The Entire Premise Of Trump’s J6 Trial Is An Affront To Free Elections And Rule Of Law

The imposition of a gag order on Trump means a judge can decide what the GOP front-runner can and cannot say in a presidential campaign.

A remarkable thing happened on Monday in former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial over his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election. U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan issued a gag order effectively prohibiting Trump, currently the leading GOP candidate for president, from defending himself in public ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

The gag order means Trump cannot speak publicly about the trial, potential witnesses, court personnel, or Special Counsel Jack Smith, the federal prosecutor who requested the gag order and characterized it as “modest” and “permissible.”

As my colleague Tristan Justice pointed out in these pages yesterday, that means Trump is barred from campaigning against his chief political opponent, which isn’t just President Joe Biden but the entire federal government, especially the Justice Department.

It also means there’s a potentially limitless number of things Trump could say on the campaign trail that would violate the gag order. Julie Kelly, who was in the courtroom Monday, noted on X (formerly Twitter) that there was an entire debate about whether it would be appropriate to allow Trump to use the phrase “Crooked Joe Biden.” A reporter for OANN relayed an exchange between Chutkan and Trump’s defense attorney about whether Trump could call Smith a “thug.” Chutkan, an Obama appointee with a long track record of politically charged Jan. 6 rulings, said she didn’t think such language was “necessary to advance a political campaign,” as if she’s any more competent to decide what sort of campaign rhetoric is necessary than she is to assess the value of Mar-a-Lago.

But set aside the insanity of a federal judge telling a leading presidential candidate — or any political candidate — what they can and cannot say on the campaign trail, as if judges are now the supreme arbiters of American political discourse. The gag order just underscores how insane and farcical this entire trial is.

Recall that Smith didn’t indict Trump on charges that he incited a riot on Jan. 6 or that he committed treason — nothing as concrete as that. He indicted Trump for expressing his opinion that the 2020 election was stolen. You might think it’s crazy that Trump thinks he won in 2020, but millions of Americans believe it — and they are free to say so thanks to the First Amendment. Trump, too, should be free to say it as often and as loudly as he likes. As Jonathan Turley said when Trump was indicted back in August, “If you take a red pen to all of the material presumptively protected by the First Amendment, you can reduce much of the indictment to haiku.”

The actual charges Trump faces are conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and an attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against...

Docs: DOJ Investigators Ordered to ‘Remove Any Reference’ to Joe Biden in FARA Warrant

An email released Wednesday by the House Ways and Means Committee shows Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf ordered investigators in August 2020 to remove any reference to “Political Figure 1” from a search warrant. A document subsequently released showed that President Joe Biden is “Political Figure 1.”

“As a priority, someone needs to redraft attachment B,” Wolf wrote in an email. “I am not sure what this is cut and pasted from but other than the attribution location, and identity stuff at the end, none of it is appropriate and within the scope of this warrant.”

“Please focus on FARA [Foreign Agents Registration Act] evidence only. There should be nothing about Political Figure 1 in here,” she added.

A second document the committee released Wednesday showed “Political Figure 1” is “Former Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.”

The document says:

VP BIDEN is currently the Democratic Party Presidential candidate for the United States and served as the 47th officeholder for the position of the Office of the Vice President of the United States (VPOTUS) in the Barack Obama Administration from January 20, 2009 to January 20, 2017. He is the father of SUBJECT 1.

House Ways and Means Committee

The documents were made public after the committee voted to approve more disclosures from IRS whistleblowers. Wolf is at the center of additional allegations levied by IRS whistleblowers.

The committee also released information from a May 2021 report generated by IRS investigators that noted Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Kevin Morris, could have committed campaign finance violations — which Wolf told investigators to ignore. “There may be campaign finance criminal violations based on interviews and a review of the evidence,” Wolf allegedly stated. But a Department of Justice (DOJ) official told the investigators to ignore the allegation, noting she was not “personally interested,” IRS whistleblower handwritten notes show:



House Ways and Means Committee

IRS whistleblowers also alleged Wolf refused to allow investigators to ask about Joe Biden being “the big guy” and that the DOJ twice prevented Weiss from bringing stronger charges against Hunter Biden.
The recent revelations come as House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) held the first impeachment inquiry hearing. “At least ten times, Joe Biden lied to the American people that he...

German Refugee Family of Homeschoolers Targeted for Deportation by Biden Administration

U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement told a German Christian family that was persecuted for homeschooling their children that they needed to prepare to be deported after living in the U.S. for 15 years, says Kevin Boden, an attorney for the Home School Legal Defense Association, who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Uwe and Hannelore Romeike fled with their family from Germany in 2008 after getting thousands of dollars in fines for refusing to stop homeschooling, which was outlawed in 1918, and sought asylum in the U.S. before being granted “indefinite deferred action status” in 2014, allowing them to remain indefinitely in the country, according to an HSLDA press release.

During a routine check-in with the agency in early September, the New Jersey parents were informed that they needed to have their passports ready in four weeks to be deported to Germany.

“They did not tell them why,” Boden told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

They were just told there was a change in orders. We don’t know where the orders come down from. They may have come to the local office from the field office director or the deputy field office director, which probably came from ICE headquarters.

Whether it came from the Biden administration or somebody more at the executive level, we don’t know, just the change in orders, get travel documents and get ready to go is effectively what they’re told.

The parents were also reportedly given no written document explaining the situation or the next steps, nor were they given instructions regarding what would happen to their two minor children, who are 12 and 10 years old and were born in the U.S., according to Boden. He said that the Romeikes’ five adult children’s status is also of concern. Some are married to U.S. citizens and others are not.

