, recently named as Trump’s “border czar,” said over the weekend on Fox News. “So, it’s going to be the worst first. That’s how it has to be done. We know a record number of people on the terrorist watch list have crossed this border. We know a record number of terrorists have been released in this country. We have already arrested some [who were] planning attacks. So, look, the president is dead on when he said criminal threats, national security threats are going to be prioritized. And that’s the way it’s going to be.”
There is a clear guide for doing this. Last year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported that as of Sept. 30, 2023, there were 1,292,830 people in the U.S. illegally who have had full legal due process and have received a final deportation order from an immigration judge. In the ensuing year, there are estimates that number has grown to somewhere between 1.35 million and 1.6 million.
The vast majority of those people are not in detention. But they have had final orders of deportation, so they are subject to removal at any time. It’s just that the Biden administration has not removed them. “They were placed into removal proceedings before immigration judges, either because they entered illegally, or overstayed, or committed a crime in the United States,” said Andrew Arthur, a former Immigration and Naturalization Service official, Capitol Hill lawyer, and immigration judge currently with the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors more rigorous enforcement of immigration law. “Some of them have made asylum claims. Some didn’t make any claim at all. Some of them may have come many years ago, and they’ve been sitting on the docket for decades.”
Arthur said the U.S. has the resources to remove about 400,000 people per year. With more resources and more determination, that number could go to 600,000. So, even if the second Trump administration gets a quick start, and Trump is determined to do so, it could take years to remove those whose cases have already been decided. In doing so, Trump officials will likely use the same set of priorities — national security threats and criminals first. Then, it could focus on those with the most recent orders of removal. As for any on the list who were ordered deported decades ago but never left, authorities will have to decide what to do on a case-by-case basis.
Would Trump deportations go beyond that group of 1.35 million to 1.6 million already ordered removed? Remember that many more millions crossed illegally into the U.S. during the Biden years. What to do with them? The vast majority do not have valid claims of asylum or any legal right to remain in the U.S.
In an ironic twist, it is possible that the second Trump administration will rely on a document known as the Mayorkas Memorandum to decide those cases. On Sept. 30, 2021, as the border incursion was moving into high gear, Biden Department of Homeland Security head Alejandro Mayorkas sent the administration’s top immigration officials a set of guidelines for enforcing immigration law. In the memo, Mayorkas laid out rules for deporting illegal immigrants.
“We will prioritize for apprehension and removal noncitizens who are a threat to our national security, public safety, and border security,” Mayorkas wrote. The first group was terrorists and spies. The second was criminals. And then there was the third group, the threats to border security. “A noncitizen who poses a threat to border security is a priority for apprehension and removal,” Mayorkas wrote. “A noncitizen is a threat to border security if (a) they are apprehended at the border or port of entry while attempting to unlawfully enter the United States; or (b) they are apprehended in the United States after unlawfully entering after November 1, 2020.”
If Trump were to apply the Nov. 1, 2020, standard, the Mayorkas standard, to removals, deporting those who had most recently crossed illegally into the U.S., he would have a basis to reverse a significant part of the Biden border rush. “Those people are already a priority for removal,” Arthur notes, “so Trump could just say we’re doing what the Biden administration said it was doing.”
If Trump actually does any of this — that is, if he increases deportations with an emphasis on national security threats, criminal, and recent entrants — it will have a powerful deterrent effect on people in foreign nations considering illegal entry into the U.S. It will also likely motivate recent illegal arrivals into the U.S., the ones with the fewest connections to this country, to leave on their own.
Trump’s actions, if he takes them, could certainly be characterized as “mass deportations” since they would involve the removal of perhaps 1 million people. It would certainly be “the largest deportation of criminals in American history.” On one hand, it would not please the Trump supporters who want to deport every single person in the U.S. illegally. After all, every illegal border crosser has violated U.S. law by unlawfully entering the country. On the other hand, prioritized deportations would be a significant restoration of the rule of law as it applies to the U.S. border, and that would be a very good thing.
October 28, 2024
AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, THE WIDE WORLD OF TRUMP. New York — If you wanted to see living, breathing proof of former President Donald Trump‘s success in broadening the appeal of the Republican Party, you just had to look around his mega-rally in Madison Square Garden Sunday night. No, Trump did not draw hordes of fans from the deep-blue blocks of Manhattan surrounding the arena. Nearly everyone I talked to came in from Long Island, New Jersey, or the outer boroughs of the city, in particular the most outer of the outer boroughs, Staten Island. But if you were looking specifically for, say, Trump’s growing appeal to Latino voters, all you had to do was look around.
An extensive poll done last month by NBC News and Telemundo showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading Trump by 54% to 40% among Hispanic voters. That 40%, should Trump actually achieve it, would equal the best Republican performance among Latino voters ever by President George W. Bush in 2004. (Remember that Trump won about 28% of the Latino vote in 2016 and about 32% in 2020. Both figures were significantly better than Mitt Romney and John McCain in the two elections before Trump.) The NBC-Telemundo poll showed Trump doing particularly well among male Latino voters, with whom Trump and Harris were tied, 47% to 47%.
These are extraordinary numbers, and they are particularly worrisome to strategists who have seen Harris’s support decline in some key areas of the Democratic Party coalition. They would find no solace at the Madison Square Garden rally.
Among the first people I met inside the Garden, as everyone waited for the program to begin, were Marc Vazquez and Engel Paulino, two friends from Brick Township, New Jersey. Vazquez’s family came to the New York area from Puerto Rico, while Paulino’s came from the Dominican Republic. Both are active in their local Republican Party.
Vazquez, who is 30 years old and works in marketing, explained that when he was younger, “I always believed I was a Democrat because that’s what my family identified as.” Republicans, he believed, were rich, out of touch, and didn’t care about people like him. Then, in 2014, around the time he turned 20, he started a business — it dealt with repairing phones and tablets — and found himself dealing with quite a few conservatives. They said all sorts of things critical of then-President Barack Obama. Vazquez found that frustrating and started doing some reading. “I realized they were right,” he said.
Trump joined the presidential race the next year. Vazquez was originally skeptical — initial skepticism is a common element of many rallygoers’ stories — but he was also intrigued by how much the media seemed to hate Trump. That is another common element of the stories. A lot of Trump supporters say they were originally struck by what they saw as a hostile media overreaction to Trump — in Vazquez’s case, it was over the issue of illegal immigration — and that it spurred them to take a closer look at Trump.
Vazquez found that he agreed with Trump on immigration. “It wasn’t about hate. It was about putting America first, making sure our laws were respected, and ensuring our communities were safe,” he said. Vazquez also found himself supporting Trump’s tax cuts, energy policies, deregulation, and more. He thought Trump “was focused on creating real opportunities, particularly for communities like mine, which had been overlooked by politicians for years.” In 2019, five years after he showed his first interest in politics, Vazquez joined the Brick Township Republican Party, in which he is now on the board. That’s how he ended up wearing a MAGA hat on the floor of Madison Square Garden, waiting for the biggest political rally in decades.
Engel Paulino wore a MAGA hat, too, a baseball cap turned backward, plus a “NEVER SURRENDER” T-shirt featuring the famous photo of Trump raising his fist after he was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania. (As an aside, I’ve covered a lot of Trump rallies, and I’ve never seen as much MAGA merchandise as I did Sunday night.) Paulino described living as a small child in the Dominican Republic, where his father had a furniture business. “A hurricane came by and destroyed the business, and my dad had a choice — either rebuild or listen to my mother and start a new life in the U.S.,” Paulino said. They came to New Jersey.
In New Jersey, Paulino recalled, “I watched my dad, as a truck driver, work 13-hour days. He would be gone for days at a time. He had a bed in his truck. And I watched him achieve the American dream. He went from a small one-bedroom apartment to a four-bedroom house in a matter of five to seven years.” His father is now a Pentecostal minister in Asbury Park.
