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.
Trump Indictment Is a Mockery of Common Sense
Attempting to criminalize Trump’s dispute of the election could stunt healthy political dissent
By Christopher Roach
August 7, 2023
At the end of the classic independent film Reservoir Dogs, the characters end up in a Mexican standoff. The criminal gang’s ringleader, Joe, insists that Mr. Orange is working with the police, even though he is dying on the floor, having been shot during a failed jewelry store heist. Mr. White – the crooks use aliases – insists that Joe is wrong. Guns get drawn. Mr. White demands some proof for Joe’s claim about Mr. Orange. Joe angrily responds, “You don’t need proof when you have instinct!” You can watch the (admittedly brutal) scene here.
This illustrates something we all experience: People disagree about many things for many reasons. Sometimes they have different sources of information. Often, they have different intuitions about shared information. Sometimes, their views are clouded by self-interest. And, frequently, people disagree because a pattern of facts matches their experience, even though they do not have rigorous proof.
Much of politics has this quality. Politics arise from disagreements. People disagree about their values and opinions, about who should rule and how, and sometimes they disagree about facts, particularly complex ones. What caused a recession? Who started a war? What is the best way to reduce crime? These are factual questions of a sort, but beliefs about these kinds of facts are inseparable from one’s values and loyalties.
A Stretch of an Indictment
For Special Counsel Jack Smith, who has now brought a second indictment against former President Trump, the world is much simpler: There is only truth and fraud. There are no honest disagreements, misunderstandings or debates.
Thus, most of the indictment consists of ridiculous constructs: The election was not stolen, and we know because Jack Smith told us so. Someone told Trump this, but Trump disagreed. Because Trump didn’t embrace the conventional wisdom, he is now a liar committing criminal fraud.
In one typical passage, the indictment alleges: “On November 13, 2020, the Defendant had a conversation with his Campaign Manager, who informed him that a claim that had been circulating, that a substantial number of non-citizens had voted in Arizona, was false.”
Let us set aside the fact that contesting elections has never been criminal before. Since when does someone have to believe everything they’re told? Millions of Americans have concluded the election was stolen or, at the very least, rigged. Are we all criminal coconspirators too?
Information, Misinformation and Disinformation
One of the more corrosive developments of recent years is what I would call the “Results-Oriented Epistemology of the National Security State.” For the bloated national security regime, everything is an information operation. There is no truth as such, only what advances the mission or the party line. After it’s dressed up with the trappings of science, or the intelligence community’s consensus, or NPR’s imprimatur, otherwise unproven beliefs become gospel truth. Indeed, their opposites do as well when the party line changes.
The whole thing reeks of insecurity because outside of this official “truth,” there is very little room for disagreement or debate. Any deviance is given a sinister and value-laden label: disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theory and hate speech. It is of minor importance that the government-dictated truth is not, in fact, always true.
Under this view of truth and falsehood, the fact/opinion distinction collapses too. Things that were always considered opinions or mixed assertions of fact and opinion – questions like “Who is the most beautiful woman?” or “Who has the best football team?” – now become undebatable axioms, for which there is only one correct view when they involve analogous political questions, like whether an election was fair or what are our foreign policy interests.
This way of thinking really took shape during the Russian Collusion hoax. The media, the FBI and Robert Mueller transformed a handful of Russian-funded memes into dangerous “election interference” and “disinformation,” a threat to our sacred democracy. They repeatedly connected Trump to these hackneyed efforts with a vague charge of “collusion,” even though it was actually his callow opponent, Hillary Clinton, who funded a completely false “dossier” on Trump and colluded with foreign nationals to do so.
Donald Trump pointedly said in a recent opinion piece, “As the Twitter Files have proven, the Radical Left establishment also used the Russia Hoax to attack freedom of speech. They built a sprawling domestic censorship regime under the guise of combatting so-called ‘Russian disinformation’ – which they quickly defined to include any content they did not like.” Having achieved some results this way, our ruling class applied the same approach to complex matters like COVID, mRNA vaccines and the recent transexual mania.
This understanding of truth empowers the government to prosecute Trump for contesting the 2020 election. Trump has done nothing novel here. Candidates have previously contested elections both in court and in the court of public opinion. Remember Stacy Abrams and Al Gore.
Is Political Disagreement Still Allowed?
Until recently, Americans always understood that politics could be rough and tumble, that people have different beliefs about both facts and values and that some things cannot be known with 100% certainty.
The competitive election process was supposed to air out both sides. Voters knew politicians exaggerated the facts a little bit (or a lot). Even so, there used to be a certain amount of trust in the common sense of voters to navigate through the fog and arrive at a reasonable decision. After all, if we do not trust voters to sift through competing accounts of reality and judge proposed policies, why so much praise from our overlords about Our Democracy?
With the Deep State and donor class now united on most items, everyone running for office is supposed to endorse a single, narrow party line or else. We have seen this before.
The indictment alleges Trump fought like hell over the 2020 election, even though he secretly knew he lost. This is ridiculous. Trump, I’ll admit, likely didn’t do extensive regression analysis; it’s not his style. But he smelled a rat with Biden’s avoidance of campaigning, extensive mail-in voting, the prolonged vote-counting process, and the various mid-game rule changes in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan. Trump is being persecuted for noticing.
Returning to the opening vignette from Reservoir Dogs, Mr. Orange really was an undercover cop. Joe was right. Like he said, “You don’t need proof when you have instinct!”
Christopher Roach is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and an attorney in private practice based in Florida. He is a double graduate of the University of Chicago and has previously been published by The Federalist, Takimag, Chronicles, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Marine Corps Gazette, and the Orlando Sentinel. The views presented are solely his own.
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ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Why Can’t Trump Find A Decent Lawyer?
OPINION
ALAN M. DERSHOWITZFELIX FRANKFURTER PROFESSOR OF LAW, EMERITUS AT HARVARD LAW SCHOOL, AND THE AUTHOR MOST RECENTLY OF THE PRICE OF PRINCIPLE: WHY INTEGRITY IS WORTH THE CONSEQUENCES. HE IS THE JACK ROTH CHARITABLE FOUNDATION FELLOW AT GATESTONE INSTITUTE, AND IS ALSO THE HOST OF “THE DERSHOW” PODCAST.
June 16, 20238:34 AM ET
Former President Donald Trump has now been arraigned and pleaded not guilty. He was represented by two lawyers, neither of whom he apparently wants to lead his defense at trial. He has been interviewing Florida lawyers, and several top ones have declined. I know, because I have spoken to them. There are disturbing suggestions that among the reasons lawyers are declining the case is because they fear legal and career reprisals.
There is a nefarious group that calls itself The 65 Project that has as its goal to intimidate lawyers into not representing Trump or anyone associated with him. They have threatened to file bar charges against any such lawyers. When these threats first emerged, I wrote an op-ed offering to defend pro bono any lawyers that The 65 Project goes after. So The 65 Project immediately went after me, and contrived a charge based on a case in which I was a constitutional consultant, but designed to send a message to potential Trump lawyers: if you defend Trump or anyone associated with him, we will target you and find something to charge you with. The lawyers to whom I spoke are fully aware of this threat — and they are taking it seriously. (RELATED: ALAN DERSHOWITZ: It’s Now More Important Than Ever For Trump’s Trials To Be Televised)
There may be other reasons as well for why lawyers are reluctant to defend Trump. He is not the easiest client, and he has turned against some of his previous lawyers, as some of his previous lawyers have turned against him. This will be a difficult case to defend and an unpopular one with many in the legal profession and in general population.
