90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, June 27, 2022

Former White House Staffer Confirms Jan. 6 Committee Lied About DOJ Attorney

‘This isn’t about truth, but about making it impossible for conservatives to successfully enter and leave government.’

Over the weekend, former Department of Justice lawyer Ken Klukowski called on the Jan. 6 Committee to release the full transcript of his deposition testimony to correct the lies they told about him to the American public. Now The Federalist has exclusively obtained a statement from a former White House staffer confirming Klukowski’s claims.

Last Thursday, the Jan. 6, 2021 show trial continued, with the Democrat-stacked committee presenting testimony concerning a draft letter Jeff Clark, a former assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice, proposed sending to the Georgia legislature.

That draft letter, dated December 28, 2020, stated the Department of Justice was investigating the 2020 election and recommended the Georgia legislature convene a special session to “evaluate the irregularities in the 2020 election including violations of Georgia election law,” and “determine whether those violations show which candidate for President won the most legal votes in the November 3 election.” The draft letter then suggested the General Assembly could appoint an alternative set of electors based on its findings.

The draft letter’s signature line included spaces for Clark, Acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen, and Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue. But when Clark pitched the idea of sending the letter to Georgia officials, Rosen and Donoghue rejected the idea out of hand, because it was “not the department’s role to suggest or dictate to state legislatures how they should select their electors,” and “for the department to insert itself into the political process this way,” Donoghue told the committee, “may very well have spiraled us into a constitutional crisis.”

Donoghue was blunter with Clark in person, with Donoghue testifying he told Clark, “What you are doing is nothing less than the United States Justice Department meddling in the outcome of a presidential election.”

While last Thursday’s hearing by the Jan. 6 Committee centered on Clark and his efforts to have the letter sent to the Georgia legislature, the committee connected another DOJ attorney to Clark’s efforts, Klukowski—and did so by blatantly lying to the American public.

The Jan. 6 Committee Is Lying

Klukowski called out the Jan. 6 Committee’s fraud over the weekend in a public statement that began: “The January 6 Committee falsely accused me on Thursday of being a go-between in a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. That accusation is false both in its broad outlines and its details. Since the Committee first contacted me, I have cooperated without hesitation, provided it with hundreds of documents, and sat for many hours of recorded depositions. The information produced from those efforts fully contradicts the Committee’s statements regarding my actions, yet the Committee has chosen to keep such information to itself rather than share it with the public.”

The former DOJ lawyer then detailed in his public statement four false accusations levied against him by the Jan.6 Committee. First, Klukowski exposed Rep. Liz Cheney’s false portrayal of him as being sent by John Eastman to work under Clark. While Cheney fraudulently told the country that Klukowski “was specifically assigned to work under Jeff Clark,” Klukowski provided the committee documents establishing that his transfer to “the Civil Division of the DOJ was in the works since July 2020, long before Jeff Clark was...

"There is a great deal of ruin in a nation."

— Adam Smith

The Left has been tempting fate since January 2021—applying its nihilist medicine to America on the premise that such a rich patient can ride out any toxic shock.

Our elites assume that all our nation’s past violent protests, all its would-be revolutions, all its cultural upheavals, all its institutionalized lawlessness were predicated on one central truth—America’s central core is so strong, so rich, and so resilient that it can withstand almost any assault.

So, we can afford 120 days in 2020 of mass rioting, $2 billion in damage, some 35 killed, and 1,500 police injured.

We can easily survive an Afghanistan, and our utter and complete military humiliation. There was no problem in abandoning some $70-80 billion in military loot to terrorists. Who cares that we tossed off a billion-dollar new embassy, and jettisoned a $300-million refitted air base, as long as our pride flags were waving in Kabul?

Certainly, we can afford to restructure all our universities, eliminate free expression and speech, and institute Maoist cultural revolutionary fervor in our revered institutions of higher learning—once the world’s greatest levers of scientific advancement and technological progress.

We can jettison merit in every endeavor, from banning the world’s great books to grading math tests to running chemistry experiments. And still, a resilient America won’t notice.

We assumed that our foundational documents—the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—our natural bounty in North America, our cherished rule of law, our legal immigration traditions that drew in the most audacious and hardworking on the planet, and our guarantees of personal freedom and liberty led to such staggering wealth and affluence that nothing much that this mediocre generation could do would ever endanger our resilience.