Seeing his father’s work pay off had a deep effect on Paulino. He developed an interest in real estate and is now a realtor. He did not pay much attention to politics until Trump won the presidency in 2016. Like Vazquez, he was fascinated by the strong media antipathy to Trump. “I always wondered, ‘Why do they hate him so much?’” he said. He started paying more attention to politics and found that he agreed with what Trump was doing. He did some reading on the basic tenets of the Republican Party. “And most of those things I resonated with,” he said. “I believe in keeping the family together. I believe in having the opportunity to start your own business and grow. And I’m a Christian. I believe in protecting our religious views.” In 2020, Paulino voted for the first time, for Donald Trump.
Finally, Paulino said he strongly supports closing the U.S.-Mexico border. He also strongly opposes illegal immigrants receiving government benefits. “Americans should come first,” he declared. But he went on to add: “In my dad’s church, it’s a Hispanic church, there are a lot of illegals, there are a lot of immigrants. So, I feel for that community as well. I’m not ‘deport them all and get rid of them.’ I understand also from their perspective, especially the Dreamers, the ones who were brought to this country as a child, went to school here, and all they know is the U.S. I wish Trump was a little more lenient about that.”
As we talked, I heard a commotion behind me, and Paulino looked over my shoulder and said, “Oh, my gosh — I love her.” It was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), making her way through the crowd.
We parted ways, and the program began. Something happened early in the proceedings that would become the object of hugely negative news coverage. Tony Hinchcliffe, a comedian and podcaster booked by the Trump campaign, did a kind of insult comic/roast routine that fell mostly flat with the audience. “There’s a lot going on,” Hinchcliffe said. “Like, I don’t know if you guys know this, but there is literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” The line did not get many laughs and quite a few groans, but it exploded on X. Trump detractors quickly denounced the rally as a “hatefest.”
It was a crude joke that led many to think: Why would the campaign book an insult comic for this event? It wasn’t a roast on cable TV. But there Hinchcliffe was, and the Trump adversaries who were ready to denounce the rally quickly made it Exhibit A in the night’s case against Trump. I texted Vazquez, with roots in Puerto Rico, and Paulino, with roots in the Dominican Republic, to see what they thought. Vazquez replied that he didn’t like what Hinchcliffe said but that “comedians often use exaggeration and sarcasm, and while this particular remark may have been harsh, it was intended as a joke rather than a factual statement.” As for whether it should be blowing up the internet, he noted that all of us encounter a wide range of material on the net, “and it’s up to individuals to decide whether to engage or simply scroll past content they find distasteful. We should be careful not to overreact to every comment, especially those intended to be a joke.”
As for Paulino, he wrote back later that night to say he is a comedy fan and knows Hinchcliffe’s style. “He’s known to be edgy — if you ever check out his show Kill Tony, you’ll see.” Paulino said when the comic made the “garbage” remark, he looked over at Vazquez and made a shocked face, and they both laughed. “Never thought about it again once he moved on to other jokes,” Paulino continued. “I honestly had no idea it would make headline news. It wasn’t until later I went on X and saw that AOC and Tim Walz were freaking out over it.” He saw the episode as something being blown out of proportion by anti-Trump media. “I have many Puerto Rican friends that will be voting for Trump,” he said. “I think it’s safe to assume Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke isn’t going to change that. No one at all is even talking about it in person. I’m still on the train with a lot of supporters. But for some reason, the internet can’t get over it.” The Trump campaign quickly issued a statement saying, “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”
There were other vulgar moments in the five-plus hour rally. The New York radio personality Sid Rosenberg was pretty unpleasant, as was a businessman named Grant Cardone. But the striking thing about the episode was the way in which media coverage blotted out the vast majority of what was said during the evening — the talk about Trump’s record on the economy, on the border, on national security, and the criticisms of the Biden-Harris record on those same issues and more. Surely that would merit some discussion, wouldn’t it? Without ignoring what Hinchcliffe and a few others said, couldn’t the reporting have given a more complete account of a very long event?
Look at the headlines. The New York Times topped its main article with “Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism.” The Washington Post headline was “Trump rally speakers lob racist insults, call Puerto Rico ‘island of garbage.’” Resistance programming like Morning Joe did what it always does in such situations. It all meshed well with the Harris campaign’s messaging on the rally.
The New York Times report had one thing right: “It was all a surreal scene.” Indeed, it was. Looking at the list of speakers, there was the name Scott LoBaido, described as a “live painter.” Sure enough, LoBaido, an artist originally from Staten Island with a lot of resentment against the Manhattan art world — he gave them the finger at the end of his routine — came onstage with a blank canvas and painted a picture of the American flag and Trump, all in the time it took to play a recording of “America the Beautiful.” Later, wrestler Hulk Hogan reprised his act from the Republican National Convention. Then, a man billed as a childhood friend of Trump, David Rem, pulled a crucifix out of his pocket and waved it as he praised Trump, criticized New York Mayor Eric Adams, and offered to campaign in Spanish for Trump in the swing states.
It was all evidence of the fact that, in his 78 years as a New Yorker, Trump has collected a colorful cast of characters around him. And, of course, he’s one, too. That’s one of the things that makes him interesting and has sometimes made it hard for him to fill the conventional role of president of the United States. The Madison Square Garden rally, a sprawling, audacious political achievement by a Republican candidate in one of the deepest blue places in the country, was also an achievement in showmanship because that’s just who Donald Trump is.
August 21, 2024
THREE DECEPTIONS FROM TIM WALZ.
Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz is scheduled to address the Democratic National Convention in Chicago tonight. He will enjoy a wildly enthusiastic, rapturous reception. In the 15 days since Vice President Kamala Harris chose Walz to be her running mate, Democrats have celebrated Walz, the governor of Minnesota, as “America’s dad” and “America’s coach.” They have swooned over his Midwestern manner, his clothes, and even his taste in food. They have made him a hero for calling Republicans “weird” and extolling the “joy” that the Democratic Party is apparently feeling these days.
Walz has also developed a reputation as someone who cannot be trusted to tell the truth about his own biography. Here are three examples of Walz deceptions that have raised concerns in the last 15 days.
1) The IVF deception. Walz has delighted Democrats with his attacks on Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), the Republican candidate for vice president. (Vance was the original target of the “weird” meme.) One of Walz’s criticisms is that Vance in June voted against a Democratic messaging bill called the “Right to IVF Act.” The bill was intended to gain publicity for Democrats attacking a since-overturned Alabama court decision that briefly, until it was reversed by legislation, declared frozen embryos to be persons. Vance noted that he, Vance, personally supports in vitro fertilization and no state in the country bans it. So he voted against the bill while also signing a statement in support of IVF.
It was a common Washington brouhaha. One party sees political advantage in drafting a bill that will never become law, written for the purpose of embarrassing the other party, and then attacks the other party for voting against it. In the case of IVF, it was particularly meaningless, because Vance fully supports access to IVF.
Nevertheless, Walz made the Vance vote an emotional highlight of his very first speech as a vice presidential candidate. In a highly personal account, Walz said he and his wife used IVF to conceive, and that their decision should be none of Vance’s, or anyone else’s, business.
“In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and their personal choices that they make,” Walz said. “Even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves, there is a golden rule — mind your own damn business. That includes IVF. And this gets personal for me and my family. When my wife and I decided to have children, we spent years going through infertility treatments. And I remember praying every night for a call for good news — the pit in my stomach when the phone rang and the agony when we heard that the treatments hadn’t worked. So it wasn’t by chance that when we welcomed our daughter into the world, we named her Hope.”
The IVF story became part of Walz’s political appeal. In a podcast interview last month, he said of Vance, “If it were up to him, I wouldn’t have a family because of IVF and the things that we need to do reproductive. My kids were born through that direct — you know, that way.” On a number of other occasions, Walz made clear that he and his wife conceived through IVF.
