90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, April 1, 2019

This Veteran, Who Supplied Water to Firefighters, Went to Prison for Digging Ponds

An elderly veteran who ran a business supplying water to fight forest fires was prosecuted by the federal government and sent to prison for digging ponds on his own property, one of his lawyers says.

Joe Robertson, a Navy veteran from Montana, was 78 when he was convicted and sentenced to 18 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $130,000 in restitution through deductions from his Social Security checks.

His crime?

Robertson, whose business supplied water trucks to Montana firefighters, dug a series of small ponds close to his home in 2013 and 2014. The site was a wooded area near a channel, a foot wide and a foot deep, with two to three garden hoses’ worth of flow, according to court documents.

The U.S. government prosecuted Robertson for digging in proximity to “navigable waters” without a permit, a violation of the Clean Water Act administered by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers.

Tony Francois, a senior attorney with Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit, public interest law firm specializing in property rights, described the events leading up to Robertson’s prosecution during a panel discussion Monday at The Heritage Foundation.

Also on the panel was Kevin Pierce, vice president of Hawkes Co., a Minnesota-based family business that harvests peat for golf course greens. Daren Bakst, Heritage’s senior research fellow for agriculture policy, was moderator of the event, called “Horror Stories of EPA and Corps Overreach under the Clean Water Act.”

Pacific Legal Foundation filed a petition on behalf of Robertson, asking the Supreme Court to review his case, which turns on the definition of “navigable waters.”

The Navy veteran argued that he didn’t violate the Clean Water Act because
digging the ponds did not discharge any soil to navigable waters, since the trickle in the channel didn’t constitute navigable waters.

The largest navigable body of water anywhere near the Robertson home is more than 40 miles away, Francois said.

Because Robertson lived in a wooded area that is “increasingly fire prone,” he was “concerned about...

Why did former DNI James Clapper just implicate Obama as the ‘Spygate’ leader again? We have a theory

Are the wheels finally coming off the Spygate scandal? Are the co-conspirators getting nervous not just about being found out but about suffering legal consequences?

Could be. And frankly, it’s about time.

Within days after special counsel Robert Mueller filed his report with the Justice Department noting that he’d found no “collusion” between the 2016 Trump campaign and Mother Russia, the House Intelligence Committee’s ranking member, Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) indicated he and others were preparing to file criminal referrals to DoJ regarding individuals Mueller “skipped over” during his 18-month probe.

“We’re still continuing to get to the bottom of what was happening to the Department of Justice and the FBI, trying to make sure that everyone there is held accountable…either through the courts or otherwise…. We’ll be making criminal referrals on a whole host of topics, most importantly probably lying and misleading Congress,” Nunes told One American News Network earlier this month, as we reported.

Well, we’ve heard these kinds of things before, only to be disappointed in the long run when nothing came of them. But there are indications that this time might be different.

First of all, looking back it made sense for the president to allow the Mueller witch hunt to play out. After all, he knew (as did most rational Americans), that the “collusion” narrative was a hoax. Mueller finally had to admit it.

Secondly, there are indications that some of the roaches involved in the scandal from the outset are scrambling to get out of the light. Enter former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Last week during a post-Mueller report appearance on his meal ticket network, CNN, Clapper once again attempted to pin the blame on Obama for...

BUSTED: Kim Foxx Admits She FAKED Recusing Herself From Jussie Case

Cook County prosecutor Kim Foxx did not actually recuse herself from the Jussie Smollett case as she claimed. Foxx’s office was forced to make this admission when confronted with the fact that a real recusal would require putting a special prosecutor in charge, not just a Foxx assistant.

“The state’s attorney did not formally recuse herself or the office based on any actual conflict of interest,” stated her communications officer Tandra Simonton.

Thus, Foxx faked recusing herself to get the pressure off her back for her text messages with Tina Tchen, the former Michelle Obama chief of staff.

One America News Network (OAN) ran a segment Wednesday covering Hungarian-born progressive billionaire George Soros’ six-figure spending to put Kim Foxx in office as the prosecutor in Cook County, Illinois in 2016.