Good lawyers, however, generally welcome challenges, especially in high-profile cases. This case is different: the threats to the lawyers are greater than at any time since McCarthyism. Nor is the comparison to McCarthyism a stretch. I recall during the 1950s how civil liberties lawyers, many of whom despised communism, were cancelled, and attacked if they dared to represent people accused of being communists. Even civil liberties organizations stayed away from such cases, for fear that it would affect their fundraising and general standing in the community. It may even be worse today, as I can attest from my own personal experiences, having defended Trump against an unconstitutional impeachment in 2020. I was cancelled by my local library, community center and synagogue. Old friends refused to speak to me and threatened others who did. My wife, who disagreed with my decision to defend Trump, was also ostracized. There were physical threats to my safety.
Our system of justice is based on the John Adams standard: he too was attacked for defending the British soldiers accused of the Boston Massacre, but his representation of these accused killers now serves as a symbol of the 6th Amendment right to counsel. That symbol has now been endangered by The 65 Project and others who are participating in its McCarthyite chilling of lawyers who have been asked to represent Trump and those associated with him.
Trump’s lawyers have now alleged that one of the prosecutors has suggested to Stanley Woodard, the lawyer for Waltine Nauta, Trump’s co-defendant, that his application for judgeship may be negatively affected if he persists in defending Nauta vigorously rather than encouraging him to cooperate against Trump. If that is true – I have not seen the evidence to support it – then it represents a direct attack on the 6th Amendment. (RELATED: ALAN DERSHOWITZ: What If Both Trump And His Prosecutors Are Guilty?)
Whatever one may think of Trump or the charges against him, all Americans must stand united against efforts to intimidate lawyers and chill them from defending unpopular clients pursuant to the 6th Amendment. Bar associations must look into the threats and actions of The 65 Project and of prosecutors who try, by subtle or other means, to influence the representation of clients by threats to their careers or other means.
Hard cases may make bad law, but partisan cases endanger constitutional rights. We must do everything to assure that all defendants, including Donald Trump, get the zealous representation to which the Constitution entitled all Americans.
Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus at Harvard Law School, and the author most recently of The Price of Principle: Why Integrity Is Worth The Consequences. He is the Jack Roth Charitable Foundation Fellow at Gatestone Institute, and is also the host of “The Dershow” podcast. This is republished from the Alan Dershowitz Newsletter.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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By: Victor Davis Hanson
The Blade of Perseus
June 13, 2023
Yes, we are told Trump is facing serious charges. Experts tell us he will be going to prison. Some of his legal team have quit. Yes, he was sloppy about communicating with the lawyers of the National Archives. Yet, read the 1978 Presidential Records Act (put into place after the typical sloppy departure protocols of most presidents)—and consider that Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Vice President Mike Pence were likely all in violation. Moreover, we are not stupid, when asked to ignore the following:
1) That a president who had the prerogative to declassify almost any presidential papers he takes with him when leaving office, in a way that a senator or vice-president does not, should be prosecuted for doing just that when a former senator and former vice-president are not prosecuted for doing the same.
2) That an ex-president is prosecuted for having supposedly classified papers in his possession after 18 months as a private citizen, but an ex-senator, ex-vice president, and current president is exempt, despite having classified documents for some 15 years—and keeping that fact absolutely quiet.
3) That a “disinterested” special counsel who is currently indicting a conservative Republican ex-president and current opposition presidential candidate, is married to a leftwing documentary filmmaker, whose recent work includes Becoming, a 2020 obsequious documentary of Michelle Obama.
4) That the current president removed classified documents, and kept them stored while President of the United States in as many as four unsecured locations, including a poorly locked garage, shared by his drug-addled son, who made millions of dollars by leveraging foreign governments in quid pro quo fashion, presumably on the principle that he and his father had inside information that could be of monetary value—and is not being indicted.
5) That never before in U.S. history has any administration overseen the indictment either of an ex-president of the opposite party or a current leading candidate for president of the opposite party—or both.
6) That many ex-presidents have removed presidential papers that were under dispute as to their exact legal ownership and classification and were never—until now—indicted.
7) That typically frequent archival disputes over presidential papers are considered jurisdictional matters that rarely even escalate to civil cases and are not violations of criminal statutes—until, oddly, now.
8) That a number of prominent ex-officials have committed by their own admission felonies with impunity:
John Brennan, as CIA director admittedly lying on two occasions, at least once under oath to the U.S. Congress;
James Clapper as Director of National Intelligence admittedly lying under oath to the U.S. Congress;
Andrew McCabe, interim FBI director, admittedly lying under oath to federal investigators on at least three occasions;
Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State, U.S. senator, and two-time presidential candidate admittedly destroying subpoenaed emails, smashing subpoenaed communication devices, unlawfully transmitting classified information on her own unsecured private email server, illegally hiring a foreign national to work on her presidential campaign, and conspiring to construct three paywalls to hide her payments to a British subject to compile and spread false information against her presidential opponent with the intent of destroying his character and his rival campaign.
Navy veteran Walt Nauta is being charged with a felony for saying “I don’t know” in the fashion of James Comey’s 245 “I don’t know/recall/remember” while under oath before Congress.
9) That Trump is being indicted in a fashion never witnessed before after his opponents previously had impeached him twice in a historical first resulting in two acquittals in the Senate, another historic first, including a Senate trial as a private citizen in yet another historical first after a special counsel spent 22 months and $40 million in a failed effort to indict Trump on false charges of “Russian collusion,” after the FBI suppressed information about a laptop that was injurious to President Trump’s then opponent and now current President Joe Biden with the lie of “Russian disinformation,” after 51 former government intelligence authorities in conspiratorial fashion lied, on a Biden campaign prompt, in a signed letter that the laptop was likely “Russian disinformation,” and after the FBI interfered in two presidential election in efforts to harm two Trump candidacies.
10) That Trump’s home was raided in surprise fashion by legions of armed FBI agents pursuing reports of unlawfully removed classified documents, in a manner that the current president was not subject to such FBI treatment for the same alleged crime, and was allowed to have the matter resolved by his own lawyers and government agents without the presence of law enforcement.
Another VDH twist on the same subject:
Indict Walt Nauta?
Why Not the Biggest Liars First?
The last thing this country needs is any more bottled-piety lectures
on the rule of law from Special Counsel Jack Smith, Joe Biden,
and the array of admitted lying former high government officials.
By Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
June 14, 2023
Walt Nauta is a 10-year-Navy veteran and served as an aide to former President Trump both in and out of office.
Special Counsel Jack Smith has now indicted him for allegedly “making false statements in interviews with the FBI.” The indictment’s subtext is that Nauta refused to cooperate with and turn state’s evidence for the special counsel in its efforts to convict the former president.
But why stop the indictments of a man who loyally served and followed the orders of the former president of the United States, was a Navy veteran, and a hard-working immigrant from Guam?
Are there not far bigger fish to fry to remind Americans that justice is blind?
After all, when Special Counsel Smith announced his indictment of Trump, he lectured America on the rule of law and the cherished notion that no one is above it.
So let us start with the former interim director of the FBI itself, Andrew McCabe.
McCabe admittedly lied four times about his illegally leaking sensitive information to witnesses and mishandling classified information.
Have those crimes suddenly ceased being felonies?
Or, is it now the policy of the United States government that an FBI director can lie with impunity, and leak, and mishandle sensitive classified information?
Yet Walt Nauta may be sent to prison while McCabe will continue to earn a fine salary at CNN as a paid “expert” to deplore . . . what exactly?
What McCabe knows best from his own experience with the deed—the “mishandling of classified information”?
Nauta reportedly is being indicted for claiming he “did not know” what he supposedly did know in relation to the movement of the president’s papers.
His denial was proffered with nearly the exact phraseology that another FBI director, James Comey, used under oath when he stonewalled congressional inquisitors on 245 occasions.
Was the FBI director ever indicted for feigning ignorance or amnesia before Congress?
Did Nauta ever record a private, and likely classified, conservation he had with the president of the United States in the White House, and then leak it to the New York Times?