Except they didn’t. This week, the New York Times reported that Walz and his wife used another method, known as intrauterine insemination, to conceive. It falls into the same broad category of fertility treatments as IVF, but with a huge difference: “Unlike IVF, IUI does not involve creating or discarding embryos,” the New York Times explained. “And so anti-abortion leaders are not trying to restrict the treatment.”
So, to summarize: Walz and his wife used a technique, IUI, that nobody opposes. But Walz saw political benefit in falsely alleging that Vance opposes a different treatment, IVF, which Vance does not, in fact, oppose. Then Walz embellished the accusation by giving a seemingly emotional personal account of his own use of IVF, which was false. Walz’s untruths left Vance mystified. “It’s just such a bizarre thing to lie about, right?” Vance said Tuesday. “There’s nothing wrong with having a baby through IVF or not having a baby through IVF. Like, why lie about it? I just don’t understand that.”
2) The DUI deception. In 1995, when he was 31 years old, Walz was stopped while driving 96 mph on a 55 mph road in Nebraska. He was drunk. He failed a field sobriety test, and then police took him to a local hospital for a blood alcohol concentration test, which measured 0.128, well above the legal limit. In court, Walz pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of reckless driving and paid a $200 fine.
Eleven years later, in 2006, Walz ran for Congress. When Republicans dug up the old arrest, the Walz campaign denied that he was drunk. From CNN: “In 2006, his campaign repeatedly told the press that he had not been drinking that night, claiming that his failed a field sobriety test due to a misunderstanding related to hearing loss from his time in the National Guard. The campaign also claimed that Walz was allowed to drive himself to jail that night.”
“None of that was true,” CNN continued. Walz got away with it for 12 years, until he ran for governor in 2018 and the issue resurfaced. He finally acknowledged that he had been drinking that night. In 2022, the arrest popped up again when a Republican-leaning news organization discovered that Walz’s alcohol level had been 0.128. At that point, there was no debating whether Walz was drunk or not and that his campaign defenses in 2006 had been false.
3) The National Guard deception. This is the Walz truth issue that has received the most attention. Walz served in the Army National Guard for 24 years. In 2003, he was deployed to Italy to support U.S. military operations in Afghanistan in what was known as Operation Enduring Freedom. In 2005, Walz retired from the National Guard as he was preparing a run for Congress and his unit was preparing for deployment in Iraq.
The deceptions involve Walz making a number of statements suggesting he actually served in Afghanistan and that he carried a weapon in combat when, in fact, he was involved in support work in Italy. The second is that Walz has referred to himself as a retired “command sergeant major” when, in fact, he retired one rank below that, as a master sergeant.
These are hugely sensitive issues, and there seems no doubt that Walz said things that were designed to leave the impression that he had served in Afghanistan when he had not. And he flatly said that he retired at one senior rank when he had retired at a lower rank. On the other hand, a careful reading of some of Walz’s statements shows that he technically did not lie even as he left a misleading impression. In the words of a New York Times account that consulted four experts on military records, “All four said they do not believe Mr. Walz engaged in stolen valor, but that he did misrepresent his record at times.”
It’s also a fact that Walz served 24 years in the National Guard and was deployed overseas in service to the United States. In politics, as in American life in general, that is viewed as an admirable thing. So it can be hard to understand why Walz hasn’t been more clear about what, precisely, he did.
So those are three Walz deceptions. On Tuesday, Axios published a few examples of Walz misleading reporters — promising a report would be released when it was never even written, claiming that Minnesota’s pandemic school closures were less extensive than they actually were, and others. None of these examples, big and small, would likely be a huge problem for Walz. But put together, they might add up to something more. “Walz dissembling approaching critical mass — seems only a bit less than what got Al Gore the reputation as a congenital fibber,” journalist Mickey Kaus wrote. “Turns out there’s more than just the military/IVF/DUI stuff.”
It does seem clear that there should be more fact-checking of Walz’s statements. For example, even with all the attention paid to the National Guard matter, there is a lot we don’t know. And now that Walz is a candidate for vice president, there could be other honesty concerns that arise through normal journalistic scrutiny of his record.
One thing that can be said with certainty is that none of that will matter to the delirious delegates in Chicago tonight. The enthusiasm for “America’s coach” will be sky-high, and any questions about his truthfulness will await another time.
May 17, 2024
Byron York’s Daily Memo
THE TRUMP TRIAL AND 2016 ELECTION TRUTHERS.
Former President Donald Trump and some Republicans famously rejected the results of the 2020 election. Trump called the election rigged. He encouraged the Jan. 6 protest at the Capitol that turned into a riot. And he and his supporters filed dozens of lawsuits to challenge Joe Biden‘s narrow victories in some key states. Trump lost them all. In the end, his legal effort to change the 2020 result was a resounding failure.
But Trump’s work was amateur hour compared to the lawfare practiced by Democrats seeking to undermine the results of the 2016 election, the one that made Trump president of the United States. What is perhaps most remarkable is that eight years later, it’s still going on.
The leading edge of 2016 denialism was, of course, the Russia investigation, which Trump calls the Russia hoax. Turbocharged by the Hillary Clinton/Democratic National Committee-financed Steele dossier, which was an actual hoax, the widespread political and media clamor for a criminal investigation of Trump overwhelmed the first months of his presidency and led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller in May 2017. Mueller’s search for Trump-Russia “collusion” — that was the popular term for the words Mueller actually used, “conspiracy” and “coordination” — ended two years later when Mueller admitted he could not establish that any conspiracy or coordination ever happened. Although a number of figures around Trump were charged with unrelated or process crimes, Mueller never charged Trump or anyone associated with him with scheming with Russia to fix the 2016 election.
After all the hysteria, speculation, media talk, and dark accusations, “collusion” was … nothing. Mueller partisans wanted to charge Trump with obstructing the investigation, but since Trump was president and actually cooperated to an extraordinary degree with the investigation, that went nowhere, too. Nevertheless, collusion die-hards still maintain that Trump conspired with Russia and that Russian attempts to interfere with the 2016 election might have tipped the vote to Trump over Clinton. One of those die-hards is Hillary Clinton herself, who, in 2019, said, “You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you.”
All that might seem like ancient history except for The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump. Last year, Alvin Bragg, the elected Democratic district attorney of Manhattan — he was elected on a platform that included going after Trump — filed 34 felony counts against the former president, all based on allegedly false bookkeeping. Normally, those charges, even if warranted, are a misdemeanor, and these were long past the statute of limitations. But Bragg found a way to turn them into felonies.
What Bragg did was to charge Trump with falsifying business records “with intent to commit another crime.” The problem was that Bragg did not specify that other crime, although his prosecutors gave the judge “theories” about what they called Trump’s 2016 “election interference.” By the time of opening statements last month, prosecutors still had not settled on a specific secondary crime, but they had developed a full-blown conspiracy theory about the 2016 election. And it’s not some sort of narrative that critics characterize as a conspiracy theory — it’s a real conspiracy theory.
“This case is about a criminal conspiracy and a cover-up,” prosecutor Michael Colangelo said at the beginning of the prosecution’s opening statement. (You may know Colangelo’s name because he is the high-ranking Biden Justice Department official who joined Bragg’s team for the purpose of prosecuting Trump.) Colangelo continued: “The defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 election; then he covered up that criminal conspiracy by lying in his New York business records over and over and over again.”
Colangelo went on to weave a tale in which Trump, then-National Enquirer chief David Pecker, and Trump lawyer Michael Cohen “formed a conspiracy … to influence the presidential election by concealing negative information about Mr. Trump in order to help him get elected.”