But such inheritances are not written in stone. America, as the world’s only successful multiracial democratic republic, was always fragile. It was and is always one generation away from disappearing—should any cohort become so foolish as to mock its past, dismantle its institutions, revert to tribalism, redistribute rather than create wealth, and consume rather than invest.

We are that generation. And we have an accounting with nature’s limitations, given there is always a corrective, not a nice one, but remediation nonetheless for every excess.

Our major cities are no longer safe. Somehow, the Left has nearly wrecked San Francisco in less than a decade. A once beautiful and vibrant city is lawless, dirty, toxic, often boarded up, and losing population. It has turned into a medieval keep of well-protected knights in secure fiefs while everyone else is engaged in a bellum omnium contra omnes.

We know it is so because California public officials talk of anything and everything—Roe v. Wade, transitions to electric cars, hundreds of millions of dollars in COVID-19 relief for illegal aliens—to mask their utter impotence to address feces in the street, the random assaults on the vulnerable, and the inability to park a car and return to it intact.

Ditto the Dodge City downtowns of Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Baltimore, Washington, and a host of others. In just four or five years, they have given up on fully funding the police, aggressive prosecutors indicting the violent, and ubiquitous civil servants ensuring the streets are free of trash, vermin, flotsam, jetsam, and human excrement.

There are natural reactions to such excess. The most terrifying is that our once-great cities, especially their downtowns, will simply shrink into something like ghost towns—our versions of an out-West Bodie, or an abandoned Roman city in the sand like Leptis Magna, or a Chernobyl.

But the culprit will not be a played-out mine, or encroaching desert, or a nuclear meltdown, but the progressive leadership of a worn-out, bankrupt people who no longer possess the confidence to keep their urban civilization safe and viable. And so, they either fled, or joined the mob, or locked themselves up in fortified citadels, both in fear to go out and terrified of losing what they owned.

We are seeing that deterioration already in our major cities. Stores are boarded up. Women cease to walk alone after sunset. Police officers walking the beat are now rare. Hate crimes, smash-and-grab robberies, and carjackings go unpunished. Streets are filthy and littered. Commerce and human interaction cease at...

Visage à trois #325

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #492

Michigan Governor Won’t Stop Lying to Voters About Job Gains

Gretchen Whitmer says the state has added 25,000 auto jobs since she took office. It has actually lost thousands.

Michigan Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer says she's added 25,000 "good-paying auto jobs" during her tenure. The state has actually lost thousands of auto jobs on her watch, labor statistics show.

In a June 2 press release, Whitmer said she was "proud" to announce Michigan has "added nearly 25,000 auto jobs since I took office." The Democrat roughly three weeks later repeated the claim, writing in a "mobility and electrification" fact sheet that she "is ensuring Michigan lives up to its legacy as the place that put the world on wheels by creating nearly 25,000 good-paying auto jobs."

Bureau of Labor Statistics data, however, contradict that claim. Whitmer inherited 169,500 auto jobs when she became governor in January 2019, according to the agency. As of May 2022, that number is 166,700—a decrease of nearly 3,000 jobs.

Whitmer's deceptive declaration shows how the Democrat is attempting to rebound on economic issues following her stringent stay-at-home orders, which shuttered local stores but deemed marijuana dispensaries, lottery ticket vendors, and big-box retailers "essential." While Whitmer has touted leading the "best economic recovery in Michigan history," a June WalletHub report ranked Michigan 46th in unemployment claim recovery.

Michigan Rising Action communications director Mary Drabik said Whitmer's "gaslighting" on auto jobs is "not surprising."

"When Gov. Whitmer's claims are this far detached from reality, it becomes difficult to believe anything she says," Drabik told the Washington Free Beacon. "But coming from the governor who claims her nursing-home policies saved lives and vacationed in Florida while telling Michiganders to avoid flying south, the gaslighting is not surprising."

Whitmer's office acknowledged that the governor's claim stems from "the number of jobs announced since January 2019," some of which are not yet actualized. Still, Whitmer communications director Bobby Leddy said the governor "is proud of her record of job creation, particularly in the auto industry, as we move to cement Michigan's legacy of manufacturing." Leddy did not address why Whitmer's statistic does not account for jobs that have left the state since 2019.