That is precisely what James “Higher Loyalty” Comey bragged about doing.
Most recently, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm admitted that she, too, recently lied while under oath to Congress when she denied owning private stocks.
Was Nauta’s “I don’t know” a greater threat to the rule of law and the security of the republic than the lies of the secretary of Energy? She deliberately misled Congress about potential conflicts of interest involving her stock portfolio.
Then we come to Joe Biden, the current president of the United States. He has sworn that he never discussed business with his son, Hunter Biden, currently under suspicion for tax improprieties and leveraging foreign governments by selling them supposed Biden influence.
Yet plenty of witnesses have contradicted Joe Biden’s statement. Photos even reveal him side-by-side with his son’s business associates.
For nearly 20 years, Senator, Vice President, private citizen, and President Joe Biden has concealed the fact he unlawfully took classified documents home and moved them about in various unsecured locations.
Was Mr. Biden’s movement of classified documents for the last 20 years less egregious than what Nauta is accused of having done?
Was the Biden Corvette garage more secure than the closets and bathrooms inside the Mar-a-Lago gated estate?
Biden’s lawyers, after nearly two decades, only came forward because of the media hype surrounding the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago in search of classified documents.
Is there some law that states that a senator, vice president, and president can improperly remove classified documents, move them about to various unsecured locations, and avoid the sort of felony indictments now facing Nauta and Trump?
Let us end with the greatest exemptions of all—those accorded to Hillary Clinton.
She has variously committed the following likely major felonies.
One, she illegally transmitted classified information involving national security over her own unsecure server while secretary of state.
Two, she destroyed both email records and communication devices that were under government subpoena.
Three, she was untruthful about both the use and destruction of said subpoenaed items.
Four, she illegally hired a foreign national, Christopher Steele, to work on her campaign as an opposition researcher.
Five, she conspired to disseminate false documents among top government intelligence and investigatory agencies as well as the media, for the sole purpose of destroying her presidential opponent Donald Trump and thereby warping the 2016 election process.
And?
Clinton—like self-confessed liars or dissimulators John Brennan, former CIA Director, James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, and former FBI Directors James Comey and Andrew McCabe—was exempted from all legal jeopardy. She, too, continues to monetize her past notorieties and controversies.
The last thing this country needs is any more bottled-piety lectures on the rule of law from Special Counsel Jack Smith, Joe Biden, and the array of admitted lying former high government officials.
Dov Fischer June 14, 2023 Why the Trump Indictment Is About So Much More Than Trump
American spectator.org/why-the-trump-indictment-is-about-so-much-more-than-trump/ The rot at the top demands only the demonstrably strongest of American presidents.
It is hard to feel bad for Donald Trump. He is richer than most of us ever will be. He has been president of the United States, an honor limited to five or fewer people in a generation. He doesn’t have to save up miles on credit cards to stay free at hotels. For those who measure life’s apex by material standards outside of religious and spiritual dimensions, Trump basically has scored at the peak in all categories. One degree of separation from anyone he wants.
Three Basic Truths Behind the Trump Indictment Trump’s first presidency was of unequivocal achievement. He was almost Mount Rushmore quality. Under his presidency, our economy boomed, unemployment reached record lows — particularly for historically discrete and insular minorities that rarely could get a fair break — America avoided a single war entanglement, a rat pack of the world’s leading terrorists were knocked off like ducks at a carnival, North Korea stopped testing nuclear weapons, Iran had to satisfy itself with biding its time for a Democrat to become president, Arab countries lined up one-by-one to grow up and make peace with Israel, Putin did not bother a fly, jobs that had abandoned America for Mexico and China came back home, the American industrial Midwest and its iron-and-steel industry was salvaged. Trade rules were changed so that others no longer could take advantage of America with impunity; their trade barriers were reciprocated, and none dared retaliate. European countries were forced to pay substantially more toward NATO. The list goes on. For every new federal regulation, two others were canceled. Work began seriously on the wall to bar illegal immigrants. Taxes were reduced. A most successful line of consistently conservative federal judges was empaneled.
It is a great shame that Trump did not get four more years after the first four, and it is an equally tragic disaster that he was succeeded by the most incompetent and corrupt moron to have entered the Oval Office in at least a century.
The impact is felt everywhere. Food bills have gone through the roof. Gasoline prices exploded. Electric and gas bills. Everything. Americans pitifully now are happy with bloated food costs and paying $5 a gallon at the pump because it has been worse and can get worse any minute. When they make it through a day on the New York City subway and have not seen anyone pushed onto the tracks or stabbed on the platform, they feel safe. A day without encountering urine on a Frisco or Oakland sidewalk is cause for celebration. Putin wars with Zelensky forever, and America foots a bill by borrowing trillions from China that we will never be able to repay to 2/9 ensure that, like Vietnam and Afghanistan, no one ever wins but the show goes on for 20 seasons. We refuse to produce and market our own energy because the woke prefer to keep it underground and have us buy dirtier oil and gas from dictatorial Arab Muslim sheikhdoms. Parents pray the schools will not convert their normal children into homosexuals and lesbians, and they count victories by banning drag queens from library hour. Culture and homespun family values are attacked by a government that should proclaim June as Shame Month, not Pride Month. Parents don’t know what to do about college. If the kids do not go to college, will they lose out in the competitive job market of the future? Will they lose the opportunity to expand their abilities to think broadly outside the box? But if they do go to college, what ensures that they will broaden their perspectives anyway — rather than more probably be brainwashed to become woke and abandon all decent values? (RELATED: Exclusive Interview With Kyle Reyes, Father Who Pulled His Kids Out of School Over Pride Video) In the midst of this chaos, no one — absolutely no one — perceived that America’s single greatest danger is a corrupt justice system. Trump’s Indictment Reveals the Corrupt Justice System Justice is the foundational pillar of all society: “Judges and officers shall you make in all your gates, which the L-rd your G-d gives you, tribe by tribe; and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment. You shall not pervert judgment; you shall not give [special] recognition to [litigants]; neither shall you take bribery; for bribery blinds the eyes of the wise and perverts the words of the righteous. Justice, justice shall you pursue, so that you may live and inherit the land that the L-rd your G-d gives you” (Deuteronomy 16:18–20).
Biden’s Banana Republic Of all the revelations since the Trump election, none has jolted Americans as badly as learning that our justice system is fundamentally corrupt. Initially, when names emerged like James Comey and Peter Strzok and Andrew McCabe and Lisa Page and Kevin Clinesmith, conservative commentators opined that, really, 99 percent of the federal justice system is honorable, with the drek only at the top. A great many Americans no longer believe that. Justice is not blind in America. There are two tiers. And how can a democracy survive becoming a tyranny when a police state takes sides? Compelling arguments can be made each way as to whether Trump should be indicted for taking top-secret documents from Washington to Mar-a-Lago as souvenirs. On one hand, he had the authority as president to declassify those documents anyway. On the other hand, there is a reason he never declassified those documents: As an intelligent patriot, he knew those documents were too sensitive to declassify.
A fair and honest justice system reasonably could be assigned to weigh the ramifications of those documents’ removal. But Biden did the same and worse because he pilfered top secret documents that he did not even control. He left them exposed in a garage and in a public building. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton perpetrated a severe federal felony when she deliberately destroyed 33,000 emails. In America, no one gets away with spoliating evidence. Martha Stewart did not. Nor do law enforcement officers or even United States military personnel. There is an explicit federal statute, 18 U.S. Code § 1519: “Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.” Yet, Hillary had her emails “bleached,” her hard drive hammered to smithereens, her 33,000 emails — all about yoga and wedding dresses — wiped out … and she got away with it. Members of the corrupt Biden Crime Family sold out America by taking millions from our country’s enemies, all the way up to the Big Guy. Yet, even with Republicans controlling the House, the wheels of justice are jammed. It is unbelievable. They subpoena people. People do not show up, so they get cited for contempt. And then what? What ever became of Lois Lerner, who participated in corrupting the election process? What ever became of Eric Holder, who was cited with contempt? But the same “justice system” that cannot produce justice encounters no impediment when persecuting Trump allies like Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, and others. Obama got away with corrupt real estate deals with Tony Rezko. Bill was never indicted for Paula Corbin Jones or Kathleen Willey or Juanita Broaddrick. Hunter remains free. Joe approaches his forthcoming presidential race unencumbered by an indictment or prison, even as his henchmen indict his leading electoral opponent weeks after a Soros defense attorney criminally indicted Trump in New York for being naughty.
