Political Arena

As most Political Arena readers are aware, the US Government under the Obama Administration spied on many reporters, including veteran CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson.

When Attkisson was reporting on President Bush she was a hero, when she reported on President Obama accurately she became a pariah and CBS, under pressure from Democrats, willingly stopped airing her work.

The Obama Administration illegally hacked CBS’s computers, hacked Sharyl Attkisson’s computers and likely put her home under electronic surveillance. After CBS admitted they were hacked, their protest ended there. Does anyone believe that if Trump or Bush had done this CBS would have just let this go so easily?

Since CBS bailed on Attkisson (a warning to other reporters who would dare report accurately about the wrongdoing of any powerful Democrat), she is suing on her own and raising money to fund the lawsuit by herself.

Since filing her lawsuit the DoJ and “intelligence community” have directly violated court ordered discovery and have been hiding evidence in violation of the law for years.

Even appellate court judges have been compromised as two of them actually had the temerity to rule that the fact that the government would not comply with court orders and violated discovery was Sharyl Attkisson’s fault – you read that correctly. Attkisson is appealing that court’s Wilson Fisk like ruling to the higher en-banc appeals court.

Senator Charles Schumer had a warning for those who would take on the “intelligence community” as Sharyl is:

Wisely, Attkisson has found a television gig on a smaller network and works hard to keep a high public profile because just keeping it real, people have been victims of Arkanside for a lot less.

Watch for yourself…..

And this is why Avery Brooks, is well Avery Brooks. He played Captain Benjamin Lafayette Sisko on Star Trek, Deep Space Nine.

The pinheads running Lucasfilm and Star Trek Discovery are now learning the hard way what Brooks explained here.

Below is one of his finest moments in Star Trek. Please watch the videos as they auto-load in order:

Below is a letter from Emmet Flood, the Special Counsel to the President. It explains in great detail how the content Special Prosecutor Mueller’s report, broke rules of procedure, DoJ Rules, the special counsel statute and the cooperation agreement Mueller made with the White House.

Much of what is said mirrors what we have said in our postings here at PoliticalArena; namely that:

1 – There is no such thing as a declaration of “innocent” in our legal system

2 – Mueller was tasked with making a determination to prosecute or not and explain why he did or did not to the Attorney General. Mueller actively refused to do just that. Instead he left it “open” for others” as a giant political hot potato. That is not the job of a prosecutor.

3 – As part of the agreement the Special Counsel had with the White House, the White House would not claim executive privilege and would cooperate with the investigation, so long and Mueller and his team kept such privileged information, interviews and personal information. Instead, Mueller published almost all of it in volume II of his report including political, law enforcement, personal, and process information that has no business being released to the public.

Please read the entire letter below carefully and deliberately. 

===================================================================

THE  WHITE HOUSE

WASHINGTON

April 19. 2019

Via Hand Delivery

The Honorable William P. Barr Attorney General of the United States United States Department of Justice 950 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W. Washington D.C. 20530

Dear Mr. Attorney General:

I write on behalf of the Office of the President to memorialize concerns relating to the form of the Special Counsel’s Office (“SCO”) Report (‘”SCO Report” or “Report”) and to address executive privilege issues associated with its release.

The SCO Report suffers from an extraordinary legal defect: It quite deliberately fails to comply with the requirements of governing law. Lest the Report’s release be taken as a ” precedent” or perceived as somehow legitimating the defect, I write with both the President and future Presidents in mind to make the following points clear.

I begin with the SCO’s stated conclusion on the obstruction question: The SCO concluded that the evidence “prevent[ed] [it] from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred.” SCO Report v.2, p.2. But “conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred” was not the SCO’s assigned task, because making conclusive determinations of innocence is never the task of the federal prosecutor.

What prosecutors are supposed to do is complete an investigation and then either ask the grand jury to return an indictment or decline to charge the case. When prosecutors decline to charge, they make that decision not because they have “conclusively determined that no criminal conduct occurred,” but rather because they do not believe that the investigated conduct constitutes a crime for which all the elements can be proven to the satisfaction of a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Prosecutors simply are not in the business of establishing innocence, any more than they are in the business of “exonerating” investigated persons. In the American justice system, innocence is presumed; there is never any need for prosecutors to ” conclusively determine” it. Nor is there any place for such a determination. Our country would be a very different (and very dangerous) place if prosecutors applied the SCO standard and citizens were obliged to prove “conclusively . . . that no criminal conduct occurred.”