“You had three parts of this conspiracy,” Colangelo told the jury. “You had the agreement to run positive coverage; you had the agreement to attack his opponents; and then the core of the conspiracy was David Pecker’s agreement to act as the eyes and ears for the campaign in an effort to locate damaging information about the defendant and then take steps to try to bury it to help Trump get elected.” Reading this, you might notice one thing about this conspiracy: Nothing that Colangelo described was illegal. Maybe it was shady, maybe it was ethically challenged, but it was not illegal. And yet Trump is now facing 34 felony charges and a maximum sentence of 136 years in prison. This Democratic conspiracy theory has turned into something very, very serious.
“It was election fraud, pure and simple,” Colangelo said. And then, he added something heard from conspiracy enthusiasts everywhere: “We will never know, and it doesn’t matter, if this conspiracy was the difference-maker in a close election.” That, of course, implies that it might have been the difference-maker, thereby surely warming the hearts of Clinton and her dead-ender followers everywhere. And just in case any juror missed the point, Colangelo concluded his opening statement with, “As I said when I started, this case is about a criminal conspiracy and a cover-up, an illegal conspiracy to undermine the integrity of a presidential election.”
It’s worth noting that for all Colangelo’s talk, Trump is not charged with conspiracy. He is not charged with corrupting the election, whatever that might mean. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote: “Alvin Bragg … is trying to hoodwink the jury into believing that (a) it is a crime for a candidate for public office to conspire with others to suppress politically damaging information, and (b) that Donald Trump was charged with such a conspiracy in the indictment that has resulted in the ongoing trial. In point of fact, there is no such information-suppression conspiracy crime in the law and the indictment against Trump does not charge a conspiracy.” And yet that phantom accusation is the basis for elevating Trump’s alleged misdemeanors into a charge that could imprison him for the rest of his life.
In casual conversations recently, it has become clear that some Republicans have had a difficult time wrapping their head around what Bragg and Colangelo are doing. A 2016 election conspiracy? Didn’t that sort of thing end with Mueller? How could Democrats focus so feverishly on Trump’s 2020 election denial while doing some of the same stuff themselves, only on the much more serious level of trying to send Trump to prison? It might be hard to believe, but it is happening.
Dear members of the Palm Beach Republican Club,
This is long, but so worth a read. It is substantive and clearly explains what we Republicans are up against all over the country!”
April 27, 2024
Special Edition
‘The Most Secure Election in American History’
By: John Eastman
April 21, 2024
I would like to discuss some of the illegalities that occurred in the 2020 election and the proposed constitutional remedies that we thought we could advance.
I would also like to discuss the lawfare that is sweeping across the country and destroying not just the people that were involved in those efforts, but the very notion of our adversarial system of justice.
This fight and the dangers from it are much bigger than what I am dealing with personally, or what the hundred or so Trump lawyers who have been targeted in this new lawfare effort are dealing with. It seems that there is something similar going on here, albeit to a much less lethal degree, than what we are seeing with the October 7th attack on Israel, as that, too, was an attack on the rule of law.
The international community that will condemn Israel’s just response to these unjust attacks demonstrates a bias in the application of the rule of law that is very similar to what we are dealing with here.
These are not isolated instances. They go to the root of the rejection of the rule of law. One of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln, gave a speech, the Lyceum Address, in 1838 talking about the importance of the rule of law.
When there are unjust laws, you have to be careful about refusing to comply with them because what you may lose in the process – the rule of law itself — is of greater consequence. He was not categorical about that, however, because the example he gave was of our nation’s founders and their commitment to the rule of law.
But think about that for a minute. What did our founders do? They committed an act of treason by signing the Declaration of Independence. They recognized at some point you have to take on the established regime when it is not only unjust, but when there is no lawful way to get it back on track. These matters frame our own nation in our own time.
Let us start with the 2020 election. What do we see and how did I get involved in this?
When President Trump, then candidate Trump, walked down that famous escalator at Trump Tower, one of the planks in his campaign platform was that we need to fix this problem of birthright citizenship. People who are just visiting here or are here illegally ought not to be able to provide automatic citizenship to their children. People laughed at him for not understanding the Constitution.
In his next press conference, he waved a law review article, and said there is a very serious argument that our Constitution does not mandate birthright citizenship for people who are only here temporarily or who are here illegally. That happened to be my law review article on birthright citizenship.
Then, during the Mueller investigation, I appeared for an hour on Mark Levin’s television show and said the whole Russia collusion story (which Trump rightly called the Russia “hoax”) was illegitimate – completely made up. President Trump thought that my analysis was pretty good, and invited me to the White House for a visit.
When the major law firms were backing out of taking on any of the election challenges, President Trump called me and asked if I would be interested. Texas had just filed its original action in the Supreme Court against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan — four swing states whose election officers had clearly violated election law in those states and with an impact that put Biden over the top in all four.
Two days later, I filed the motion to intervene in the Supreme Court in that action. The Supreme Court rules require the lawyer on the brief to have their name, address, email address and phone number.
Nobody in the country at that point really knew who Trump’s legal team was, but all of a sudden people had a lawyer and an email address. I became the recipient of every claim, every allegation, crazy or not, that existed anywhere in the world about what had happened in the election. It was like drinking from a fire hose.
I received communications from some of the best statisticians in the world who were working with election data and who told me there was something very wrong with the reported election results, according to multiple statistical analyses.
One group decided to do a counter-statistical analysis. They said the statisticians had misapplied Stan Young’s path-breaking work. Unbeknownst to them, one of the statisticians I was relying on was Stan Young himself.
Did you ever see the movie Rodney Dangerfield’s Back to School? He has to write an essay for English class, the essay has to be on Kurt Vonnegut’s thinking, so he hires Kurt Vonnegut to write the essay for him.
The professor fails him. Not because it was not his own work – the professor hadn’t figured that out — but because, in the professor’s view, the work that Dangerfield turned in was not what Kurt Vonnegut would ever say. That is what I felt like with this supposed critique of the statistical work my experts were conducting.
Those were the kinds of things we were dealing with. I became something of a focal point for all this information. The allegations of illegality were particularly significant. I’ll just go through a couple of states and a couple of examples:
In Georgia, the Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, signed a settlement agreement in March of 2020 in a suit that was filed by the Democratic Committee that essentially obliterated the signature verification process in Georgia. It made it virtually impossible to disqualify any ballots no matter how unlike the signature on the ballot was to the signature in the registration file.
The most troubling aspect of it, to me, was that the law required that the signature match the registration signature. Secretary Raffensperger’s settlement agreement required three people to unanimously agree that the signature did not match, and it had to be a Democrat, a Republican and somebody else, so you were never going to get the unanimous agreement. That means no signature was ever going to get disqualified – and in Fulton County, election officials did not even bother conducting signature verification
Even more important than the difficulty of disqualifying obviously falsified signatures was that, under the settlement agreement, the signature would be deemed valid if it matched either the registration signature or the signature on the ballot application itself. That means that if someone fraudulently signed and submitted an application for an absentee ballot and then voted that ballot after fraudulently directing it to a different address than the real voter’s address, the signature on the ballot would match the signature on the absentee ballot application and, voila, the fraudulent ballot would be deemed legal..
How do we know that went on? Well, we had anecdotal stories. A co-ed at Georgia Tech University, if I recall correctly, testified before Senator Ligon’s Committee in the Georgia Senate. She said she went to vote in person with her 18-year-old sister. They were going to make a big deal about going to vote in person because the 18-year-old sister was voting for the first time. They did not want to vote by mail. They wanted to make an event out of it, get a sticker, “I voted,” and all that stuff. They get down to the precinct and the 22-year-old is told that she has already voted. They said she had applied for an absentee ballot.
“No, I didn’t,” she said. “Oh, Deary,” they said, “you must have forgotten.” Very patronizing. “No, I didn’t forget.,” she said. “We have been looking forward to this for months. I know I did not apply for an absentee ballot.”
They subsequently found out that somebody had applied for an absentee ballot in her name, had it mailed to a third-party address, not an address she knew. She never recognized it, didn’t understand it, and then she testified that she later learned that the fraudulent ballot was voted.