We Need Trump or DeSantis to Uproot the Rot The perversion of justice under Merrick Garland and Biden further has corrupted the democratic process. The GOP has a Kentucky Derby of excellent contenders lining up for 2024, but only two have the demonstrated mettle to meet the moment’s demands.
Trump can do it. Ron DeSantis can do it. That’s it. Like Trump, DeSantis has proven far stronger than anyone expected. He fights and beats politically woke untouchables: Disney, teachers unions, academic tenure, abortion, sexual perversion in school curricula, illegal immigration.
Mike Pence is a good man, but not for now. Except for Jan. 6, Mike Pence was a 100 percent Trump-MAGA team player through four years. He even is better than Trump on matters of cultural and religious values, abortion, sexual perversion, and common decency. Absolutely no serious American conservative leader would have acted differently than Pence did on Jan. 6. He was true to conscience. Nevertheless, at this time of public corruption of justice, America stands at the brink. There must be a Republican president with a Republican Senate and a Republican House to turn the Justice Department inside out, top-down, and replace it with a department devoted to equal and blind justice. Only the strongest of presidents can possibly eradicate the evil, focusing laser-like on finally overseeing justice meted to the Bidens and Clintons and letting those pieces fall where they may. Pence is not strong enough for that. Neither are Tim Scott or Nikki Haley. America cannot afford mere “nice” during this national crisis. Chris Christie is not conservative on the social and cultural issues that are at the core of whether America can survive even if justice returns.
The Trump indictment is about so much more than Trump. It reveals the rot at the top that demands only the demonstrably strongest of American presidents. Only Trump and DeSantis have the track records. No doubt there are other great Americans who could do the job too. But the corruption of our justice system has deterred them. Their gain. America’s loss.
Rabbi Dov Fischer, Esq., is Vice President of the Coalition for Jewish Values (comprising over 2,000 Orthodox rabbis), was an adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools for nearly 20 years,
DeSantis, Trump and Other 2024 GOP Campaigns Take Notice of Moms for Liberty
Members are shaping a new Republican Party platform on education
By Eliza Collins | Photographs by Madeline Gray for The Wall Street JournalMay 30, 2023 12:01 am ET
NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C.—In recent weeks, Tara Wood has introduced Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at a gathering of conservative activists, brought people to South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott’s campaign launch and is talking to the Trump campaign about meeting with the former president.
Wood is president of the Charleston County, S.C., chapter of Moms for Liberty, a nationwide organization that has become an influential force in the GOP presidential primary. The group, which didn’t exist during the 2020 race, has become the loudest voice advocating for greater parental involvement in schools. Members are helping shape a new education platform for the Republican Partyin 2024.
“The moms in this country, they’re going to save America,” said Wood, who has a 14-year-old daughter and a 28-year-old stepson. She quit her job as a real-estate agent to focus full time on her efforts to change what students are taught in schools.
Moms for Liberty is technically nonpartisan but largely attracts conservative women. What started as a grassroots entity of moms working to change their local school boards’ votes on corona virus restrictions and curriculums has morphed into a nationwide network with more than 100,000members and 275 chapters. Members are pushing to revamp the U.S. education system with policies aimed at limiting teachings on gender, race and sex in schools; banning books they deem inappropriate;and placing limits on transgender students in school sports.
GOP presidential candidates are trying to tap into Moms for Liberty’s powerful networks to gain an edge in states that hold early nominating contests, including South Carolina, which is third behind Iowa and New Hampshire. Candidates have courted the group’s leaders and members, inviting them to key campaign events and holding listening sessions over pizza and barbecue. And, after intensive lobbying efforts by the group, some top Republican hopefuls have reflected their proposals in campaign platforms or legislative efforts.
The group pushed Donald Trump to embrace their issues more than he did in 2016 and 2020, and his campaign platform reads like it is from the group’s website, including a pledge to cut federal funding from any school pushing so-called critical race theory and what he deems other inappropriate sexual and political content. Its members lobbied DeSantis, an early advocate for restrictions on curriculum, to sign a slate of education measures that Moms for Liberty touts as the gold standard. Members also backed bills that the GOP-majority House of Representatives passed to put restrictions on school curriculums and ban transgender girls and women from competing in female event categories in school sports.
Critics say these moms have inappropriately inserted conservative beliefs into school systems and are impeding necessary conversations about the history of racism in America. They say that limiting conversations about gender and banning transgendered people from competing in sports is harmful for students.
President Biden and Democrats see the issue as boosting their chances in a general election where they hope voters will view such moves as excessive government control and censorship. Biden, who is expected to get his party’s nomination, cited book bans in his campaign launch. One progressive organization, MoveOn, is fundraising with the goal of filling a bus with books banned in Florida schools to hand out.
Women have had higher turnout than men in midterm and presidential elections since 1982, census data show. One-third of women identify as conservative. Republican women vote for the GOP candidate nearly all of the time, according to analysis from Gallup and AP Votecast.
Moms for Liberty doesn’t plan to endorse in the GOP primary. Candidates will have to court its members individually or in small groups, like the one gathered over coffee on a recent spring day outside of Charleston. These members of the Berkeley County South Carolina chapter of Moms for Liberty described in interviews why no candidate is their clear favorite.
Those who want Trump back in the White House say it is because they view him as the strongest fighter, and they believe he would get their education priorities implemented if elected. Those lining up behind DeSantis say he has the record—including signing a bill restricting teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity in public school—and has a better chance at winning a general election.
“Trump is the only one who has the chutzpah to be able to do away with that bureaucracy,” said grandmother Peggy Lassanske, 76, referring to the education department and government. Lassansk evoted for Trump twice, put out yard signs and made phone calls for him in 2020. She has not committed to any candidate and wants someone to earn her vote.
April Coleman, 49, with three teenagers, said she has a “Trump girl” hat and Trump flags she can pull back out if he is the nominee. But she is going to support either DeSantis or Scott because she worries the former president is too divisive in a general election. “I just want to win,” she said.
Christi Dixon, 54, a mom of four kids between ages 14 and 31, chairs the Berkeley County chapter and is undecided on whom to support, though she has been heartened to see candidates “recognize that the movement for parental rights has gained traction and it’s gonna be important in the next election.”
Moms for Liberty is a nonprofit that doesn’t have to disclose its donors, and founders say it is funded by donations and merchandise sales. Two political-action committees run from the group are focused on school board and superintendent races.
Schools rely on only about 10% of federal funding, and funding decisions must first be approved by Congress, giving the executive branch less power than presidential candidates often campaign on, said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.
DeSantis has held listening sessions over pizza and barbeque with Moms for Liberty members in the general election battleground states of Michigan and Georgia. Earlier this year, he met with Moms for Liberty founders to discuss endorsements for school-board candidates and spoke at their summit last year. Trump’s team offered a chance for members of Iowa chapters to take a photo with him and reserved special seating for them at an event.
Scott’s team reached out to Wood and Dixon ahead of his campaign launch and asked them to bring friends, the two said. A Scott-aligned group donated to a fundraiser held by the Charleston chapter, and he frequently talks during appearances about education and his push to expand school choice.