“We just don’t know at this point, which is part of the scary nature of it,” Boden told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “You can imagine showing up in two weeks and not knowing, ‘Will they take me or my wife into custody and then what happens to our two minor children, who are literally U.S. citizens?’ So, the uncertainty of this is just remarkable.”

The Romeikes faced similar issues a decade ago when the Obama administration threatened to deport them in 2012 after they were initially granted asylum by an immigration judge two years earlier, according to the homeschooling association. The judge’s decision was overturned, and the family appealed, but the Supreme Court declined to review the case.

A petition was sent to the White House with more than 120,000 signatures demanding that the executive branch take action to protect the Romeike family, according to the Christian Post. In 2014, the Department of Homeland Security granted the family “indefinite deferred action status” in March.

Boden told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the homeschooling association is looking into its legal options and that they are circulating another petition in hopes of raising public support and “spreading awareness.” He said that the Romeikes have been “a delightful family” as he’s worked on their case and that anyone “who meets this family would appreciate and enjoy who they are and would have a desire that they...

Joe Biden Is About to Be Let Off the Hook for Mishandling Classified Docs

Have you forgotten about the ongoing investigation into Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents? I can understand if you did because the media hasn’t talked much about it since partisan Democrats have been indicting Donald Trump for blowing his nose. The investigation is still ongoing, and according to a report from ABC News, the investigation has been expanded significantly.

“Federal prosecutors and FBI agents from special counsel Robert Hur’s office have been interviewing witnesses for nearly nine months, targeting an expansive constellation of former aides — from high-level advisers to executive assistants and at least one White House attorney,” the network reports. “Several sources estimated that as many as 100 witnesses have already been interviewed, with interviews conducted as recently as last week and some witnesses asked to return for follow-up interviews.” Among those who were interviewed were Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Don’t get too excited. Trust me. I’ve never believed that Joe Biden would ever be treated the same way as Donald Trump, and according to the story, the investigation “has grown into a sprawling examination of Obama-era security protocols and internal White House processes.” Right there, alarm bells should be going off. The investigation may have expanded, but is it really about Joe Biden anymore, or is it about Obama administration security protocols? When you read between the lines, it sounds like the burglar is getting off the hook because the home he robbed wasn’t locked.

Oh, look, I was right.

Sources who were present for some of the interviews, including witnesses, told ABC News that authorities had apparently uncovered instances of carelessness from Biden’s vice presidency, but that — based on what was said in the interviews — it seemed to them that the improper removal of classified documents from Biden’s office when he left the White House in 2017 was more likely a mistake than a criminal act.

And there it is.

The media has long sought to put distance between Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and Joe Biden’s; however, we learned that Biden was keeping the classified documents in boxes in his garage in Wilmington, Del. while his crackhead son Hunter Biden was living there. On top of that, there is evidence that suggests that Hunter Biden had access to these documents and was using them for his business ventures. Among the classified documents found at his home were documents relating to Ukraine, and in an email to his former business partner Devon Archer, Hunter cited 22 detailed points with “research” regarding Ukraine — much of which was information he likely wouldn’t have known about had he not had access to classified information.

It sure sounds like the story is framing Biden’s possession of classified documents as innocent mistakes and sloppiness, but there is, at the very least, significant circumstantial evidence that...

Third, higher-ranking IRS official says DOJ blocked U.S. Attorney David Weiss from charging Hunter Biden, contradicting AG Garland

 

It hasn't been a good week for hack-man Garland, has it?

I'll explain this in layman's terms: Multiple officials at the IRS have testified that the US Department of Justice, led by Attorney General Merrick Garland, the man Obama tried to push through to the Supreme Court 7 years ago, stonewalled the tax agency's efforts to assist in bringing finance charges against the son of Garland's boss, President Joe Biden. Another official, IRS Director of Field Operations Michael Batdorf, has now corroborated those claims under oath before Congress.

In any other context, the corruption at play would lead to multiple people being fired and jailed, but these are top-level Democrats so we're still years away from that happening.

IRS Director of Field Operations Michael Batdorf told the House Ways and Means Committee in a closed-door interview on Sept. 12 that he felt "frustrated" by the refusal of the Justice Department to approve tax charges that IRS agents viewed as well-supported by evidence, according to a transcript of the interview obtained by the Washington Examiner.

He also said the IRS removed agent Gary Shapley, a whistleblower, from the Hunter Biden case at the direction of Weiss despite having done nothing wrong.

Batdorf's testimony was the latest piece of evidence to suggest [U.S. Attorney David] Weiss did not enjoy the unfettered authority to pursue Hunter Biden that Garland and others claimed he had.

For more on the unfolding whistleblower testimony, see...

Three Years Later, Trump Deserves A Nobel Peace Prize For The Abraham Accords

On Sept. 15, 2020, President Trump ushered in a new era of peace and collaboration in the Middle East without a single bullet fired.

This month, the world will celebrate the three-year anniversary of President Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords.

While the Obama administration and others said Trump’s bold decision to keep his campaign promise and move the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the eternal capital of Israel, would cause war in the Middle East, just the opposite happened. Many of these individuals said the same when the framework of the Abraham Accords was initially announced, but just as they were wrong before, they were wrong once again.

On Sept. 15, 2020, President Trump ushered in a new era of peace and collaboration in the Middle East among Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco without a single bullet fired. Imagine that: Peace was achieved through America leading with strength, without any wars started, when the experts said the opposite would happen.