We had that kind of anecdotal evidence to prove that this change in the signature rules that Secretary Brad Raffensperger signed on to had actually resulted in fraud. The disqualification rates statewide, because of this change in the law, went down by about 46%.
Why is the change in the rules through a settlement agreement a problem? Article II of our Constitution, the Federal Constitution, quite clearly gives the sole power to direct the manner for choosing presidential electors to the legislature of the State.
When Brad Raffensperger, who is not part of the legislature, unilaterally changed the rule from what the legislature had adopted by statute, that change was unconstitutional, not just illegal.
Another alteration of the rules set out by the legislature occurred in Fulton County. Election officials there ran portable voting machines in heavily Democrat areas of Atlanta, which was contrary to state law.
Pennsylvania. One of my favorite cases comes out of Pennsylvania. The League of Women Voters, which claims to be non-partisan but is clearly anything but, filed what I believe was a collusive lawsuit against the Democrat Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Kathy Boockvar, in August of 2020.
The premise of the suit was that the signature verification requirement that election officials had been applying in Pennsylvania for a century violated the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment because voters whose ballots were disqualified were not given notice of the disqualification and an opportunity to cure the problem.
The premise of the lawsuit was that there was a signature verification process but that it violated federal Due Process rights. The remedy the League of Women Voters sought was to have the court mandate a notice and opportunity to cure requirement.
The Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania decided to resolve the lawsuit by providing something the League had not even requested. She decided, on her own, that Pennsylvania did not really have a signature verification requirement at all, so the request relief – notice and opportunity to cure – would not be necessary.
Unilaterally, she got rid of a statute that election officials in Pennsylvania had been applying for 100 years to require signature verification. She then asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to approve what she had done.
She filed what was called a Petition for a King’s Bench Warrant to ratify what she had done. If I ever bump into her, I’m going to say, “You know, you have not had a king in Pennsylvania since 1776, maybe you ought to change the name of that.”
The partisan elected Pennsylvania Supreme Court obliged. Not only is there no signature verification requirement in Pennsylvania, the Court held, but all those statutes that describe how election officials are supposed to do signature verification are just relics; they really do not have any meaning. So the Democrat majority on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, at the urging of the Democrat Secretary of the Commonwealth, just got rid of the whole signature verification process.
Then the court went on to say: And since there is no signature verification requirement, there is no basis on which anybody would be able to challenge ballots, so we are going to get rid of the challenge parts of the election statutes as well, and since there is no basis to challenge, the statute that requires people to be in the room while things are being counted, that really does not matter. It does not have to be meaningful observation. Being at the front door of the football field-sized Philadelphia Convention Center was sufficient even though it was impossible to actually observe the counting of ballots.
The statute actually requires that observers be “in the room,” but it was written at a time when canvassing of ballots would occur in small settings, like the common room of the local library, where being “in the room” meant meaningful observation of the ballot counting process. Obliterating the very purpose of the statute, the court held that being “in the room” at the entrance of the Philadelphia Convention Center was sufficient.
In other words, all of the statutory provisions that were designed to protect against fraud were obliterated in Pennsylvania. We ought not to be surprised if fraud walked through the door left open by the unconstitutional elimination of these statutes.
To this day, there are 120,000 more votes that were cast in Pennsylvania than their records show voters who have cast votes. Think about that: 120,000 more votes than voters who cast votes. The margin in Pennsylvania was 80,000.
Wisconsin. One of the people who has testified for me in my California bar proceedings was Justice Mike Gableman, former Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. He was hired by the Wisconsin legislature to conduct an investigation.
His investigation efforts were thwarted at every turn, with the Secretary of State and others refusing to comply with subpoenas, etc. Nevertheless, he uncovered an amazing amount of illegality and fraud in the election. For example, the county clerks in Milwaukee and Madison had directed people that they could claim “indefinitely confined” status if they were merely afraid of COVID.
That is clearly not permitted under the statute, but voters who followed the county clerks’ directive and falsely claimed they were “indefinitely confined” did not have to submit an ID with their absentee ballot as the law required — again, opening the door for fraud.
Although the Wisconsin courts held that the advice was illegal and ordered it to be withdrawn, the number of people claiming they were indefinitely confined went from about 50,000 in 2016 to more than a quarter of million in 2020. The illegal advice provided by those two county clerks in heavily Democrat counties clearly had impact.
Election officials in heavily Democrat counties also set up drop boxes. They even set up what they called “human drop boxes” in Madison, which is the home of the University of Wisconsin. For two or three consecutive Saturdays before the election, they basically ran a ballot harvesting scheme at taxpayer expense with volunteers – whom I suspect were actually supporters of the Biden campaign — working as “deputized” county clerks to go collect all these ballots, in violation of state law.
How do I know it is a violation of the state law? The Wisconsin Supreme Court after the fact agreed with us that it was a violation of state law.
One last piece. Wisconsin law is very clear. If you’re going to vote absentee, you have to have a witness sign a separate under-oath certification that the person who is voting that ballot is who they say they are.
The witness has to fill out their name and address and sign it, under penalty of perjury. A lot of these came in with the witness signatures, but the address not filled in. The county clerks were directed by the Secretary of State to fill the information in on their own. In other words, they were doctoring the evidence.
They were doing Google searches to get the name, to fill in an address to validate ballots that were clearly illegal under Wisconsin law. All told, those couple of things combined, more than 200,000 ballots were affected in a state where the margin victory was just over 20,000.
Then in Michigan, we had similar things going on. We probably all saw the video of election officials boarding up the canvassing center at TCF Center in Detroit so that people could not observe what was going on. There were hundreds of sworn affidavits about illegality in the conduct of that process in Detroit.
Then there was one affidavit on the other side submitted by an election official who was responsible for legally managing the election. He said, basically, that everything was fine, it was all perfect.
The judge, without holding a hearing on a motion to dismiss, at which the allegations of the complaint are supposed to be taken as true, rejected all the sworn affidavits from all the witnesses who actually observed the illegality, and instead credited the government affidavit – without the government witness even being subject to questioning on cross-examination.
This is a manifestation of what I have described as the increasingly Orwellian tendency of our government. “We’re the government and when we’ve spoken, you’re just supposed to bend the knee and listen.”
That was just some of the evidence we had. In those four states, and in Arizona and Nevada as well, there is no question that the illegality that occurred affected way more ballots than the certified margin of Joe Biden’s victory in all of those states.
It only took three of those six states — any combination of three — for Trump to have won the election.
When I was coming out of the Georgia jailhouse after surrendering myself for the indictment down in Georgia, one of the reporters threw a question at me. He said, “Do you still believe the election was stolen?”
I said, “Absolutely. I have no doubt in my mind,” because of things like this and because of the Gableman report, because of Dinesh D’Souza’s book on 2000 Mules — that stuff is true.
People say, “Well, it’s not true. It’s been debunked.” No, it has not been debunked. In fact, there have been criminal convictions down in Pima County, Arizona, from the 2018 election, where people finally got caught doing the same thing that Dinesh D’Souza said they were doing.
Dinesh’s documentary was based on the investigative work conducted by Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote. Her team obtained, at great expense, commercially-available cell phone location data and identified hundreds of people who visited multiple ballot drop boxes, oftentimes in the wee hours of the morning, 10 or more different drop boxes. Then they got the video surveillance from those drop boxes (those that were actually working, that is), confirming that the people were dropping in 8, 10, 12 ballots at a time.
In Georgia, you are allowed to drop off ballots for immediate family members, but I think it is fairly clear that these folks – “mules” is what the documentary called them – were not family members. They were taking selfies of themselves in front of the ballot boxes because, as the whistleblower noted to Engelbrecht, they were getting paid for each ballot they delivered. In other words, this certainly looks like an illegal ballot harvesting scheme.