Vivek Ramaswamy, founder of a biopharmaceutical company, has held town-hall gatherings with Moms for Liberty members in Iowa and South Carolina. Ramaswamy said he signed the group’s parent pledge, a promise to push the issue, “to provide empowerment to parents and to moms in particular across the country who are concerned about their kids’ education.”
The concept of changing what kids are taught in schools has had mixed success in a general election. Tiffany Justice, a Moms for Liberty cofounder, said roughly half of 270 candidates endorsed by her group won their seats in the 2022 midterms.
An April Wall Street Journal poll found that 59% of GOP primary voters favored withholding federal funding from schools that teach concepts related to systemic racism, while 33% of the general electorate backed such a move.
Aaron Zitner and Ben Chapman contributed to this article.
Write to Eliza Collins at eliza.collins@wsj.com—
Appeared in the May 31, 2023, print edition as ‘Moms for Liberty Is Force in GOP’.
The Bigotry That Proudly Speaks Its Name
From Dodger Stadium to Washington, indulging anti-Catholic sentiment is an elite pastime.
By Gerard Baker
When John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, he felt compelled, memorably, to make a declaration ofpolitical independence from the authorities of his Catholic faith.
His opponents had notoriously exploited anti-Catholic sentiment in key states to suggest that somehowa papist in the Oval Office would owe principal loyalty to the Vatican and would take instruction fromthe pope on critical questions of the presidency.
The issue had dogged him through Democratic primaries and threatened him in a close generalelection, so in remarks to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September, Mr. Kennedysought to lay the calumny to rest: “I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the DemocraticParty’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church onpublic matters, and the church does not speak for me.”Sixty years on, Joe Biden, the second Catholic president, hasn’t had to make a similar declaration. It would be nice to think that is because America is a more tolerant place than it was in 1960. But with each day of his presidency it seems the opposite is true. Anti-Catholic bigotry is entrenched among the left-wing elites who control the Democratic Party, and they have no fear that Mr. Biden in office would lift a finger to restrain it. Far from being a secret agent for the Vatican, the president seems content to be a very public agent for the continuous denigration of those who hold to traditional Catholic doctrine.
The grip this bigotry holds on our cultural life was on display last week in a revealing surrender by the Los Angeles Dodgers. As they planned for their annual Pride Night festivities next month, the Dodgers, the leading baseball franchise in a city that is one-third Catholic, initially thought it prudent to withdraw a plan to give an award to a famously ribald group whose signature is the mockery and vilification of traditional Catholic teaching on sexual mores.
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence describe themselves facetiously as a “leading-edge Order of queer and trans nuns.” They do community-service work but are most visible for their performative acts— frequently involving lewd depictions of sacred Catholic rituals that crudely lampoon the church’s precepts on homosexuality and transgenderism.
After an outcry over the disinvitation, the Dodgers reversed course and reinvited them last Monday. There is a wider political and cultural significance to the Dodgers’ craven genuflection to the powerful crowd who dominate our cultural conversation. The White House declined to comment on the matter, its press spokeswoman saying she wasn’t “going to get in the middle of who a sports team is going to honor or should honor or should not honor.” You don’t need a vivid imagination to ponder what the administration might have said if a sports team had invited an anti-trans or pro-life group to receive plaudits at a game.
The Byzantines never awakened in time to understand what they had become. Will Americans?
By: Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
March 15, 2023
When Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the Byzantine Empire and its capital had survived for 1,000 years beyond the fall of the Western Empire at Rome.
Always outnumbered in a sea of enemies, the Byzantines’ survival had depended on its realist diplomacy of dividing its enemies, avoiding military quagmires, and ensuring constant deterrence.
Generations of self-sacrifice ensured ample investment in infrastructure. Each generation inherited and improved on singular aqueducts and cisterns, sewer systems, and the most complex and formidable city fortifications in the world.
Brilliant scientific advancement and engineering gave the empire advantages like swift galleys and flame throwers—an ancient precursor to napalm.
The law reigned supreme for nearly a millennium after the emperor Justinian codified a prior thousand years of Roman jurisprudence.
Yet this millennium-old crown jewel of the ancient world that once was home to 800,000 citizens had only 50,000 inhabitants left when it fell.
There were only 7,000 defenders on the walls to hold back a huge Turkish army of over 150,000 attackers.
The Islamic winners took over the once magical city of Constantine and renamed it Istanbul. It had been the home of the renowned Santa Sophia, the largest Christian church in the world for over 900 years. Almost immediately, this “Church of the Holy Wisdom” was converted into the then-largest mosque in the Islamic world, with minarets to follow.
So what happened to the once indomitable city fortress and its empire?
Christendom had cannibalized itself. Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy fought endlessly. Westerners often hated each other more than they did their common enemy.
In the final days of Constantinople, almost no help was sent from Western Europe to the besieged city.
250 years earlier, the Western Franks of the Fourth Crusade had detoured from the Holy Land to storm the supposedly allied Christian City of Constantinople.
Then they ransacked the city and hijacked the Byzantine Empire for a half-century. Constantinople never quite recovered.
The 14th-century Black Plague killed tens of thousands of Byzantines and scared thousands more into moving out of the cramped city.
But the aging and dying empire battled more than the challenges of internal divisions, or an unforeseen but deadly pandemic and the empire’s disastrous responses to it.
The last generations of Byzantines had inherited a global reputation and standard of living that they no longer earned.
They neglected their former civic values and fought endless battles over obscure religious texts, doctrines, and vocabulary.
They did not expand their anemic army and navy. They did not reunite their scattered Greek-speaking empire. They did not properly maintain their once life-giving walls.
Instead of earning money through their accustomed nonstop trade, they inflated their currency and were forced to melt down the city’s inherited gold and silver fixtures.
The once canny and shrewd Byzantines grew smug and naïve. Childlessness became common. Most now preferred to live outside of what had become a half-empty, often dirty, and poorly maintained city.
Meanwhile, they underestimated the growing power of the Ottomans who systematically pruned away their empire. By the mid-15th century, Islamic armies were ready to exploit fatal Byzantine weaknesses.
Sultan Mehmed II grandly announced the Ottomans were now the real, the only world power. Ascendant Ottoman armies would eventually move on to the very gates of Vienna in an effort to rule all the lands of the ancient Roman empire.
We should take heed from the last generations of the Byzantines.
Nowhere is it foreordained that America has a birthright to remain the world’s preeminent civilization.
An ascendant China seems eerily similar to the Ottomans. Beijing believes that the United States is decadent, undeserving of its affluence, living beyond its means on the fumes of the past—and very soon vulnerable enough to challenge openly.
Left and Right seem to hate each other more than they do their common enemies.
Like the Byzantines, Americans gave up defending their own borders, and simply shrugged as millions overran them as they pleased.
Our once iconic downtowns, like end-stage Constantinople before the fall, are now dirty, half-deserted, dangerous, and dysfunctional.
America prints rather than makes money, as its banks totter near bankruptcy.
Americans similarly believe they are invincible without ensuring in reality that they are. Our military is more worried about being woke than deadly.
Like Byzantines, Americans have become snarky iconoclasts, more eager to tear down art and sculpture that they no longer have the talent to create.
Current woke dogma, obscure word fights, and sanctimonious cancel culture are as antithetical to the past generations of World War II as the last generation of Constantinople was to the former great eras of the emperors Constantine, Justinian, Heraclius, and Leo.
The Byzantines never woke up in time to understand what they had become.
How About a Little Context for Pence’s Classified Docs?
The former vice president is the latest to discover classified material that was handled inappropriately.
By: Nate Jackson
The Patriot Post
January 25, 2023
Mike Pence is a truly unique politician because he places great value on honor and integrity. He’s the same guy, after all, who makes a point to avoid being alone with a woman who’s not his wife. Left-media personalities mocked him for that, just as they’re now mocking him for discovering classified documents at his Indiana home.