Furthermore, Trump and his administration provided the metaphorical runway and jet fuel for long-standing relationships among the Israelis, Bahrainis, and Emiratis that had been held in the darkness to take off into the light for the world to see, which has led to tremendous economic and societal expansion. As commercial ties grow, so will the strength of the bonds between the countries and their people.

Per the Abraham Accords Peace Institute, trade between the countries saw a major increase from 2021 to 2022, coming in at $3.37 billion in 2022, an 82 percent increase from 2021! Bahrain is set to utilize Israeli solar technology as a result of the Abraham Accords, and earlier this year, the Abrahamic Family House opened its doors to the world in Abu Dhabi. The center encompasses three separate houses of worship — a mosque, a church, and a synagogue, as well as shared spaces for gathering and dialogue. Based on these economic and societal indicators, the Abraham Accords have been a major success thus far.

Both authors have seen firsthand how Israel is liked and respected in the Arab world, which never would have happened if not for the Abraham Accords. Having served as a U.S. Army Reserve captain and intelligence officer in Saudi Arabia during the historic peace accords, Abraham Hamadeh had a unique experience serving in the Middle East, with Syrian ancestry and Arabic language skills allowing for much more personal interactions with Saudi Arabia’s security apparatus’ leadership — and they’re ready for peace.

A Jewish American who is an outspoken supporter of the world’s only Jewish state, Israel, Bryan Leib has enjoyed relationships and friendships with Arabs in America and throughout the Middle East, especially Saudis and Emiratis, for years that predate the Abraham Accords.

When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021 he had a prime opportunity to expand the Abraham Accords but unfortunately did not. The Biden administration took great pains not to acknowledge the Abraham Accords in the first year of his presidency, and that has created a chilling effect in the Middle East. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s decision to reorient America’s foreign policy toward appeasement with the Islamic Republic of Iran while largely ignoring America’s closest allies has been a catastrophic mistake.

As this three-year anniversary approaches, we applaud the courageous leaders Trump assembled to achieve this historic peace in the Middle East. Surely had it been Biden or anyone else, the Nobel Peace Prize Foundation would have already awarded its highest honor for the Abraham Accords. Its failure to reward these historic agreements and Trump with the honor only damages the credibility of the Nobel Foundation. Peace shouldn’t be political, especially in a world where...

Nationwide Cellular Network Connects Election Equipment And Gives Federal Government Access To Election Systems At The Precinct Level

A growing majority of Americans know the 2020 election was fraudulent. Many analysts who have been studying election integrity have concluded that there had to be a two-way connection between local election electronics (electronic poll pads, tabulators, election management systems, voter databases, etc.) and a centralized data collection system responsible for monitoring and manipulating the election. Fingers have rightly been pointed at all-inclusive election management software, the Albert Sensor system, Scytl and Edison, and the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC).

This incestuous collaboration between the Department of Homeland Security, the Election Assistance Commission, leftist/globalist funding, foreign companies, and their private partners, allowed for the real-time monitoring of all election data, and more importantly, the ability to change the results.

While experts could understand the functional capabilities of how these programs manipulate elections at the county and state levels, one area of mystery remained. Experts could not fully explain how systems within individual precincts which are supposedly “air-gapped” were adding votes in real-time – such as KnowInk poll pads in Texas that added hundreds of votes to the 2022 midterm election after the polls had closed. To accomplish election fraud at individual polling places, it is necessary to have an air-interface with the supposedly “air-gapped” equipment networked at the polling place.

A year-long research project led by an election integrity investigator from Utah, Sophie Anderson, and communications engineer, Dr. Charles Bernardin, has uncovered the mechanism that is being used to connect our election equipment at polling places across the nation. Anderson and Bernardin met while working together in several overlapping election integrity efforts. After submitting a countless number of public documents requests from multiple federal, state, and local governments, and working with other grassroots researchers, the team realized that the federal government has indeed created a nationwide network that is capable of collecting and changing real-time voting data at polling places across the country from a central location. The private network tool is called FirstNet, and like so many things that have proven detrimental to American liberty – it was sold as a tool to ensure public safety.

WHAT IS FIRSTNET?

The idea of a national cellular network dedicated to public safety was hatched in the wake of 9/11 when congested cell networks proved to be a bottleneck for first responders. In 2012, Congress created the First Responder Network Authority under the Department of Commerce to oversee the build-out of “FirstNet.” The original intent provided by its sponsors was that FirstNet would serve police, fire, and EMT services. However, the scope was soon expanded to include all “critical infrastructure” – which included water, energy, and transportation infrastructure. (https://www.digi.com/solutions/by-technology/firstnet )

Curiously, just days before Barack Obama left office, his administration’s Department of Homeland Security used the specter of “Russian interference” in the 2016 election as an excuse to declare election systems to be a part of that critical infrastructure. As a result, the stage was set to roll election systems into FirstNet.

The original plan to build FirstNet was to create a separate network with nationwide coverage that used a dedicated cellular band portion known as Band 14. Years and billions of dollars later, AT&T had built out the FirstNet Band 14 network with the coverage shown in...

Joe Biden’s Race Against the Truth

What is the long-term Democrat strategy that requires such short-term malodorous skullduggery?

Joe Biden has about 17 months left as an elected politician—if he is lucky. That projection guides most of the inexplicable and shameless behavior of the Department of Justice and Biden himself. View Biden as in a race against the truth. Will he be physically and mentally able to complete his term and head to retirement before his decades-long crimes of corruption catch up to him?