Because they do not belong to our criminal justice vocabulary, the SCO’s inverted-proof­ standard and “exoneration” statements can be understood only as political statements, issuing from persons (federal prosecutors) who in our system of government are rightly expected never to be political in the performance of their duties. The inverted burden of proof knowingly embedded in the SCO ‘ s conclusion shows that the Special Counsel and his staff failed in their duty to act as prosecutors and only as prosecutors.

Second, and equally importantly: In closing its investigation, the SCO had only one job – to ‘·provide the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the Special Counsel.’. 28 C.F.R. § 600.S(c). Yet the one thing the SCO was obligated to do is the very thing the SCO – intentionally and unapologetically ­ refused to do. The SCO made neither a prosecution decision nor a declination decision on the obstruction question. Instead, it transmitted a 182-page discussion of raw evidentiary material combined with its own inconclusive observations on the arguable legal significance of the gathered content. As a result , none of the Report’s Volume 11 complied with the obligation imposed by the governing regulation to explain the prosecution or declination decisions reached.” Id.

The SCO instead produced a prosecutorial curiosity – part ”truth commission” report and part law school exam paper.  Far more detailed than the text of any known criminal indictment or declination memorandum, the Report is laden with factual information that has never been subjected to adversarial testing or independent analysis. That information is accompanied by  a series of inexplicably inconclusive observations (inexplicable, that is, coming from a prosecutor) concerning possible applications of law to fact. This species of public report has no basis in the relevant regulation and no precedent in the history of special/independent counsel investigations .

An investigation of the President under a regulation that clearly specifies a very particular form of closing documentation is not the place for indulging creative departures from governing law. Under general prosecutorial principles, and under the Special Counsel regulation’s specific language, prosecutors are to speak publicly through indictments or confidentially in declination memoranda. By way of justifying this departure, it has been suggested that the Report was written with the intent of providing Congress some  kind of ‘roadmap’ for congressional action.  See,e.g., Remarks of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, 4/18 /19 (Press Conference). (1) If that was in fact the SCO’s intention, it too serves as additional evidence of the SCO’s refusal to follow applicable law. Both the language of the regulation and its “‘legislative ” history make plain that the ‘·[c]losing documentation” language was promulgated for the specific purpose of preventing the creation of this sort of final report. (2) Under a constitution of separated powers, inferior Article II officers should not be in the business of creating ‘road maps” for the purpose of transmitting them to Article I committees.

With the release of the SCO Report, and despite all of the foregoing, the President has followed through on his consistent promise of transparency. He encouraged every White House staffer to cooperate fully with the SCO and, so far as we are aware, all have done so. Voluntary interviewees included the Counsel to the President, two Chiefs of Staff, the Press Secretary and numerous others. In addition, approximately 1.4 million pages of documents were provided to the SCO. This voluntary cooperation was given on the understanding (reached with the SCO) that information (i) gathered directly from the White House or White House staffers and (ii) having to do with Presidential communications, White House deliberations, law enforcement information, and perhaps other matter may be subject to a potential claim of executive privilege and, for that reason, would be treated by the SCO as presumptively privileged.  Volume II of the report contains a great deal of presumptively privileged information, largely in the form of references to, and descriptions of, White House staff interviews with the SCO. It also includes reference to presumptively privileged documentary materials.

The President is aware that, had he chosen to do so, he could have withheld such information on executive privilege grounds, basing such an assertion on the established principle that to permit release of such information might have a chilling effect on a President’s advisors, causing them to be less than fully frank in providing advice to a President. Notwithstanding his right to assert such a privilege, and with a measure of reluctance born of concern for future Presidents and their advisors, the President has in this instance elected not to assert executive privilege over any of the presumptively privileged portions of the report. As a consequence, not a single redaction in the Report was done on the advice of or at the direction of the White House.

The President therefore wants the following features of his decision to be known and understood:

• His decision not to assert privilege is not a waiver of executive privilege for any other material or for any other purpose;
• His decision to permit disclosure of executive-privileged portions of the report does not waive any privileges or protections for the SCO’ s underlying investigative materials such as, for example, FBI Form 302 witness interview summaries and presumptively privileged documents made available to the SCO by the White House.
• His decision does not affect his ability as President  to  instruct  his advisors to decline to appear before congressional committees  to  answer  questions  on  these same subjects. It is one thing for a President to encourage complete cooperation and transparency in a criminal investigation  conducted  largely within the  Executive Branch; it is  something  else entirely  to allow  his advisors to  appear  before Congress, a coordinate branch of government, and answer questions relating to their communications with the President and with each other. The former course reflected the President’s recognition of the importance  of  promoting  cooperation  with  a criminal investigation. The latter course creates profound separation  of  powers concerns and- if not defended aggressively – threatens to undermine the integrity of Executive Branch deliberations. The President is determined to protect from congressional scrutiny not only the advice rendered by his own advisors, but also by advisors to future Presidents.

