Thursday, April 7, 2022

Nancy Pelosi’s Jan. 6 Committee Is Following The Same Pattern As The Evil John Doe Investigation

Through intimidation of opponents, spying, and invasive subpoenas that scare away donors, the Jan. 6 committee is John Doe for all of America.

Fifteen months after Congress certified the 2020 election, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hand-picked Jan. 6 commission is still forging ahead with partisan theater.

The committee has seized bank records of peaceful protesters, routinely made up evidence to tarnish Republican leaders, spied on federal lawmakers’ phone records, threatened press freedom, and is now admittedly trying to criminalize GOP’s fundraising on the issue of election security, as The Federalist’s Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway reported last month.

The unserious committee has been exploiting the Capitol riot for political ends since it happened, but as time passes, Democrats’ abuses of power become more brazen — and they call to mind some of the most egregious instances of neglect of the rule of law and civil liberties in our country’s recent history.

The yearslong and still ongoing Russia collusion hoax comes to mind. The committee’s conduct has drawn parallels to Watergate as well, most recently with its attempts to subpoena opposition records, which would include financial records from the Salesforce database as well as personal, sensitive information about Republican donors and other party supporters.

As the National Republican Senate Committee wrote in an amicus brief, “What the Salesforce subpoena demands is for the company to hand over the ‘Holy Grail’ of the RNC’s internal digital playbook.”

But there’s another comparison — one that carried massive implications for national politics and the rule of law: Wisconsin’s infamous John Doe investigation of former Gov. Scott Walker and his supporters.

The John Doe Investigation

It all started back in 2010, when Walker was still county executive of Milwaukee and running for governor. Based on a report that public funds had been stolen from an annual military event, Walker opened an investigation, which came to be known as John Doe I.

Wisconsin has a provision for these legal proceedings, called John Doe investigations. Like grand juries, they’re intended to determine whether a crime has been committed and, if so, who committed it.

Unlike grand juries, however, these are not conclusions drawn not by a jury of peers but investigations helmed by a single judge. Not only can law enforcement subpoena witnesses, but they can issue gag orders that prevent those witnesses from saying anything publicly about the investigation, granting an inordinate amount of secrecy to those overseeing it.

Six people were convicted as a result of John Doe I. By this point, Walker had secured the governorship and by 2012 was facing a union-fueled recall effort, which he weathered and won.

After Walker won the recall election, however, a judge gave the overseeing district attorney the green light to grow the scope of the John Doe investigation — except this time it targeted Walker himself for supposedly breaking campaign finance laws. The DA was John Chisholm, the same DA who became infamous in November 2021 when a criminal he let off with exceptional leniency murdered six people and injured more than 62 others when he plowed an SUV through an annual Christmas parade.

The overreaches of the investigation were extreme and chilling. Prosecutors targeted not only Walker and conservative organizations in the state but also his supporters. For instance:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #337

Trans child molester Hannah Tubbs was accused of earlier attack on 4-year-old girl

Hannah Tubbs, the 26-year-old suspect who, in a case that made national headlines, was sentenced to two years in a juvenile facility for assaulting a pre-teen girl in a Los Angeles-area Denny’s bathroom in 2014, allegedly committed a disturbing prior offense against an even-younger child elsewhere in the state about a year earlier.

“Explicit court documents obtained by Fox News Digital show Tubbs, then using the name James, was accused of sexually molesting a four-year-old girl at a California library in August 2013 while her mother was browsing books ‘just a few aisles over,'” Fox News reported on Wednesday about an incident in the San Joaquin Valley area of Kern County.

Insofar as the 2014 case is concerned, Tubbs reportedly pleaded guilty to molesting a 10-year-old girl at the Palmdale, Calif., restaurant when he was a few weeks shy of turning 18. He began identifying as a transgender woman and asked to be called “Hannah” after being arrested, according to Fox News.

The assault was stopped, fortunately, because another patron entered the restroom. Tubbs was reportedly not linked to the 2014 incident until 2019 when the suspect’s DNA was submitted into a database after an unrelated arrest in Idaho. The suspect was charged in early 2020.

Tubbs had reportedly bragged about the light sentence he would receive in a phone call from jail. He reportedly was not required to register as a sex offender.

In January 2022, a California judge remanded Tubbs to a juvenile facility for girls owing to Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon’s refusal to prosecute the defendant as an adult.

Gascon is one of a number of George Soros-backed soft-on-crime, Democrat prosecutors in America.

A nascent 2021 voter recall of Gascon came up short because of lack of petition signatures. A second recall drive, which appears to have far more momentum, is currently underway and appears likely to make the...

The defendant claimed that he thought police allowed him into an entrance near the Capitol Rotunda.

Following a two-day bench trial, New Mexico engineer Matthew Martin was acquitted Wednesday on four misdemeanor charges by Judge Trevor McFadden. | Jon Cherry/Getty Images

A judge has issued the first outright acquittal of a defendant charged in the Capitol riot.

Following a two-day bench trial in U.S. District Court in Washington, New Mexico engineer Matthew Martin was acquitted Wednesday on four misdemeanor charges by U.S. District Court Judge Trevor McFadden. Martin claimed that he thought the police had allowed him into an entrance near the Capitol Rotunda on Jan. 6, 2021.

McFadden said that, based on video of the scene, that assertion was at least “plausible” and that prosecutors failed to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.

“People were streaming by and the officers made no attempt to stop the people,” said the judge, an appointee of President Donald Trump.

Prosecutors argued that broken windows and blaring alarms should have alerted Martin that he did not have permission to enter, but McFadden said the sheer size of the crowd coupled with the conduct of the police undermined that evidence.

The ruling is a blow to the Justice Department and seems likely to elevate similar defenses from hundreds of other members of the mob who have claimed that they didn’t know they weren’t permitted inside the Capitol and believed that police officers had approved their presence.

Martin, who became the first Jan. 6 defendant to testify in his own defense, said he believed that an officer waved him into the Rotunda lobby at about 3 p.m. that day.

McFadden said that he did not believe that, but that the way the officer briefly interrupted the flow of people and then stepped back to allow it to resume could have given Martin that impression.

“I do think the defendant reasonably believed the officers allowed him into the Capitol,” the judge said.

McFadden stressed that he wasn’t criticizing the officers, who he said “were grossly outnumbered at that point.”

“I think they acted responsibly and reasonably throughout,” the judge said.

However, the verdict could be viewed as a message from McFadden to prosecutors that pursuing criminal charges against nearly every demonstrator who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6 was unwise and that resources should have been trained more intensely on those accused of violence or of conspiring to block the electoral vote count.

McFadden called Martin’s conduct “about as minimal and not serious as I can imagine” among Jan. 6 defendants.

Martin faced charges of entering and remaining in a restricted area set up for a Secret Service protectee, disorderly conduct in such an area, disorderly conduct on the Capitol grounds and parading or...