Joe Biden’s serial yarn that he never knew anything about his son Hunter’s quid pro quo grifting with rich foreign grandees has been finally exposed as the old lie it always was.

Biden’s fallback untruth—that he never got involved in Hunter’s business—proved instantly laughable, given prior damning testimonies from Hunter’s business associates, from IRS whistleblowers, from the assertions of foreign beneficiaries, from Hunter’s own laptop, and from Joe’s own earlier loudmouth braggadocio about using threats of canceling U.S. foreign aid to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into corruption of the sort in which his own son was knee deep. (Did not then president Barack Obama know the nature of Biden corruption when he appointed him as point man on Ukraine)?

To his partners in corruption, Hunter referred to his father variously as the “big guy” as well as the recipient of “ten percent” of the leveraged income. And apparently as a rather greedy pop, Hunter whined that Joe himself demanded half of all Hunter’s own shake-down income from abroad—despite Hunter’s payment of many of Joe’s monthly bills incurred on his palatial lakeshore mansion.

At some point, even the corrupt leftwing media and DNC cannot continue to laugh off eyewitness testimonies, whistleblowers’ revelations, bank records, Hunter Biden’s own computer messaging, Joe Biden’s phone calls and personal appearances, and the evidence from foreign beneficiaries.

And then there is simply the power of reason and logic.

Over the last five years of this hushed-up tawdry saga, Americans knew immediately that Joe Biden was lying in all his denials of any involvement whatsoever in the procurement of a large part of his income from abroad simply because no one in the entire Biden family had any business, investment, or energy expertise. In other words, as grifters without Joe, the Bidens had zero market value.

As energy consultants, financial investors, or international analysts, they had no qualifications—a fact known and remarked upon by their corrupt foreign partners. If any doubt about that, try to guess how much the prior cash recipients Jim or Hunter or Sarah or Hallie or Kathleen Biden will be getting from foreign concerns for services rendered after Joe leaves office.

The Biden familial mediocrities had nothing to offer shady wealthy foreign interests other than they were not only related to the Vice President of the United States, but also could guarantee that Joe Biden had no scruples whatsoever, and so even while in office he would call or meet his son’s associates to substantiate Hunter’s promises of favorable diplomatic or business treatment from the Obama—or a future Biden—administration. Note Biden seemed to have no worries whether his family’s lobbying of Ukraine, Russia, or China was in conflict with the interests of his own country.

And so deals were cut, millions were rerouted to Biden accounts to avoid scrutiny, and the Biden clan got rich off Joe’s offices and his son’s rank criminality. Joe’s adjusted gross income on his 2016 return of $396,456 soared on his 2017 return to more than $11 million. No one knows whether these or any of Biden’s returns showed reported income commensurate with what either he actually received or with his lavish lifestyle, bank accounts, and his multiple expensive homes.

Rarely has any prosecutor enjoyed a more riveting confessional than Hunter Biden’s own laptop that established his credentials as a drug addict who burned up millions of dollars on his various drug and sex...

Obama’s Fraudulent Legacy Is Being Exposed, And It’s On The Wrong Side Of History

Barack Obama’s crumbling public image is more Louis Farrakhan, less MLK.

Barack Obama is often hailed as one of the greatest orators in modern politics. While he had undeniable gifts in that department, as someone who attended a number of his speeches in person, I never quite understood all the praise. Setting aside his career-making “red states, blue states” speech at the 2004 Democratic convention — a plea for political moderation he spent his time in office repudiating — the only memorable things Obama said were either campaign pablum such as “hope and change,” or remarks that were unintentionally revealing.

In the latter category, my personal favorite remark was this comment about congressional Republicans from 2013: “We’re going to try to do everything we can to create a permission structure for them to be able to do what’s going to be best for the country,” he said.

“Permission structure” is a phrase that’s been used by marketing executives for many years, and was apparently in common usage at the Obama White House. The idea is “based on an understanding that radically changing a deeply held belief and/or entrenched behavior will often challenge a person’s self-identity and perhaps even leave them feeling humiliated about being wrong. … Permission Structures serve as scaffolding for someone to embrace change that they might otherwise reject.”

While there’s more overlap between politics and marketing than anyone would like to admit, the naked use of jargon that comes from the world of consumer manipulation betrays a remarkably egotistical approach to politics. There was no need to address honorable disagreement to Obama’s policies, which were politically extreme and consistently opposed by voters. The White House just needed to create, with the help of a slavish media, narratives that could help people admit they were wrong and come around to his way of thinking.

Ironically enough, I thought of the “permission structure” remark reading David Samuels’ interview in Tablet with Obama biographer David Garrow, which is shaping up to be perhaps the most discussed piece of journalism of the year. That’s because the entire article is a really effective “permission structure” for a lot of Obama voters and moderates to finally admit he’s an entirely overrated, largely failed president who was far more radical than he ever let on. He’s also obsessed with celebrity and not very loyal to the people who helped him along the way.

In other words, he’s pretty much the guy his critics on the right said he was all along.

MLK vs. Obama

To be clear, that’s my gloss on it, and while I don’t think it’s an unfair summation, I wouldn’t want to claim to speak on behalf of Samuels or Garrow. But I think it’s undeniable the article does real damage to Obama’s reputation because the many criticisms in the piece are rooted in factual revelations about Obama’s past and the considered opinion of Garrow, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for his biography of Martin Luther King Jr. (In addition to decades of work as a civil rights historian, Garrow is a major historian of abortion.) Garrow was considered an important enough scholar that Obama sat for eight hours of interviews with him while he was still president. And it’s clear his opinion of Obama is somewhere between dismissive and contemptuous.