A great deal is said these days about the rule of law and the importance of legal norms. In that spirit, and mindful of the frenzied atmosphere accompanying the Report’s release, the following should not be forgotten. Government officials, with access to classified information derived from a counterintelligence investigation and from classified intelligence intercepts, engaged in a campaign of illegal leaks against the President. Many of those leaks were felonies.

They disclosed the identity of a U.S. person in violation of his civil rights; they misused intelligence for partisan political purposes; and they eroded public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of our intelligence services. The criminal investigation began with a breach of confidentiality executed by a very senior administration official who was himself an intelligence service chief.  This leak of confidential information, personally directed by the former Director of the FBI, triggered the creation of the SCO itself – precisely as he intended it to do.

Not so long ago, the idea that a law enforcement official might provide the press with confidential governmental information for the proclaimed purpose of prompting a criminal investigation of an identified individual would have troubled Americans of all political persuasions. That the head of our country’s top law enforcement agency has actually done so to the President of the United States should frighten every friend of individual liberty. Under our system of government, unelected Executive Branch officers and intelligence agency personnel are supposed to answer to the person elected by the people – the President – and not the other way around. This is not a Democratic or a Republican issue; it is a matter of having a government responsible to the people – and, again, not the other way around. In the partisan commotion surrounding the released Report, it would be well to remember that what can be done to a President can be done to any of us.

These leaks and this investigation also caused immense and continuing interference with the functioning of the Executive Branch. Our constitution makes the President the sole constitutional officer for whom the entire Nation votes, and [who] represent[s] the entire Nation both domestically and abroad.” Clinton v. Jones, 520 U.S. 681, 711 (1997) (Breyer, J., concurring). As a result, ‘interference with a President ‘s ability to carry out his public responsibilities is constitutionally equivalent to interference with the ability of the entirety of Congress, or the Judicial Branch, to carry out its public obligations.” Id. at 713. It is inarguable that the now-resolved allegation of ·’Russian collusion” placed a cloud over the Presidency that has only begun to lift in recent weeks. The pendency of the SCO investigation plainly interfered with the President’s ability to carry out his public responsibility to serve the American people and to govern effectively. These very public and widely felt consequences flowed from, and were fueled by, improper disclosures by senior government officials with access to classified information. That this continues to go largely unremarked should worry all civil libertarians, all supporters of investigative due process, and all believers in limited and effective government under the Constitution.

I respectfully ask you to include a copy of this letter in the Department’s records relating to the SCO investigation.

Sincerely

Emmet T. Flood

Special Counsel to the President

================================================================

As readers may recall, FBI Lead investigator Peter Strzok and FBI DoJ Attorney Lisa Page spoke in their text messages and emails how the FBI was setting up an “insurance policy” in case Donald Trump won the election.

George Papadopoulos was a junior foreign policy consultant in the Trump campaign. His area of expertise is Middle Eastern/Mediterranean studies, Israel and energy.

George Papadopoulos

Papadopoulos had already been on the Obama Administration’s radar in a bad way for his support of Israeli energy independence and his opposition to the Iran deal and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Turkey. The Obama Administration was growing cozy with elements of the Muslim Brotherhood and President Erdogan of Turkey who is more sympathetic to militant Islam.

Papadopoulos was targeted by at least three FBI/CIA assets/agents that we know of in an attempt to entrap him and make it appear that Papadopoulos was a Russian Intelligence asset, this giving the FBI/Obama Administration the excuse to get a FISA wire tap warrant against him and this spy on nut just him, but most of the Trump Campaign through him.

EDITOR’S NOTE: When the FBI or CIA want to spy on a VIP illegally,  they do not target said person directly as that raises the chance of getting caught, leaks etc. So they find an obscure person, one or two orbits removed from said VIP and use that person as the central spying target on paper, and then anyone he associates with and then anyone associated with that group of people until the real target is being surveilled. The government will then abuse “unmasking requests” (of those “incidentally” targeted /wink /wink) to reveal information on the target VIP and those around him.

UPDATE – Make that at least FOUR FBI/CIA assets – Attorney General William Barr revealed during his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that former Australian diplomat Alexander Downer was an FBI source for information about George Papadopoulos.