This does seem to be a rather disconcerting fad among members of the last three administrations, but there are some key differences.
Before we get to those differences, the gist of Pence’s story is that after multiple batches of classified documents were found in Joe Biden’s garage and think tank (chuckle, snicker), Pence ordered a search of his own home. Lawyers found “a small number of documents bearing classified markings that were inadvertently boxed and transported.” They added that Pence was “unaware” of their existence, and they alerted the National Archives. The FBI retrieved the documents a day later.
The actual material in those documents remains unknown, though we suspect a good bit of the problem here is what constitutes “classified” material in the first place. In other words, these aren’t the nuclear codes or valuable intel that jeopardizes national security or personnel. The documents are probably low-level briefings or some hand-scribbled notes. That goes for Biden and Donald Trump, too. Heck, with Hillary Clinton it was just wedding plans and yoga routines, right?
Then again, anyone in government who handles classified material must be cringing right now. Every last one of them knows they’d be in a jail cell already.
That said, “I don’t believe for a minute that Mike Pence is trying to intentionally compromise national security. Same thing about Biden and Trump,” said Senator Lindsey Graham. “But clearly, we’ve got a problem here.”
Does that problem mean Merrick Garland will appoint another special counsel? He did for Trump, which backed him into a corner for Biden.
Trump came to Pence’s defense. “Mike Pence is an innocent man,” he declared. “He never did anything knowingly dishonest in his life. Leave him alone!!!”
Now, let’s talk about what’s different here.
First of all, again, everyone knows Pence is not a corrupt political thug like Joe Biden, who used the vice presidency to cash in on a pay-to-play scheme involving his lout of a son, Hunter. Second, Pence immediately came forward with the discovery as opposed to covering it up until after a major national election like Biden did.
Biden is also cognitively impaired, and he haphazardly kept documents in a box in his garage next to his Corvette. He insisted the garage was “locked” and the docs weren’t “sitting out on the street,” but Hunter was also living in the house and driving the car at the time. Which ChiCom visitor got a peak?
It would also help to consider the cases of Trump and Clinton. Trump actively resisted attempts by the National Archives to retrieve the documents in question, while claiming publicly that presidents can declassify documents “by thinking about it.” Presidents can indeed declassify material, but it’s a bit more complicated than Trump acknowledged. Vice presidents do not have the same authority. Moreover, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home is protected by the Secret Service, though that didn’t stop the FBI from raiding it.
Trump’s case seems to be entirely about his typical bravado. Of course, I did it, he openly admitted, because I had the authority as president. And no one was going to tell him otherwise.
As for Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, she deliberately set up an unsecured email server in her home specifically to avoid scrutiny of her own pay-to-play corruption scheme with the State Department and the Clinton Foundation. She emailed classified material from that server, which had been compromised by foreign intelligence hackers. That’s a whole different level than secured papers.
As Mark Alexander put it, “Let’s be clear: Maintaining hard copies of some documents in a secured area of a former president’s house, which is protected by the Secret Service among other law enforcement personnel, is a minuscule national security risk compared to unsecured transmitting and storing of highly classified information electronically.”
Clinton also methodically destroyed evidence to conceal her crimes. She smashed a Blackberry with a hammer, deleted tens of thousands of emails with high-tech software to ensure recovery was impossible and wiped her servers — you know, “with a cloth or something.” She also lied her pantsuit off about it.
Pence has never been accused of profiting from his position as vice president, and the classified material he is guilty of having in his possession is highly unlikely to be compromising in any way. Trump has certainly been accused of all manner of nefarious schemes, though his deranged critics generally fall woefully short of even a shred of proof.
By contrast, Biden and Clinton both were running lucrative operations based on their names and positions high in the federal government. Clinton took extraordinary measures to cover that up. Biden merely delayed confession until after it would have mattered to his party’s election prospects, and he has worked overtime to dismiss the seriousness of the crime — largely because of the blatant hypocrisy of the way his Justice Department treated Trump.
Carelessness is inexcusable, as is belligerent defiance of the law. What’s worse, however, is double standards and outright criminal corruption.
By: Victor Davis Hanson, January 12, 2023 | First appeared on Review Journal
Here is what we do not understand about the January 6th Committee—if it truly was intended to appear as a disinterested investigatory body.
Why for the first time in memory did Speaker Pelosi forbid the House Minority Leader’s pro forma nominees to a special House committee? Fairly or not, the result was that the only two Republicans who did serve shared two embarrassing requisites: they would likely be out of office, and not by their own volition, in January 2023; and two, they despised Donald Trump and voted for the second Trump impeachment.
So, what were the Democrats afraid of to make them break all precedents with past hearings? Pelosi, in other words, ensured that there would be no cross-examinations of any witnesses, no disagreements about witness lists, no contrasting interviews to the media about the work of the committee, and no diversity in staff interrogatories.
Why did the Committee not investigate whether the FBI had numerous agents and informants present on January 6th? Michael Rosenberg, the New York Times assigned a reporter to the demonstration, claimed they were ubiquitous. Were they?
Why did the Committee not review the circumstances in detail of the deaths of Officer Brian Sicknick and the fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt? These were the two most high-profile and controversial deaths on January 6th, and Babbitt’s perhaps was the only violent death at the direct hand of a known other.
Why did the Committee not investigate and release all the communications between the House leadership and the Capitol police to learn why the Capitol was virtually open and unsecured on a day that everyone knew would be the scene of mass protests there?
Why did the Committee not investigate all incendiary speech by major elected officials at iconic Washington buildings, deemed inflammatory and allegedly resulting in violence at a subsequent time? For example, in 2020 then Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer screamed to a large demonstration massed at the doors of the Supreme Court:
“I want to tell you Gorsuch, I want to tell you Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
“You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price”? “Hit you”? Did Trump say to supporting demonstrators on January 6th anything like, “Pelosi and Biden, you released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
Had Trump said that, would he now be in jail?
Note that not too long after Schumer’s threats, protestors appeared to swarm the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices, including a would-be assassin.
Why did the Committee not investigate all organized rioting by activist groups that also damaged federal properties, such as in 2020 a federal courthouse that was torched and attempts to storm the White House grounds to endanger a president?
Why did the Committee not release all the full transcripts of all those it interrogated, and why not all the arrangements and conditions with witnesses it finalized to make them appear?
Destroying American Democracy – An Inside Job
By: Pete Hoekstra, Gatestone Institute, January 15, 2023 | First appeared on Gatestone Institute
Over the last few years, there has been much written about the destruction of American democracy. Frequently the threat has been of alleged interference in U.S. elections by Russia, China, or other state actors. Government agencies, by the name of election integrity, were assigned to identify and disrupt these foreign intrusions. As more and more information is revealed about these agencies, it seems that America’s Intelligence Community participated in these activities domestically, and in a way that poses a grave threat to both election integrity and American democracy.
Just last week it was revealed that the FBI again withheld pertinent information from the American public, for the past two months, until after the November 8, 2022 federal election. As with the Bureau’s reported cover-up of evidence influence-peddling reportedly found on Hunter Biden’s laptop, agents knew, since November 2, 2022, about at least some of the three sets of classified material that illegally found their way into the garage and library of President Joe Biden and into the Penn Biden Center think tank at the University of Pennsylvania — to which anonymous members of the Chinese Communist Party have donated $54.6 million.
Their existence only became known this week, after the newly elected Republican-majority House of Representatives announced that it would hold hearings on “how the [Justice] department handled investigations into classified materials found at former President Donald Trump’s Florida home and those found at President Joe Biden’s office in a Washington think tank bearing his name and his Delaware home…”
In addition, the recent release of the “Twitter Files” has raised at least two major concerns regarding actions by the Intelligence Community. The first is that the wall of separation between the Intelligence Community and the U.S. media has not only sprung a leak, it has totally collapsed. The report that officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) met weekly with Twitter executives to coordinate information is totally inappropriate. Would officials from the ODNI review, affirm, or label certain sets of information as false? When ODNI was created, no one intended its officials to have a role in these types of discussions.