Worse, Garrow’s opinion is all the more devastating to Obama because, throughout the sprawling 16,000-word interview, Garrow keeps reverting back to his extensive knowledge of MLK and making explicit comparisons between the two men to reinforce his unflattering judgments about Obama. At first blush, being compared to MLK would be an impossible standard for almost anyone to be held up to. However, as a historian Garrow is notable for deftly exposing MLK’s considerable character flaws — the degree of MLK’s womanizing and alcoholism are decidedly worse than the public wants to know — while still burnishing his historic accomplishments. It’s clear throughout the interview that Garrow is not so reverential toward MLK he can’t think objectively about him, yet he still considers him a great man.

And in fairness, Obama invited this comparison upon himself. He rode into the White House encouraging supporters to frame his election as the fulfillment of MLK’s legacy, and further invited comparisons by appropriating...

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Border Control Is Love, Not Hate

Americans must control their borders for humanitarian reasons, says Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Democrat who is challenging President Joe Biden for the 2024 nomination.

“The reason for strong border control is not xenophobia, bigotry, or hate,” Kennedy tweeted on August 7. “The reason is humanitarian conscience … Ruthless criminal cartels have woven drugs, immigration, and human trafficking together into a multibillion-dollar business,” he added.

Kennedy is trying to restore the Democrat party’s former skepticism about migration, which largely ended when President Barack Obama signaled his support for illegal migration in 2012.

Obama’s signal prompted status-seeking progressive voters to discard their claimed support for working-class Americans, and to instead vociferously support mass illegal migration as a “humanitarian” cause. In time, they portrayed the public’s demand for border control as “hate” or “xenophobia.”

That elitist and condescending view remains a minority because the public is alarmed by the civic and economic cost of Biden’s mass migration.

Under Joe Biden, and with Obama’s quiet backing, Democratic progressives have imported more than five million illegals — along with millions of legal immigrants and visa workers.

The huge inflow of migrants has subsidized coastal investors, imported clients for government agencies, weakened the political power of middle-class America, made many millions of Americans dependent on...

NYT: Trump Prosecutor “Charged the Same Story Three Different Ways”

"There aren’t enough prisons to hold them all."

What do you do when you have a political crime, but not a legal one? You keep trying to attach laws to what you consider a political crime. As I already noted in my analysis, Clinton ally Jack Smith took random unrelated laws and then waved his arms a lot while talking about democracy.

Describing publicly conducted election challenges as an effort to “defraud” the United States government turns 18 U.S. Code § 371 into an open-ended tool for suppressing a wide range of political dissent. Treating lobbying or any kind of advocacy as the equivalent of witness tampering weaponizes 18 U.S. Code § 1512 against virtually anyone trying to influence a function of government. Which is to say virtually everyone who is interested in politics. And finally deploying 18 U.S. Code § 241, originally designed to fight the KKK, against Trump and anyone trying to verify legitimate election results makes election fraud into a civil right.

Instead of finding specific crimes committed, Jack Smith took the House Democrat J6 Committee report and then did his best to fit them into some federal statutes somewhere. Including one that bans wearing disguises on highways which was created to fight the KKK.

The New York Times has to be polite and supportive so it describes Smith’s tactics as “novel”.

(Note to non-lawyers, prosecutors using novel tactics is rarely a good thing for the targets, the prosecutors or the country. Laws are supposed to be reasonably straightforward and so are prosecutions. A country where prosecutors are constantly figuring out how do novel things either has bad laws or is a totalitarian regime.)

In accusing former President Donald J. Trump of conspiring to subvert American democracy, the special counsel, Jack Smith, charged the same story three different ways. The charges are novel applications of criminal laws to unprecedented circumstances, heightening legal risks, but Mr. Smith’s tactic gives him multiple paths in obtaining and upholding a guilty verdict.

America isn’t a “democracy”, subverting it is what political parties do, and there was nothing illegal in trying to contest an election.

‘Stories’ aren’t charged, crimes are. But Smith doesn’t have a crime, he has a ‘story’ that he’s trying to criminalize by throwing whatever statutes he has at the wall to see what sticks.

Kimberley A. Strassel quickly shows the implications of this “novel” approach in her Wall Street Journal piece.

Take Mr. Trump out of the equation and consider more broadly what even the New York Times calls Mr. Smith’s “novel approach.” A politician can lie to the public, Mr. Smith concedes. Yet if that politician is advised by others that his comments are untruthful and nonetheless uses them to justify acts that undermine government “function,” he is guilty of a conspiracy to defraud the country. Dishonest politicians who act on dubious legal claims? There aren’t enough prisons to hold them all.

Consider how many politicians might already be doing time had prosecutors applied this standard earlier. Both Al Gore and George W. Bush filed lawsuits in the 2000 election that contained bold if untested legal claims. Surely both candidates had advisers who told them privately that they may have legitimately lost—and neither publicly conceded an inch until the Supreme Court resolved the matter. Might an ultimate sore winner have used this approach to indict the loser for attempting to thwart the democratic process?

And why limit the theory to election claims? In 2014 the justices held unanimously that President Barack Obama had violated the Constitution by decreeing that the Senate was in recess so that he could install several appointees without confirmation. It was an outrageous move, one that Mr. Obama’s legal counselors certainly warned was a loser, yet the White House vocally insisted the president had total “constitutional authority” to do it. Under Mr. Smith’s standard, that was a lie that Mr. Obama used to defraud the public by jerry-rigging the function of a labor board with illegal appointments.