So while Papadopoulos was invited to talk to FBI/CIA asset Joseph Misfud in Rome, who presented himself as a Russian agent working for Putin who had dirt on Hillary to give to Papadopoulos; on the back side FBI/CIA assets Prof. Stefan A. Halper and a curvy seductress known as Azra Turk who worked to ahem….”coax” Papadopoulos into saying that he was getting information for the Trump Campaign from the Russians. In short, textbook entrapment.

It seems that Ms. Turk was a little too obvious and Papadopoulos was able to put “two & two” together. The Mueller Report falsely labels Joseph Misfud as a Russian asset and thus is a part of the justification used to get FISA warrants on the Trump Campaign.

MSN has a great piece on Stefan Halper and Azra Turk – F.B.I. Sent Investigator Posing as Assistant to Meet With Trump Aide in 2016.

More on Misfud – Devin Nunes: How Many Spies (With An “S”) Did Obama Administration Target At Trump Campaign?

More on Misfud’s ties to the Clinton State Department – Devin Nunes: Clinton ‘dirt’ tipster Joseph Mifsud has ties to State Department.

Mueller Report hid information on Misfud – Nunes: Mueller report ‘cherry-picked’ information about mysterious Maltese Professor Mifsud.

EDITOR’S NOTE – The DNC talking point against George Papadopoulos is “Papadopoulos plead guilty to lying to the FBI so he isn’t trustworthy”. What they fail to say is that in his voluntary testimony to Robert Mueller that he simply got a date wrong. Robert Mueller threw the book at Papadopoulos, his staff tried to convince his wife to leave him and also threatened to prosecute him under the FARA Act for his position on Israeli and South East Mediterranean energy independence.

Papadopoulos did not have the resources to pay the lawyers to fight these false charges even though he was innocent, so he accepted 16 days in jail as a plea bargain.

Watch the video below. Democrat Congress-lady Madeleine Dean seems so reasonable doesn’t she? Well she isn’t and she counting on you to be unaware of several important key facts to get away with the wildly dishonest statements given in the video below. The Fox News reporter pushes back a little, but essentially lets her get away with it.

It is important to understand exactly what what Congress-lady Madeleine Dean is asking from Attorney general Bob Barr is illegal for him to reveal to her as a member of the House Judiciary Committee.

She is asking for Grand Jury testimony that is given to the DoJ in secret under Federal Rule of Procedure 6E. Grand Jury testimony is not cross examined and is essentially unsubstantiated allegations and information used in a fishing expedition in order for a prosecutor to see if there is a crime alleged that he can possibly charge.

It is unethical in the extreme for a prosecutor to not charge someone with a crime, but than to release unsubstantiated rumors, hearsay and unchallenged accusations to the public to smear someone; yet this is exactly what Democrats are asking AG Barr to do. The courts have had these rules for over 200 years and the Congress has passed laws to enforce these rules for very good reasons most of which are obvious.

Congress-lady Dean is also asking that raw intelligence data gathered through covert and other means be turned over to her. She is not on the Intelligence Committee and she is not entitled to see such information. Data received during counter intelligence operations is largely inadmissible in court as people under surveillance or even moles can say or allege anything. Also, the accused would have a right to face and cross examine such accusers and witnesses.

Lastly, Congress-lady Dean goes on and on about how the Mueller Report gave no exoneration. Political Arena readers let me ask you, when a Jury gives a verdict in a trial do they say “Guilty” or “Not Guilty” (essentially proven beyond reasonable doubt or not proven) or do they say “exonerated”? As everyone knows very well the courts, juries and prosecutors never render an judgment of “exoneration” to anyone as that is not even an option available to them. They either have enough substantiated proof to make a criminal charge stick with a jury unanimously or they don’t.

Congress-lady Dean is not just a member of Congress, but an experienced trial lawyer who knows all of this very well (as is most members of the Judiciary Committee) and yet when pushed by the reporter she uses such dodges as “what do they have to hide” and makes allegations that she says are in the Mueller Report that simply are not there. She is just counting on you not actually reading it and counting on you to not understand the laws of criminal procedure which are there to protect all of us and due process.

Democrats are going to put on a dog and pony show to attempt to make Trump and AG Barr look like they are guilty “of something”, but the truth is that the “dossier” that got all of this fake Russia business going was “intelligence” that was manufactured by the Democratic Party and their allies and presented to the courts as if it was real.

UPDATE: Ted Cruz systematically dismantles Democrat’s arguments at the Barr Hearing

I just got back from Avengers Endgame. I have no words other than to say that this is the greatest epic adventure film in history.

I am aware of nothing that can top this, not even Lord of the Rings, Tora Tora Tora, Gone with the Wind, Saving Private Ryan, The longest Day, Victory, etc.