It also appears that intelligence officials in recent years have politically weaponized intelligence. The combination of a politically weaponized Intelligence Community, operating hand-in-hand with organizations that are the main gateways for information to millions of Americans, poses a serious threat to American democracy and the integrity of our elections.
Let us just briefly look at the steep slope of lying, deceit, and corruption that has seeped into the leadership of the U.S. Intelligence Community.
First, there are not enough words to praise our Intelligence Community and the men and women who risk their lives to keep America safe. These are the rank-and-file professionals that form the core of the Intelligence Community. Most are dedicated to the mission of gathering the necessary information to protect our nation. Their leaders have a responsibility to serve these individuals. Too often, however, as the current array of whistleblowers indicates, those leaders have let these individuals down.
Imagine their reaction in 2013 when, in response to a question from Senator Ron Wyden to then-Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper about whether the National Security Agency (NSA) collects “any type of data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans,”Clapper answered, “No sir, not wittingly.” Clapper, who had been given the question the previous day, was asked after the hearing if he wanted to amend the answer and declined. It was shortly thereafter that a massive NSA program containing millions of pieces of Americans’ data was revealed. Clapper was caught in a huge lie — to U.S. Senator Wyden and the American people.
On January 12, 2017, CNN reported that President-elect Donald Trump had been briefed by DNI Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Michael Rogers. The topic: “Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Donald Trump.” It was intended to inform the President-elect that these allegations “are circulating among intelligence agencies, senior members of Congress, and other government officials in Washington.” The briefing also touched on other major allegations they claimed were “circulating.”
Having this false information — some of which the FBI actually altered — in the public domain was evidently intended to damage Trump. The Russian “hoax” allegations would haunt and damage the Trump presidency for almost two years. Clapper himself stated:
“I express my profound dismay at the leaks that have been appearing in the press … they are extremely corrosive and damaging to our national security.”
Clapper also released a statement that neither he nor anyone else in the Intelligence Community was responsible for the leaks. How did this highly classified information, then, get into the public domain?
A House Republican investigation provides the answer. Clapper denied leaking the dossier but admitted to discussing the dossier with CNN correspondent Jake Tapper and perhaps other journalists in early January 2017. Later in 2017, Clapper would go on to join CNN as a “national security” contributor and CNN would receive an award for its reporting at the White House Correspondents’ dinner.
Today we know that the “Russia hoax” was a lie. After a 22-month investigation, no evidence of collusion between any element of the Trump campaign and Russia was uncovered. The supposedly compromising evidence had never existed; the information in the “Steele dossier” was false — and the FBI had known it was from the start. The entire fabrication had been an attempt to attack and politically weaken Trump.
In October 2020, shortly before the elections, 51 former intelligence professionals had even signed a joint letter stating that the Hunter Biden laptop had “…has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” They stated that their national security experience made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” They went on:
“If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we strongly believe that Americans need to be aware of this.”
The New York Times raised questions about the authenticity of the materials found on the laptop. Bill Evanina, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director, had indicated in August that Russia was trying to denigrate the Biden campaign. All these manufactured “facts” were apparently intended to create circumstances where reasonable people would have to conclude that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
Signatories of the 2020 letter included Clapper, Brennan, Michael Hayden, Jeremy Bash, and David Buckley. Clapper and Brennan are familiar names. They were involved in the January 2017 briefing to President Donald Trump on the fake Steele dossier. Jeremy Bash and David Buckley are worth mentioning because they continue to play significant roles in domestic and national security areas in the U.S. government. Buckley was the majority staff director on the House Select Committee investigating January 6th. Bash has been named to co-chair a government commission to review the war in Afghanistan.
The fraudulent efforts by the U.S. government, Clapper, Brennan, and the 49 others — along with Hillary Clinton, her campaign committee, the Democratic National Committee, and the suppression of the media and social media (here and here) — to influence the public, unfortunately, met with some success. For almost two years, the authenticity of the material found on Hunter Biden’s laptop was questioned. Today, its authenticity has been verified; the information is real and damning. As summarized by the New York Post:
“Yes, that letter from the Dirty 51 had all the classic earmarks of a disinformation operation, all right – one designed to ensure Joe Biden won the presidency. And it was essentially a CIA operation, considering 43 of the 51 signatories were former CIA.”
One final example of the Intelligence Community involving itself in domestic politics comes from the recent release of the “Twitter Files.” According to tweet #20 of the third tranche released:
“This post about the Hunter Biden laptop situation shows that Roth not only met weekly with the FBI and DHS but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.”
Tweet #17 states: “executives were also clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content.”
Finally, the FBI paid Twitter $3.5 million reportedly to “handle requests from the bureau.”
We now know what happened. Twitter suppressed discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop story and suppressed conservative messaging, while at the same time, it appears the FBI, DHS and the ODNI had literally set up shop at Twitter.
The American people should be outraged. This level of collaboration between federal law enforcement and a private sector company on controlling speech is terrifying. Having our Intelligence Community, which is supposed to be focused on foreign intelligence collection, involved is even more terrifying.
DNI James Clapper lying to the American people in 2013 about government surveillance of them, the promoting of the Russian hoax theory in 2017 by CIA Director Brennan, DNI Clapper, FBI Director Comey, and others, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story by 51 former intelligence professionals, and the close working arrangement between the FBI, DHS and the ODNI in 2020-2022 raises a staggering series of questions:
Can our government, law enforcement, and the Intelligence Community still be trusted?
Have those federal government agencies literally weaponized law enforcement and intelligence against political opponents in the U.S.?
Has more than one solitary person — former FBI attorney Kevin Clinemith, for altering an email — been held accountable for these egregious abuses of power?
Why wasn’t there a more powerful response from the Intelligence Community and the law enforcement community about the disinformation from the 51 former intelligence professionals?
Who authorized the cozy relationship between law enforcement, and the intelligence community with Twitter?
Who in these government agencies reviewed and approved of the output and decisions coming from these joint efforts?
Were political appointees in the review loop?
Who has the records, notes, and decisions that emanated from these groups?
It is clear that our law enforcement community needs to be investigated, but most importantly we need to investigate how our Intelligence Community has evolved from having literally a non-existent relationship with speech in America to being inside the room determining what speech is allowed.
There also needs to be a significant investigation by an outside, non-government group to understand how far this massive government overreach into free speech and election manipulation went. Clearly, the government has been influencing what we get to see and hear. It needs to stop — now — before our democracy is destroyed.
Peter Hoekstra was US Ambassador to the Netherlands during the Trump administration. He served 18 years in the U.S. House of Representatives representing the second district of Michigan and served as Chairman and Ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. He is currently a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.
McCarthy Learns His Three Rs: Reset, Revelation, Retribution
The hard nudge from his hard right appears to have instilled some useful forgetting and learning in Kevin McCarthy.
By: Bob Maistros, American Greatness, January 14, 2023 | First appeared on American Greatness
The restored Bourbon dynasty is said to have “learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.” But Louis XVIII’s posse had nothing on Republican “moderates” in the recently (barely) restored House majority.
Check out this choice tidbit, in the wake of Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) bruising, begrudging battle for the speakership, from Representative Nancy Mace (R-S.C.):
I am concerned that common-sense legislation will not get through to get a vote on the floor . . . [F]or example, we have 12 bills that we’re supposedly going to be voting on in our first week in office . . . [Three pro-life bills] are not legislation . . . that can pass the Senate and get onto the desk for the president to sign into law.
Puh-leeze.
Pummeling by progressive radicals. Outright embarrassment in November voting. Five days, 15 ballots, and hours of nonstop, no-holds-barred negotiations and concession-coaxing to elect a Speaker.