What’s the betting someone told President Biden he didn’t have the power to erase $430 billion in student loan debt. Oh, wait! That’s right. He told himself. “I don’t think I have the authority to do it by signing with a pen,” he said in 2021. The House speaker advised him it was illegal: “People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not,” Nancy Pelosi said. Yet Mr. Biden later adopted the lie that he did, and took action to defraud taxpayers by obstructing the federal function of loan processing—until the Supreme Court made him stop.

If even a former president can be hit with conspiracy charges, what’s to protect a mere congressman, or a failed candidate, or a consultant? For how long did Stacey Abrams falsely dispute her loss in the 2018 Georgia governor’s race and pressure Georgia lawmakers to alter election procedures in ways that might undermine voting integrity on the basis of untruths? Would the advisers who egged her on in that pursuit qualify as co-conspirators, like the lawyers in Mr. Smith’s indictment?

Strassel goes on like this for a while and obviously she has a point. Legally. Politically, it’s another matter.

The Al Capone tax case wasn’t as absurdly corrupt and abusive as in The Untouchables, but it was obviously corrupt and, for once, not by Capone. The presumption was that Capone had skipped justice too many times and that he was a public menace, all true, and that he had to be locked up no matter what.

That’s the reasoning behind supporting the otherwise nightmarish premises that Jack Smith sets out. Democrats are assuming that they won’t be used against them or much of anyone except maybe Trump, some ‘right-wingers’ and then it’ll stop.

Just like it did in the Soviet Union, Communist China, and Revolutionary France...

Tanya S. Chutkan, Obama-Appointed DC Judge Assigned to Trump Case, Gave J6 Defendants Sentences LONGER Than Govt Requested

Tanya Chutkan, the Obama-appointed DC district judge assigned to Donald Trump's Jan 6 case, is reportedly "the only federal judge in Washington, D.C. who has sentenced Jan. 6 defendants to sentences longer than the government had requested."

From The New York Times, "Judge in Trump Jan. 6 Trial Is Known for Tough Capitol Riot Sentences": When former President Donald J. Trump appears in court before Judge Tanya S. Chutkan on charges of conspiring to subvert American democracy, it will not be the first time she has dealt with high-profile questions related to Mr. Trump's attempts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election. Nearly two years ago, Judge Chutkan rejected Mr. Trump's efforts to prevent his White House records from being given to the House committee investigating his actions leading up to and during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by his supporters — delivering a swift and sharp rebuke about the limits of his ability as former president to invoke executive privilege. "Presidents are not kings," she wrote, "and plaintiff is not president."*Cue sassy finger snapping.* [...] Judge Chutkan was appointed by President Barack Obama and, before joining the bench, donated money to his campaigns. [...] [...] Judge Chutkan ruled against Mr. Trump in the dispute over White House papers with the Jan. 6 committee [...] Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Judge Chutkan came to the United States to attend college at George Washington University and obtained her law degree at the University of Pennsylvania. She spent more than a decade serving as a court-appointed lawyer for indigent clients and worked for a time at the white-shoe law firm Boies Schiller & Flexner before joining the federal bench in Washington in 2014. She is married to Peter A. Krauthamer, a former associate judge of the Superior Court in the District of Columbia, which handles local criminal trials. [...] In 2017, she ruled that an American citizen being held in military detention in Iraq as a suspected member of ISIS had a right to a lawyer, over the Trump administration's objections. She also blocked the administration from preventing undocumented, pregnant teenagers from having access to abortion-related services. And in 2019, she issued an injunction halting the Trump administration's plan to resume the death penalty, blocking executions of four federal convicts. But her involvement in cases related to Jan. 6 is likely to attract the most attention as she takes up what seems destined to be one of the most significant criminal trials in American history. She handled both a lawsuit brought by Mr. Trump seeking to block his White House records from being handed over to the House Jan. 6 committee and several criminal cases brought against rioters in the Capitol attack. Over the past two years, Judge Chutkan has earned a reputation for handing down tough penalties to people convicted of crimes in the Jan. 6 riot. [...] The events of Jan. 6 were "an attempt of a violent mob to prevent the orderly and peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next" and their efforts "soiled and defaced the halls of the Capitol," she said in October 2021 in delivering a harsher sentence to a rioter than what prosecutors had requested. "The country is watching to see what the consequences are," she declared, adding, "There have to be consequences."The New York Times is floating racial revenge as a motive for Chutkan to have Trump crucified: As a matter of political reality, it may also prove significant that Judge Chutkan is Black, an immigrant and a woman. Mr. Trump has a history of attacking judges and prosecutors — especially those who are women, members of minority groups or both — in personal terms. In 2016, Mr. Trump denounced Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was overseeing a fraud case against Trump University, calling him a "Mexican." He accused the judge of bias because he wanted to...

Conservatives Fight Secretive Biden Voting Order as ‘Bidenbucks’ – Federal ‘Zuckbucks’ on Steroids

GOP lawmakers and other conservative critics are working to expose and fight a secretive executive order by President Biden to expand voter participation in elections, which they suspect has become a powerful government-wide complement to private left-wing election financing that could tip the 2024 campaign illegally and unfairly in Democrats’ favor.

Cast as a civil rights measure issued as the nation marked the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” police beatings of voting-rights marchers outside Selma, Ala., the president’s 2021 directive orders every federal agency, more than 600 in all, to register and mobilize voters – particularly “people of color” and others the White House says face “challenges to exercise their fundamental right to vote.” It further orders the agencies to collaborate with ostensibly nonpartisan nonprofits.