What has happened since then? Well, there is a group in DC, largely hard-liner partisan Democrats, Hillary and Bill Clinton crowd, but joined by a couple of hard-line never-Trump Republicans, or one, so they can claim they are bipartisan. The group is called The 65 Project, and it is named after the 65 cases brought by Trump’s team that supposedly all ruled against Trump.
Well, first of all, that mantra, how many have heard it?: “All the cases, all the courts ruled against Trump.” First of all, that is not true. Most of the cases were rejected on very technical jurisdictional grounds, like a case brought by a voter, rather than the candidate himself.
Individual voters do not have standing because they lack a particularized injury. Those were dismissed. There is no basis for claiming that there was anything wrong with the claims on the merits. It is just that the cases were not brought by the right people.
There was one case where one of these illegal guidances from the Secretary of State was challenged before the election. The judge ruled that it was just a guidance, and that until we get to election day to find out if the law was actually violated, the case was not ripe — and it got dismissed.
Then the day after the election, when election officials actually violated the law, the case gets filed again, and the court says, “You can’t wait until your guy loses and then bring the election challenge. It’s barred by a doctrine called laches.” This is the kind of stuff that the Trump legal team was dealing with in those 65 cases.
Of the cases that actually reached the merits –there were fewer than a dozen of them, if I recall correctly — Trump won three-fourths of them. You have never heard that in the New York Times. And the Courts simply refused to hear some clearly meritorious cases, such as one filed in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The majority in that case simply noted that it did not see any need to hear the case, over a vigorous dissent that basically said, “Are you nuts? This was illegal, and we have a duty to hear the challenge.”
Two years later, that same Court took up the issues that had been presented to it in December 2020, and it held that what happened was illegal. But by then it was too late to do anything about it.
The 65 Project was formed — I think I’ve seen reported that they received a grant from a couple of George Soros-related organizations of $100 million — to bring disbarment actions against all of the lawyers who were involved in any of those cases.
The head of the organization gave an interview to Axios, kind of a left-leaning Internet news outlet, and he said in his interview to Axios that the group’s goal with respect to the Trump election lawyers is to “not only bring the grievances in the bar complaints, but shame them and make them toxic in their communities and in their firms” “in order to deter right-wing legal talent from signing on to any future GOP efforts” to challenge elections.
Think about that. Our system works, in part, because we have an adversarial system of justice that supports it. If groups like the 65 Project succeed in scaring off one side of these intense policy disputes or legal disputes, then we will not have an adversarial system of justice.
We will not have elections in which we can have any faith, because if you do not have that kind of judicial check on illegality in the election, then bad actors will just do the illegality whenever they want, and we won’t be able to do anything about it.
They are not the group that brought the bar charges against me in California, but they did file a complaint against me in the Supreme Court of the United States. A parallel group called the States United Democracy Center is the one that filed the bar complaint against me in California. Nearly every single paragraph of the complaint had false statements in it.
The bar lawyers publicly announced back in March of 2022 that they were taking on the investigation. Under California law, investigations before charges are filed publicly are supposed to be confidential. But there is an exception if the bar deems that the lawyer being investigated is a threat to the public.
So the head of the California Bar had a press conference announcing that I was a threat to the public, and therefore they could disclose that they were conducting an investigation. Now, what is the threat to the public that I pose? What is the old line? Telling truth in an era of universal deceit is a revolutionary act? I guess that is the threat to the public they’re asserting.
That is the threat to the public. Telling the truth about what went on in the 2020 election. They gave me the most extraordinary demand. They basically said we want to know every bit of information you had at your disposal for every statement you made on the radio, for every article you published, for every line in every brief you filed. It took us four months.
I said, “We’re going to respond to this very comprehensively.” They say I have no evidence of election illegality and fraud. We gave them roughly 100,000 pages of evidence. 100,000 pages we disclosed to them. They went ahead and filed the bar charges anyway against us in January of 2023.
My wife and I, since 2021, have been on quite a roller coaster.
We came to the realization that my whole career, my education in Claremont, my PhD, my teaching constitutional law for 20 years, my being a dean, my being a law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, probably equipped me better than almost anybody else in the country to be able to confront, stand up against this lawfare that we’re dealing with.
This is our mission now. This is what we do. This is what I do around the clock, is deal with this.
I was teaching our summer seminar at the Claremont Institute. We do a series of summer seminars, one for recent college grads called the Publius Fellowship Program.
You may recognize some of the names of people that have gone through Publius. I was a Publius Fellow in 1984. Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, Tom Cotton, Kate Mizelle (the judge who blocked the vaccine mandates down in Florida). We’ve had some pretty good folks.
We also conduct a program for recent law school grads called the John Marshall Fellowship. We were conducting a seminar on the Constitution’s religion clauses when the news of the Georgia indictment naming me as an indicted co-conspirator came down. We kept going on with the seminar. At the end of the program, the fellows always roast each other and make fun of each other, missteps they’d made during the week and things like that.
Well, this year, they roasted me a bit. One of the students noted that as FBI agents were rappelling down from the rooftop, Eastman kept talking about the Constitution’s religion clauses.
He recounted that, prior to the program, the students didn’t know what to expect when they accepted the fellowship offer to study with me (among others), given all that was going on. Then he said that what they witnessed on that night, when the indictment came down, was a demonstration of courage they had not seen before, and that it was contagious. He then recited a line from our national anthem – the one asking whether the flag was still flying. And he noted, with great insight, that if you listen carefully to the words, the question is not so much whether the flag still flies, but what kind of land it flies over? Is it still the land of the free and the home of the brave, or the land of the coward and the home of the slave?
I find more and more, as more Americans are waking up to what is going on, that courage is indeed contagious. People are looking for ways to help fight back. When they see somebody standing up with that kind of courage, it gives them courage to join.
There are people in every county in the country, with eyes on the local clerk’s office and verifying that, “When it says 28 people are living and voting in an efficiency apartment, we know that is not true and we’re going to get that cleaned up.”
I remain optimistic as people are awakening to the threat to our way of life. This is one of the cornerstones of our Declaration of Independence. We are all created equal. There are certain corollaries that flow from that.
This means that nobody has the right to govern others without their consent. The consent of the governed is one of the cornerstones of our system of government. Our forefathers exercised it in 1776 by choosing to declare independence, and 10 years later by choosing to ratify a constitution, and we exercise that consent of the governed principle in an ongoing way by how we conduct our elections.
Ultimately, we are the sovereign authority that tells the government which direction we want it to go, not the other way around.
Regularly, we are instead being given the following message: “We’re the government. We have spoken. How dare you stand up and offer a different view.” That has turned us from being sovereign citizens in charge of the government to subjects being owned by or run by the government.
That is not the kind of country I intend to live in. It is not the kind of country in which I want my kids and now my grandchildren to grow up. This is a fight worth everything you’ve got. That’s why we’re going to do as much as we can to win this fight. Thank you for your support and prayers.
Question: What happened after the 2020 election with Justices Thomas and Alito. They wanted the Supreme Court at least to hear the evidence, but were turned down. Why?
Dr. Eastman: One of the cases that was up there was one of the other illegalities that occurred in Pennsylvania. The Secretary of State unilaterally altered the statutory deadline for the return of ballots.
Pennsylvania, like most states, says, “If you’re going to mail in your ballot, it’s got to be received by the close of the poll so we’re not having this gamesmanship of being able to get ballots in after the fact.” She said, “Oh, we’re going to give an extra week.” The court said, “No, we’ll give an extra four days.”
That case was brought to the Supreme Court to block that clearly illegal action by the Secretary of the Commonwealth, agreed to by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. They asked for an emergency stay of that decision so the rule that had been in place would still be followed.
Ruth Ginsburg had died, there were eight people, and the court split four to four, which means the stay was denied. You had to have a majority. It was Thomas, it was Alito, it was Gorsuch, and it was Kavanaugh. John Roberts voted with the three liberals. Then when Amy Coney Barrett joined the court, I thought, “OK, we’ll get to five.”