And Mace—likely reflecting the views of many equally clueless colleagues in the Stupid Party—still thinks the GOP’s Job One is “legislation that can pass the Senate and get onto the desk of the president”?
Does the gentlelady mean legislation like the amnesty con a feckless faction of Senate Republicans tried to foist on America? The federal codification of make-believe matrimony 12 of them waved through? The $1.7 trillion lame-duck appropriations leviathan that trampled the incoming House majority’s prerogatives in instilling fiscal discipline?
One supposedly unpassable bill to which she definitely referred would require lifesaving care for aborted children born alive. Perhaps Mace prefers chloroform?
And does the Charlestonian believe that the usurper in the Oval Office gave one thought to her party’s priorities in affixing the John Hancock she covets to a typhoon of “pen-and-phone” executive orders trashing major Trump accomplishments?
The good news: in contrast to Mace and her fellow travelers on the Good Ship GOP’s port side, the hard nudge from his hard-right appears to have instilled some useful forgetting and learning in Kevin McCarthy.
He’s taking, temporarily at least, a mental Bleach Bit to the old ways of go-along, get-along, tax-along, spend-along in an age when the scorched-earth opposition—and some on his side of the aisle—have put aside Sleepy Joe’s treasured “norms” and think nothing of:
aiding, abetting, and institutionalizing election fraud;
solitary confinement for non-violent protesters and congressional show trials to advance a fictitious Big Lie narrative inoculating against future such fraud;
abusing power to perpetuate the Russian collusion whopper, entrap a sitting national security advisor, and sic the feds on concerned, anti-woke parents;
canceling ideological adversaries as irredeemably racist, transphobic, or climate deniers; and
raiding a former president’s home and releasing his private records.
Moreover, the speaker has seemingly absorbed the three Rs that must shape the Republican agenda for this Congress:
Reset. As previously maintained here, mimic the Green New Deal’s success in “staking out territory beyond rational hopes of capturing in the current environment—aspiring, ultimately, to re-reshape the battlefield.”
Revelation. Use every available platform—including the appropriations process, hearings, events, and a 24/7/365 “tweet storm”—to lay bare not just Bidenite corruption, incompetence, and coverups, but also every dollar of misspent and misappropriated funds in the omnibus(t) bill forced down the new majority’s throats.
Retribution. Not “score-settling,” as Democrats charge. Rather, make malicious malfeasants pay a political price for skyrocketing spending and prices; ceding hard-won energy independence; surrendering the southern border; freedom-sapping COVID mandates; promoting sexual perversion and child mutilation; emboldening America’s enemies, and most of all, weaponizing the government against political rivals and the very people it ostensibly serves.
Thus far, the Californian has wildly exceeded this commentators’ expectations to earn solid “As” across the board:
Advancing bills not only to defund the Democrats’ new army of nearly 90,000 tax harassers, but, incredibly, to pull the plug on the entire IRS and the income tax itself.
Establishing a select committee to investigate the wide-ranging misdeeds of America’s arch-foe, China—as a precursor to keeping the speaker’s pledge to move against the Middle Kingdom’s economic, trade, and human rights violations, military aggression, and “theft of Americans’ personal information, intellectual property, and jobs.”
Setting up a subcommittee to investigate and demand accountability for the “weaponization of the federal government” against political foes and private citizens alike.
Releasing 14,000 hours of January 6 security videos to undercut the “insurrection” deception.
Further pledging to investigate “Biden’s border crisis, pandemic relief fraud, (the) Afghanistan withdrawal, (the) energy crisis, COVID origins, (and) Biden family’s influence peddling.”
Promising votes on separate appropriations bills instead of opaque annual funding monsters.
Best of all, booting perpetual Pinocchio Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and compromised China boy-toy Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) from the intelligence committee and terrorist-touter-cum immigration-fraudster Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) from the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Yes, it’s just a start and largely symbolic. But all in all, plaudits for McCarthy’s interim report card.
Now, to reinforce his gains in learning—and forgetting—as a recharged majority forges forward, this commentator suggests one additional exercise for the lower chamber leader: write on the office whiteboard 100 times, “Nancy Mace is not the base.”
Taking on ‘The Weaponization of Government’ Led by Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, the House GOP wasted no time in targeting the deep state.
By: Douglas Andrews, The Patriot Post , January 13, 2023 | First appeared on The Patriot Post
This week was a good one for limited-government constitutional conservatives — especially those who are fed up with the deep state, fed up with the Democrats’ use of the federal government as a cudgel against its political enemies within Washington and across the country.
House Republicans passed a resolution Tuesday to establish the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which will investigate, among other things, the FBI’s effort to censor and ban conservative Twitter users, and the Justice Department’s probe of “threats” from parents who’ve had the temerity to speak out at local school board meetings against wokeness and rampant leftism.
To no one’s surprise, the vote was party-line, 221 to 211, in favor of examining the behavior of the FBI and DOJ, which followed revelations in a series of “Twitter Files” that the FBI paid the company $3 million to suppress mostly conservative voices on the social media site.
The committee will be housed under the House Judiciary Committee and will “fully investigate the Biden administration’s efforts to ‘collect information on or otherwise investigate citizens of the United States,’ examine how federal agencies collect or work with the private sector to collect information on U.S. citizens, and probe other issues ‘related to the violation of the civil liberties’ of U.S. citizens.”
The resolution, from Ohio Congressman and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, is what House Speaker Kevin McCarthy says is part of the GOP’s mission to “hold the Swamp accountable.”
During his remarks on the floor, Chairman Jordan responded to Democrat charges that the resolution was merely a ploy:
A ploy? It’s not a ploy when the Department of Justice treats parents as terrorists, moms, and dads who are simply showing up at a school board meeting to advocate for their son or daughter.
A ploy? It’s not a ploy when the FBI pays Twitter $3 million, not one, not two, but $3 million to censor American citizens.
It’s not a ploy when the Department of Homeland Security tries to set up a disinformation governance board because we all know that the Department of Homeland Security can tell what’s good speech and what is bad speech.
Writing for the opposition, The New York Times casts a jaundiced eye at the enterprise, reporting that Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern likened the panel to the House Un-American Activities Committee of the 1950s, “which demonized Americans suspected of being sympathetic to communism.”
And your point is?
“I call it the McCarthy committee,” McGovern continued, “and I’m not talking about Kevin; I’m talking about Joe. This committee is nothing more than a deranged ploy by the MAGA extremists who have hijacked the Republican Party and now want to use taxpayer money to push their far-right conspiracy nonsense.”
Here, a bit of a history lesson for the Times and McGovern: Joe McCarthy was right about everything and everyone, and the McCarthy period itself, which Ann Coulter has dubbed “The Rosetta Stone of all liberal lies,” was a period marked by the Democrats’ sustained efforts to shout down and demonize the truth-tellers and rewrite history about the very real and widespread infiltration of commies and commie sympathizers within the U.S. government, especially the State Department, from 1938 to 1946. Anyone who doubts this should read M. Stanton Evans’s 672-page Blacklisted by History, which is the definitive post-Soviet volume on the McCarthy era.
Likewise, let’s hope that history looks back on the period from 2009 to 2023 as a period of widespread weaponization of government agencies against the citizenry, and the period immediately thereafter as one of significant reform and a return of the federal apparatus to its rightful role.
Suffice it to say, honest and decent Democrats have nothing to fear from a Republican committee meant to unravel and undo the political weaponization of our federal government.
Those Democrats who are neither honest nor decent, though, they have plenty to fear.
“Americans are sick and tired of it,” said Jordan. “And we don’t want to go after anyone. We just want it to stop, and we want to respect the First Amendment to the Constitution that the greatest country in the world has. That’s what this committee is all about.”
If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.Plato