Since issuing the order, critics claim, the Biden administration has stonewalled efforts to scrutinize its implementation by often ignoring document requests and litigating to shield relevant records. The critics, including members of Congress, state officials, and government watchdog groups, say the executive branch is attempting to federalize elections with an end-run around constitutionally prescribed state control over voting – in many cases using the resources of agencies with missions unrelated to registering voters.

Some have labeled the president’s order “Bidenbucks,” evoking “Zuckbucks” – Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan’s funneling of some $400 million through two nonprofits into election offices across the country during the 2020 election. That money often flowed to left-leaning nonprofits managing critical aspects of election administration that were considered crucial to Biden’s winning the White House.

In a notable recent defeat for conservatives, Judge Beryl Howell of the D.C. District Court, an Obama appointee to the generally liberal jurisdiction, on July 18 dismissed Freedom of Information Act requests from the America First Legal Foundation, siding with administration arguments that the records in question were exempt as privileged presidential communications. Trying to pry strategy documents loose, America First had sued nearly a dozen non-responsive agencies, ranging from the Departments of Agriculture, Education, and Health and Human Services to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Left-leaning think tank Demos, which in late 2020 drafted a blueprint for the order, estimates that if fully implemented, it could generate 3.5 million new or updated voter registrations annually. Even a far more modest increase could dramatically impact the 2024 presidential election, considering that recent contests have been decided by just thousands of votes in several states.

Critics say the order could violate laws including the Administrative Procedure Act, barring agency actions “in excess of statutory jurisdiction” and the Hatch Act, curbing political activities by federal employees.

Their concerns are driven in part by the fact that the directive appeared to be cribbed from the Demos white paper. Two ex-Demos executives – one of whom helped write the paper – departed for the Biden administration for roles positioning them to push for the order.

Republican House members raised the alarm about this issue in a January 2022 letter requesting documents from administration officials, calling the order “nearly identical to a federal election takeover plan crafted by the radical left-leaning group known as...

Flashback: Obama gave away the internet and, with it, our liberty

In 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president, if you asked the average American, “What is the Internet? What is the World Wide Web? And, what is Email?” most Americans would not have known.

It is hard to believe in less than a quarter century, the internet has transformed the world. It has created wealth for many. It has changed the way America does business. It has given birth to political movement and killed political careers. The Internet is without a doubt the greatest tool for advancing freedom since the invention of the printing press.

It is no great shock that President Obama does not like American control of the internet. The internet was an American invention and America shared it with the world. American values of freedom and liberty created the Internet and allowed it to flourish. Now, in one of his last acts, Obama wants to destroy the Internet.

No, this is not one of those crazy internet conspiracy theories.

Despite the explicit wishes of Congress, Mr. Obama wants to allow an international body to take control of the Internet...

Senator Uses Freedom Center’s Expose of Quotas for White Male Officers to Challenge Joint Chiefs Chair Nominee

Biden's nominee wanted a 43% quota for white male Air Force officers.

In May, Front Page Magazine broke the story that Air Force Chief of Staff Charles Q. Brown Jr., who had been put forward by Biden as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had signed off on a 43% quota for white male officers.

As the investigative piece warned Brown’s quotas limit the number of white officers to 67% and cut white men down to 43%.

“The Air Force officer corps is currently 77% white: getting it down to 67%, a reduction of 10%, would require serious effort to purge white officers and bar the doors to any new ones. Reducing the number of white men in the officer corps to a minority, 43%, would cripple the service and wipe out generations of talent: especially when 86% of pilots are white men. What do you do with those 86% of white male pilots?”

The David Horowitz Freedom Center had led the way into investigating military wokeness as part of its Disloyal Military project which has generated two breakthrough pamphlets, “Disloyal: How The Military Brass Is Betraying Our Country” and “How Obama And Biden Destroyed The Greatest Military The World Has Ever Seen”.

Since Brown’s nomination became official, Shillman Journalism Fellow Daniel Greenfield has made a tour of podcasts and radio shows urging Senate members to challenge the nominee on these racist quotas.

At the Senate Armed Services Committee confirmation hearing, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo) challenged Brown by asking him point blank, “Do we have too many white officers in the Air Force?”

When Brown tried to dodge the question while claiming that he just wanted the most qualified officers, Sen. Schmitt cited the August memo that had been uncovered by the Front Page Magazine investigation.

“That answer is not consistent with your August 9th memo,” Sen. Schmitt challenged, “that there should be a reduction of about 9% of the white officers. That’s a reduction of 5,400. 5,400 too many white officers.”

Brown argued that the numbers were fair because they were based on national “demographics”.

“Your story about wanting to be the best pilot in the Air Force regardless of race, that is what the military is supposed to be,” Sen. Schmitt told Brown. “It’s this great meritocracy”.

But the senator from Missouri argued that under Brown, the Air Force had lost its way.

“Somehow, some way we ended up in a place where a general in the Air Force is advocating for racial quotas,” Sen. Schmitt. “And I just think that’s wrong.”

While the Senate Armed Services Committee has voted to move Brown’s nomination forward, it goes to the Senate where members will have the opportunity to take a stand against the...

Supreme Court Ends the Last Vestige of ‘Systemic Racism’ in America

On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the greatest majority opinion ever written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts. That one-time Obamacare savior, who in 2012 rewrote the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate as a “tax” in order to salvage President Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy, this time penned a landmark ruling abolishing something the Left has been clamoring to abolish ever since the 2020 death of George Floyd and the subsequent “Great Awokening” that rocked the republic: “systemic racism” in America.