This is far from the first time Whitmer has faced criticism for failing to deliver on a claim. In April 2020, the Democrat pledged to give back a portion of her salary for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic. But Whitmer ended the pledge just five months later in September, even as her indoor gathering restrictions and public face mask requirements lasted for 15 months.

Whitmer, who implemented a policy that required nursing homes to accept positive coronavirus patients who were discharged from hospitals, is up for reelection in November after a roller coaster of a first term. Whitmer's national profile exploded during the beginning of the pandemic thanks to her harsh restrictions and public feud with then-president Donald Trump. Whitmer went on to ramp up those restrictions, which sparked large protests, particularly as the Democrat defied her own rules.

Whitmer's potential Republican opponents include...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was not uncommon to hear progressives identify the distribution of the virus as “racist,” and to call for a species of reverse racism to remedy the offense. In the words of Ibram X. Kendi - one of the most influential, widely read and intellectually vapid spokesmen for this cause: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination….”[1] In medical practice this now means providing special resources and special care to black patients whose medical conditions are allegedly caused by white racism. It is also unconstitutional and a nullification of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which specifically outlaws systemic racism, even against white people.

It would be a relief to learn that this is a view confined to an academic fringe – and a mediocre one at that. But Ibram X. Kendi is not only a best-selling author and self-styled “anti-racist” advocate, he is also the head of a multi-million-dollar, tax-exempt, “anti-racism” institute at Boston University. Moreover, his racist remedies have taken root in America’s medical schools, hospitals, and professional associations and have become an integral policy of the American public health system.

The Equity in Health Movement I: The Ideology

In 2021, the Biden administration issued an instruction to Medicare physicians to “create and implement an anti-racism plan.” Issued as a final rule in the Federal Register last November, it states, “The plan should include a clinic-wide review of existing tools and policies, such as value statements or clinical practice guidelines, to ensure that they include and are aligned with a commitment to anti-racism and an understanding of race as a political and social construct, not a physiological one.”[2] Under this rule, doctors who create and implement an “anti-racism” plan and discriminate in favor of black patients will receive a financial bonus for doing so – in the form of higher reimbursements for their services.[3]

An even more prestigious proselytizer of this racial perspective is Lisa A. Cooper, MD, MPH ’93, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor and director of the Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity.[4] Cooper’s evidence for concluding that the coronavirus pandemic has a racist dimension,\ which is “structural,” is the shared view of the entire progressive effort to politicize the medical profession. It is the product of Critical Race Theory and other Cultural Marxist ideas, whose “structures” erase individuals and their choices in favor of ideological categories, which allegedly lead to disparities in outcomes between different racial and gender categories. But as Thomas Sowell has pointed out, there are disparities in the achievements and outcomes of all racial and ethnic groups globally, which have nothing to do with racism.[5]

Thus, the faux evidence for COVID-19 having “racist” effects is that it impacts black Americans disproportionately to their representation in the general population. In the words of the Johns Hopkins magazine that interviewed Lisa Cooper: “Nationally, African American deaths are nearly two times greater than would be expected based on their share of the population, according to The COVID Racial Data Tracker.”[6] Q.E.D.

But why is that? According to the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, Lisa Cooper: “Before COVID-19, minority communities were already disproportionately impacted by health inequities. People in those communities already have higher rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and lung disease, so these are the folks who were actually going to be at more risk of getting seriously ill with COVID-19. These health inequities result from the financial stresses of being poor and the social stresses of being from a marginalized group with a history of institutionalized, sanctioned mistreatment by law enforcement and other societal institutions. There’s a confluence of all these different factors—not having access to food, not having access to good quality housing, being crowded in small houses where there are multiple generations and unable to engage in social distancing or stock up on groceries for several weeks at a time, having to use public transportation, to work in essential jobs, and having less access to health care. These are all manifestations of structural racism.”[7]

There are so many false statements and misrepresentations in these sentences, it is hard to know where to begin. In the first place it is an insult to black Americans (even though Cooper herself is black) to describe black America as living in inner city poverty, beset by the unhealthy conditions associated with that status. In fact, more than eighty-percent of American blacks are living above the poverty line and the majority are comfortably middle class.[8] If eighty percent of blacks live like other Americans of all colors, how can racism be an explanation for the plight of...