Soros gave more than $400,000 to super PAC’s supporting Foxx in the race, which put her in the position to cut Jussie Smollett a sweetheart deal. Foxx’s office arranged to drop all charges against Smollett after Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff Tina Tchen personally texted Foxx on Smollett’s behalf. Smollett faked a violent hate crime against himself, which he blamed on fictional President Donald Trump supporters.

Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff Tina Tchen, who intervened on Jussie Smollett’s behalf with Cook County prosecutor Kim Foxx, spoke side-by-side with Jussie Smollett’s sister Jurnee at the May 5, 2018 United State of Women Summit in...

There’s no doubt that one of the flashpoints of the modern culture war in America is the debate over our nation’s history.

On one side, there are Americans who believe that the United States is a unique country, a shining city upon a hill that while flawed, has been exceptional from the beginning.

On the other side is a growing bloc of Americans who believe America was rotten from its conception, its history worthy of both figuratively and now literally destroying, and that its only hope is in some kind of fundamental transformation to purge it of its past sins and injustices.

In simpler terms, it’s a battle of gratitude vs. grievance.

Few perhaps represent the grievance side better than former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder, who took the opportunity on Wednesday to scoff at the concept of “Make America Great Again.”

“Exactly when did you think America was great?” Holder said on an MSNBC panel in response to supporters of President Donald Trump.

“It certainly wasn’t when people were enslaved. It certainly wasn’t when women didn’t have the right to vote. It certainly wasn’t when the LGBT community was denied the rights to which it was entitled,” Holder said.

Apparently, greatness is entirely dependent on the norms of 2019.

This is absurd.

Perhaps one of the most profound rebukes to Holder and those who share his view are the words of Frederick Douglass.

Douglass had been born a slave in Maryland. Having received cruel treatment from several masters, he later escaped.

He had more reason than any American today to hate his country and the Founding Fathers.

Douglass delivered his famed speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” at a time when slavery not only existed in America, but was spreading. Yet in that speech he said that America and the men who founded it were truly “great.”

Douglass pulled no punches when it came to slavery, which he considered a great hypocrisy in light of the Founders’ statement that all men are created equal. Yet this great sin did not convince Douglass that America’s foundations were hopelessly flawed.

Far from it.

“I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic,” Douglass said. “The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too—great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men.”

Douglass insisted that the Founding generation was worth celebrating for all time.

“With them, nothing was ‘settled’ that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were ‘final;’ not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation.”

America, in the eyes of Douglass, had always been great. To say otherwise was nonsense.

Douglass understood the difference between his country’s timeless ideals and its failure to live up to them. He only demanded that Americans, if they wished to remain in an exceptional country, uphold the sacred principles that their ancestors had bravely fought for.

It’s through this kind of patriotic criticism that Douglass convinced many of the need to extinguish the evil of slavery, or the promise of their nation would fade and crumble.

Later, when slavery was defeated, Douglass looked back not with contempt, but with gratitude for the country and fellow citizens who made such an achievement possible.

He hoped that this sentiment of thankfulness would “never die while the republic lives.”

So Americans today, who will never feel the sting of slavery, who all have the monumental privilege of living under the Constitution and the stars and stripes, should be thankful and cherish our founding ideals and the advancements we’ve made to live up to them.

Surely, America was great when a handful of Pilgrims arrived on our shores and through toil, hardship, and prayer planted the seeds of liberty in the New World.

America was great when a few colonists at the edge of the world pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the cause of independence, based on the timeless concepts of inalienable, God-given rights and the notion that “all men are created equal.”

America was great when more than half a million of our countrymen gave their lives in a civil war so that others could be free and their nation might remain one.

America was great when, miraculously, it climbed out of the wreckage of a civil war that would have destroyed most other peoples, and rebuilt itself, ultimately becoming stronger and freer than it had ever been.

America was great when it harnessed free enterprise and the rule of law to produce the most explosive and dynamic economy known to man, allowing the common man to rise up into success, drawing millions from around the world desperately seeking a better life.

America was great when it stood in World War II as the prime bulwark of freedom and unleashed the arsenal of...