When a motion to expedite in my case was filed in mid-December, we filed a cert petition from three of the erroneous Pennsylvania Supreme Court cases, we filed a motion to expedite, and that was denied. They didn’t even act on it.
Then February 12th of 2021, they denied the cert petition and the motion to expedite. The vote there was six to three on the ground that it had become moot. That meant Barrett and Roberts and Kavanaugh all voted to deny the cert petition. But it had not become moot.
The issue of whether non-legislative actors in the state can alter election law consistent with the Constitution remains an open issue. It should not be an open issue. The Constitution is quite clear, but there was a news account at one point reporting that John Roberts had yelled at Alito and Thomas, who had insisted they needed to take these cases. They were just like Bush versus Gore.
Roberts was reported to have said, “They’re not like Bush versus Gore. If we do anything, they will burn down our cities.” Which means the impact of what had gone on in the summer of 2020 in Portland and Kenosha and all these other places, had an impact on the Supreme Court declining to take these cases.
By the way, a little aside on that story to show you how distorted the January 6th committee, and particularly Liz Cheney was on the evidence.
At some point during the course of all this, the legislator in Pennsylvania who was conducting hearings on the election illegality in Pennsylvania wanted my advice on what the legislative authority was if they found that there was outcome determinative illegality or fraud in the election.
He sent an email to me at my email address at the University of Colorado, where my wife and I were teaching at the time.
I responded, “If there is clear evidence of illegality, that’s unconstitutional, and so you have the legal right, the legal constitutional authority to do something about it. If you think it altered the effect of the election, you should name your own electors.”
University of Colorado, contrary to their policy, disclosed that email publicly. Liz Cheney announced the email, said Eastman was pressuring the Pennsylvanian legislature to overturn the election, even though it was quite clear that my statement about legislative authority was specifically conditioned on a finding of illegality and fraud sufficient to have affected the outcome of the election.
The other gross distortion that came out of the J6 Committee involved an email exchange I had about whether to appeal the Wisconsin case to the Supreme Court. The campaign staff, money guys in the campaign said, “We’re trying to be good stewards of the funds we have. What are the chances that they’re going to take these cases? Is it worth filing these cert petitions?”
I wrote in the email, “The legal issues are rock solid. It therefore doesn’t turn on the merits of the case. It turns on whether the justices have the spine to take this on.” Then I said, “And I understand that there is a heated fight underway and whether they should take these cases. We ought to give the good guys the ammunition they need to wage that fight.”
Liz Cheney or someone on the J6 Committee puts out a portion of this email. They ignore that I say the legal issues are rock solid. They say instead that Eastman, knowing his case had no merit, was pressuring the Supreme Court to take the case and obviously had inside information from Ginni Thomas, because three weeks earlier, Ginni had sent me a note saying, “I heard you on Larry O’Connor’s show giving an update on the election litigation. Can you give that same update to my Zoom call group? By the way, what’s your home address? I need it for the Christmas card.”
That was the email. All of a sudden, Liz Cheney and the J6 Committee puts those two things together as if there was something nefarious about it.
My understanding that there is an intense fight underway at the Court was based exclusively on the news accounts in The New York Times about Roberts yelling at Alito for insisting that the Court needed to take these cases. The dishonesty, the combination of the dishonesty, the whole thing, this narrative is out there and it is the government narrative.
No matter how false the narrative is, we are supposed to just accept it or bend the knees. “It’s like, the government says, ‘We’ve increased your funds this year from four to three,'” and we’re just all supposed to accept it. This is lawfare, but it is support of totalitarianism, of authoritarianism.
The government has spoken, and we are all supposed to accept it as true, no matter how obviously false it is. I’m sorry, free people should not and never have and never will if they continue to be a free people tolerate that kind of thing.
Q: I have two questions. One, when Raffensperger did that in Georgia, was it expressly to defeat Donald Trump? Do you think he knew what the ramification of that ruling was going to be? The second thing is, in this upcoming trial, is there an opportunity to lay out publicly for a jury?
Is this a jury situation, the talk you just gave us? Because there has to be a moment where people pay attention to this, and so far it has not happened.
Dr. Eastman: So far it has not come, I agree. I mean, it has come, but in ways that are immediately shut down. We are laying out the case now in my California bar trial, which next week enters its eighth week. My defense of my California bar license will have cost us a half million dollars before all is said and done.
Being a full trial team for eight weeks, it’s gone on. It is insane, but we are laying out the case to the extent the judge permits. She has already blocked about a dozen of my witnesses, but I’ll tell you some of the stories. We have a guy named Joseph Freed, retired CPA, professional auditor, auditing Fortune 500 companies his whole career.
He said something doesn’t smell right here, and so he applied his tools of the trade to look at the elections and wrote a book called Debunked. It’s a brilliant book. I told my wife, “This is the book I would have written if I hadn’t been on my heels playing defense the last year.”
The book was written and published in January of 2023, so the judge ruled it was not relevant because even though it discusses all the evidence I had before me, the analysis he did was after the fact and I could not have relied on it, therefore it was not relevant.
Two days later, the government offers a witness to introduce into evidence government reports that were done in September 2022. My lawyer objected, “It’s not relevant on your prior ruling.” The lawyer for the bar actually said, “Well, these are government reports. They are different.” So the judge let them in.
Part of the problem is, trying to prevent the story from getting out, even in a trial where the rules of evidence are supposed to come to play. I don’t think they’ll be able to get away with that in the Georgia criminal litigation.
This full story probably will come out more clearly there and it will have a bigger viewership there than my California bar trial has had because Trump is one of the defendants. The California bar trial is exposing a lot of this.
A reporter for the Arizona Sun, Rachel Alexander, is doing a terrific job covering the case in daily articles in Arizona Sun, but she also she has a Twitter account.
What I’ve seen this far from the state trial judge down in Georgia is that he is going to hold the line on what the law is and what the law requires. That is a very good thing and we’ll be able to see it. Fingers crossed.
About Raffensperger, look, I don’t know what his motives are, all I can see is the consequences of them. There are the consequences of that, which should have been obvious on its face. More importantly, there is the continued falsity claims in his public statements, and I’ll give you one example.
One of the expert reports on the election challenge that was filed — which never got a judge appointed, by the way, for nearly a month, and by then it was too late.
One of the allegations based on an expert analysis was that 66,247 people had voted who were underage when they registered to vote.
Now, he goes out and does a press conference and says, “We checked, nobody voted when they were underage,” but that was not the allegation made by the expert. The allegation was that they registered to vote when they were 16. You have to be 17 and a half before you can register.
If they had not re-registered, that meant they were not legally registered and not legally allowed to vote. He routinely mischaracterizes the actual allegation in the case, deliberately lying. Whatever his motives were with whether he’s anti-Trump or not, he is clearly lying, and we ought not to give him any credence whatsoever.
Q: You had said before that President Trump had won three quarters of the real cases. I’m wondering what that means to win, what are the implications of that and what is correct, if anything? What, then, is the way forward?
Dr. Eastman: The way forward is a legal system. Now, the Trump cases that were won only involved small components like the statutory right in Pennsylvania to be there to observe the counting. They were blocking even minimum observation. The court ordered, “Yeah, you’ve got to let them into the room and observe.”
That was not one that was the grand enchilada on the outcome determinative issues, but he won the case. We won ultimately on the indefinitely confined ruling up in Wisconsin. They said that, “Just being fearful of COVID does not mean you’re indefinitely confined under the statute.”
It’s not as if the Wisconsin legislature didn’t have an opportunity to alter that. If they wanted, they determined, they considered alterations in the law as a result of COVID, made some, but this was not one of them.