Oh, that wasn’t the way Thursday’s huge news was framed by MSNBC talking heads and New York Times editorialists? Curious, that.

It is true that the corporate media headlines emanating from Thursday’s consolidated opinion in this term’s twin affirmative action cases, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard College and SFFA v. University of North Carolina, would have you believe that the Court did something closely approximating the opposite of ending so-called “systemic racism” in America. Those wokesters, “identity politics” enthusiasts, Ibram X. Kendi-esque “anti-racism” proponents, Al Sharpton-style race hustlers, and the addlebrained president of the United States himself would all instead have us believe that a far-right, reactionary cabal of jurisprudential troglodytes on the High Court “set us back” on the issue of race. According to this popular narrative, the SFFA opinion is positively nightmarish; John Roberts might as well be a reincarnation of Roger Taney.

The fact that such a narrative exists – indeed, that it is so popular – says a great deal about the woeful state of intellectual honesty, and indeed basic ethical decency, on the American Left. (That very much includes the two vociferous dissenters in SFFA, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson).

The outcome of SFFA, which mercifully overturns the Court’s muddled mess of affirmative action precedents going back four and a half decades, is every bit as much a vindication of the U.S. Constitution’s colorblindness as was last century’s epochal desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. The “sordid business” of race-conscious admissions decisions in American universities, to borrow from one of Roberts’ earliest notable writings during his Court tenure (League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry, in 2006), has been vanquished in the name of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Even preceding the Constitution, the very equality principle – “We hold these truths to be self-evident …” – of Jefferson’s Declaration itself has been vindicated, as well.

In what world is that a fundamentally just result not worth celebrating?

Admissions officers at both public and private universities shall never again be legally permitted to explicitly take race into account when they make admissions decisions. If they do so anyway, they will now face personal liability and be subject to monetary damages. Sure, some officers will try to get creative and toe a very careful line, but how far can they really go when it is their own personal savings on the line? And as the chief justice himself clarified, in a delectable shot across the bow fired at Sotomayor and Jackson: “(D)espite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. (A dissenting opinion is generally not the best source of legal advice on how to comply with the majority opinion.)”

SFFA is also a vindication of Justice Clarence Thomas, the greatest living American, who has been sounding the alarm on the perils of affirmative action for decades. As Thomas has repeatedly pointed out, and which he reiterated in his magisterial SFFA concurrence, the liberals and progressives who seek to “help” black and Hispanic applicants via affirmative action policies oftentimes do the precise opposite of...

Biden Admin Allowed Pro-Iran Figure Accused of Mishandling Classified Info to Remain as ‘Special Envoy’ to Iran

No FBI raids, no trials, you can even stay at your job.

You may remember Rob Malley from Islamic terrorism scandals such as these.

During the 2008 election, the Obama campaign dropped Robert Malley as an adviser over his work with Hamas on behalf of George Soros’ International Crisis Group. Once in office, Obama brought back his old buddy into the National Security Council.

Malley then became the lead negotiator for the sellout deal to legitimize Iran’s nuclear program.

Despite vocal criticism from Iranian dissidents and the country’s freedom movement, Biden chose Malley as his special envoy to Iran. Even as Robert Malley continues conducting outreach to the Islamic terrorist state on behalf of the Biden administration, his son works at a pro-Iran organization tied to a key figure in the Iran Lobby.

Robert was the son of Simon Malley, an adviser to PLO terrorist leader Yasser Arafat and the founder of a Communist party in Arafat’s native homeland of Egypt. Blaise Malley represents the third generation of the family’s leftist radicalism being used to prop up Islamist movements.

The son of Biden’s envoy to Iran spends his time undermining American efforts against Iran.

Blaise Malley is listed as a full-time reporter for the Quincy Institute run and funded by key figures in the pro-Iran movement.

Now, shockingly, Rob Malley has been charged with mishandling classified information.

Rob Malley, the US special envoy on Iran, has been placed on leave without pay, which occurred after his security clearance was suspended earlier this year amid an investigation into his handling of classified material, multiple sources told CNN.

A US official said that Malley’s clearance was suspended amid a State Department diplomatic security investigation into the possible mishandling of classified information. Another source familiar with the matter said he was placed on unpaid leave on Thursday afternoon.

For a period of time following the State Department investigation, Malley remained on the job but was not allowed to access classified information, said the US official, who requested anonymity while discussing a sensitive matter.

State Department spokesperson Matt Miller confirmed to CNN on Thursday afternoon that Malley was on leave, though earlier in the day he said that Malley was still the special envoy for Iran.

“Rob Malley is on leave and Abram Paley is serving as acting Special Envoy for Iran and leading the Department’s work in this area,” Miller told CNN on Thursday afternoon, after earlier in the day saying that Malley remained in the role.

Contrast this treatment with that of Trump and other political targets.

Malley had his security clearance suspended and was being investigated for mishandling classified information, but was still allowed to function as the envoy to Iran.

When caught out on it, the State Department claimed that he was still the envoy before apparently replacing him.

There’s no way to spin this except that it’s a major scandal that makes a mockery of the pretense of this administration that it cares about classified information and national security. No one with Rob Malley’s background, which caused him to be dumped from the Obama campaign for his contacts with Hamas, should have ever held the national security positions he did under the Obama and Biden administrations.

When faced with mishandling of classified information, the Biden response was to let him stay on the job without giving him access to classified information even though his job is of the highest level of...