What I have seen, and it pains me to say this, is that the level of corruption in our institutions, including our judicial institutions, is so pervasive now that it is troubling. Because many of these cases end up in the DC courts, I cannot imagine a stronger case for change of venue than those January 6th criminal defendants.
Yet their motions for change of venue were uniformly denied because they wanted this in the DC jury pool, which is like 95% hostile to Trump. This is not a jury of peers. This is not a jury that is likely to lead to a just and true result. This is a partisan political act, a loaded dice system in DC.
The same thing I think they were gambling on being true in Georgia, in Fulton County. But I don’t think the dice are as loaded there as they are in DC.
…
Biden has a secret, illegal deal with Iran that gives mullahs everything they want
By Richard Goldberg
September 12, 2023
In the latest phase of an unacknowledged and unlawful nuclear deal between the United States and Iran, President Joe Biden this week formally approved giving the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism another $6 billion — ostensibly for the release of five Americans held hostage in Tehran.
But in bypassing Congress to avoid a political fight he knows he’d lose, Biden is not only guaranteeing more hostage-taking of American citizens, he’s also subsidizing Iran’s terrorism, military support for Russia, nuclear-weapons capabilities and repression of Iranian women.
In May, a top White House official visited Oman to pass a message to Tehran: Washington wants to broker a nuclear deal in secret.
Biden would lift sanctions restrictions on Iranian funds held outside its borders, and in exchange Iran would slow its steady march toward a nuclear-weapons threshold.
Iran would be free to continue hunting former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, former Special Envoy for Iran Brian Hook and other Americans.
Tehran could keep directing attacks against Israel through its Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror proxies.
The mullahs could keep providing armed drones to Vladimir Putin for use against the Ukrainian people.
The regime could even keep producing high-enriched uranium just a stone’s throw from weapons-grade, manufacturing advanced centrifuges, developing longer-range missiles, denying access to international nuclear inspectors and constructing a new underground facility that could prove invulnerable to military action.
Biden’s only demands: Don’t move across the nuclear threshold by producing weapons-grade uranium and release five American citizens held hostage in Iran.
For Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the deal was a dream come true.
On the nuclear front, Iran gives up nothing. The United Nation’s nuclear watchdog last week reported that Iran is still expanding its stockpile of high-enriched uranium, just at a slower rate.
As for the five American hostages — at a cost of $1.2 billion a person — Khamenei will merely restock his collection of American hostages for a future extortion racket.
Meanwhile, Iran gets to use billions of dollars in budget support to subsidize a wide range of illicit activities.
In June and July, the Biden administration unfroze more than $10 billion of Iranian assets held in Iraq, allowing Baghdad to move payments for Iranian electricity into accounts in Oman established for Tehran’s use — payments that will continue on a rolling basis.
Now comes $6 billion more transferred to accounts in Qatar, providing the regime additional budget support.
Multiple reports also suggest Washington is allowing Tehran to trade $7 billion in International Monetary Fund special drawing rights for fiat currency.
At the same time, US officials now admit they’re allowing Iranian oil exports to China to skyrocket with estimates ranging from 1.4 to 2.2 million barrels per day flowing in August — their highest levels since President Donald Trump ended America’s participation in the old Iran nuclear deal.
Conservative estimates put this sanctions relief at $25 billion in annual revenue. Iran is now eyeing the transfer of another $3 billion from Japan.
All told, this is at least a $50 billion protection racket — not just a $6 billion hostage payment.
How can this occur without Congress holding one hearing or one vote? Because the deal was negotiated in secret and the White House insists there is no deal.
To acknowledge an agreement would trigger a 2015 law, the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, that prohibits sanctions relief for Iran tied to its nuclear activities until Congress has been afforded 30 days to review and potentially reject the deal.
Given Iran’s assassination plots targeting US officials, arm transfers to Russia and crackdowns on women, the White House knows that a vote on a deal that pays Iran to expand rather than curtail its nuclear-weapons capabilities would be rejected on a bipartisan basis in the House and Senate.
And with job-approval numbers sagging on the eve of his reelection year, waging a political battle over a dangerous nuclear deal is a distraction his aides want to avoid.
Congress shouldn’t stand for this flagrant abuse of power and evasion of the law.
Oversight committees should demand all documents related to the secret nuclear negotiations.
The House should also pass a joint resolution of disapproval rejecting the new deal and putting pressure on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to hold a vote as well.
New legislation to prevent the executive from releasing more money should also be considered.
President Biden is mortgaging our national security to rent a false sense of nuclear quiet in Tehran until next November. Congress must not let him get away with it.
Richard Goldberg, a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is a former National Security Council official and senior US Senate aide.
https://nypost.com/2023/09/12/biden-has-a-secret-illegal-deal-with-iran-that-gives-mullahs-everything-they-want/
Will Biden Cross a Line on Poverty?
The administration may attempt to expand the welfare state via a definitional trick.
By Kevin Corinth
May 22, 2023 at 5:49 pm ET
A new report from the National Academy of Sciences seeks to redefine poverty. The NAS presents the effort as a matter of science: “An accurate measure of poverty is necessary to fully understand how the economy is performing across all segments of the population and to assess the effects of government policies on communities and families.”
But the report’s real purpose could be to expand the welfare state. If the Census Bureau adopts the new poverty definition, millions more Americans could automatically be made eligible for benefits—leading to at least $124 billion in additional government spending over the next decade, all accomplished by administrative fiat.
There is no scientific basis for any particular poverty line. Advocates of redistribution push for a higher poverty line because they want more people to count as poor and qualify for government assistance. But scientists aren’t supposed to be advocates. The 13 authors of the recent NAS paper appear to have been selected along partisan lines: 12 of them have
contributed to Democratic causes or worked for Democratic administrations.
The NAS authors recommend that the Census Bureau adopt its Supplemental Poverty Measure as the nation’s headline poverty statistic. This measure relies on an extremely complex formula, but the end result is clear: The new poverty line would be significantly higher. It would also break with more than 50 years of precedent by establishing a relative
standard. People could become better off and still be classified as “poor”; poverty would decline only if income at the bottom of the distribution increases more quickly than in the middle class.
Over the years, Congress has tied eligibility for dozens of programs to multiples of the poverty line. To qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a family’s income can’t exceed 130% of the official poverty line. For ObamaCare subsidies, the limit is 400%. The Biden administration could raise the poverty line, and thereby expand these
benefits as soon as September, when the Census Bureau releases its annual report on poverty. The new poverty line would affect programs starting in 2024, all without any input from Congress.
In a new paper, I estimate the effects of such a change. I project that the poverty line for a family of four would rise to almost $38,000 in 2024, over $6,000 higher than it would be using the current approach that updates the poverty line with inflation each year. The gap would grow over time, and by 2033 the poverty line would be more than $13,000 higher
than it would be using the current approach.
Raising the poverty line would increase government spending on entitlements by more than $124 billion over the next decade—$47 billion for SNAP and $78 billion for Medicaid. ObamaCare subsidies, Medicare Part D low-income subsidies and the school-lunch
program would grow as well, not to mention the effects on dozens of nonentitlement programs.
As consequential is the potential reallocation of government assistance across states. The poverty line under the Supplemental Poverty Measure is higher in states like California and New York, where housing is more expensive, and lower in states like West Virginia and Mississippi, where housing is cheaper. If state-specific poverty lines were used to determine program eligibility, residents of states with cheaper housing would receive a smaller share of assistance. Yet poor people in low-cost states tend to be more deprived than poor people in high-cost states.
Redrawing the official poverty line would be a nakedly political move without any scientific basis that could alter the scope of the safety net overnight. It is up to Congress to prevent the administration from unilaterally expanding program eligibility and increasing government spending by over $124 billion.
Mr. Corinth is deputy director of the America Enterprise Institute’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility. He served as chief economist for the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers (2020-21) and Republican staff director of the U.S. Congressional Joint
Economic Committee (2022-23).