“Like the Old Man said, Together.”

While we do not do a great deal of pop culture reporting, it is worth pointing out that Avenger’s actors have universally approached their roles as something that is much bigger than themselves. They have treated the Marvel franchise with not just respect, but reverence and humility. This is one reason why these characters and the talented actors who play them, are so well received by audiences around the world.

There is, unfortunately, an exception in Brie Larson who plays Avenger newbie Captain Marvel. Larson has used her newfound fame and platform as a member of the biggest entertainment franchise in world history to engage in relentless “virtue signalling” and cramming her highly divisive radical feminist and cultural Marxist ideology down people’s throats.

The Avengers has always been about a group of VERY different people coming together in spite of their own personal failings, for the cause of the greater good. Along comes Brie Larson who time and time again uses her platform to spread divisiveness. Needless to say a great number of the fans resent it, as well do several Avengers cast members.

The disgust shown by Don Cheadle (War Machine) and Chris Hemsworth (Thor) show towards Larson is impossible to miss. So shocking was this interview that Bombards Body Language posted an analysis of it which is very much worth your time:

Notice what Larson says in reaction to some of Hemsworth’s harmless banter “I am NOT the next Tom Cruise! I am the first BRIE! Thank you VERY much!”

Thanks to Geeks and Gamers for this video of an interview with Jeremy Renner (Hawkeye) and Brie Larson (Capt. Marvel). Renner is obviously very uncomfortable with her and his body language is unmistakable. Renner has a reputation of being warm and funny so the bad behavior Larson had to display to get to this point with Renner…..

FBI ADMITS: Obama White House Used Hillary’s Illegal Email Server:

Hannity: Clinton’s colluded with the Russians

Hannity Entire Show

‘Unplanned’ director tells Senate panel about Twitter, Google’s censorship

Joseph Mifsud was not a Russian asset as he claimed to be to George Papadopoulos when he approached Trump Campaign officials about getting Hillary’s emails from Russia. Misfud is a CIA/FBI asset who works at the CIA’s “spy university” in Rome. Misfud is also a friend of Hillary Clinton and once said in an interview that he is a member of the Clinton Foundation. He worked to entrap George Papadopolous.

Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller knew all of this and lied in his report about the status of Misfud.

PAPADOPOULOS’ TRANSCRIPTS OF HEARING WITH OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE – LINK

Deep State Target by George Papadopoulos – Amazon Link

U.S. Intelligence Institutionally Politicized Toward Democrats – LINK

UPDATE –

More on Misfud – Devin Nunes: How Many Spies (With An “S”) Did Obama Administration Target At Trump Campaign?

More on Misfud’s ties to the Clinton State Department – Devin Nunes: Clinton ‘dirt’ tipster Joseph Mifsud has ties to State Department.

Mueller Report hid information on Misfud – Nunes: Mueller report ‘cherry-picked’ information about mysterious Maltese Professor Mifsud.

Obama’s Campaign Paid $972,000 To Law Firm That Secretly Paid Fusion GPS In 2016
Since April of 2016, Obama’s campaign organization has paid nearly a million dollars to the law firm that funneled money to Fusion GPS to compile a dossier of unverified allegations against Donald Trump.

BOB WOODWARD: FBI AND CIA HANDLING OF STEELE DOSSIER ‘NEEDS TO BE INVESTIGATED’

NYT: The Tables Have Turned — Time To Investigate The FBI, Steele And The Rest Of The ‘Witch Hunters‘

U.S. Intelligence Institutionally Politicized Toward Democrats

DOJ, FBI OFFICIALS ON MUELLER’S RUSSIA TEAM IN COVER UP OF MUELLER’S, CLAPPER’S, AND BRENNAN’S SURVEILLANCE ‘HAMMER’ THAT SPIED ON TRUMP, STRZOK-PAGE TEXT SHOWS – LINK

CIA whistleblower: Mueller’s FBI computers spied on Trump and SCOTUS – LINK

Obama’s surveillance Hammer on Trump worse than Watergate – LINK

Under grants of immunity obtained with the help of United States District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth, former head of the FISA Court, Klayman brought Montgomery to FBI Director James Comey. “We brought Montgomery forward to FBI Director James Comey, through his General Counsel James Baker” Klayman wrote at Newsmax.

On August 19, 2015, Montgomery produced 46 hard drives and 600 million pages of evidence documenting illegal surveillance to the FBI. The law enforcement agency took possession of Montgomery’s evidence, giving Montgomery a receipt for his production of the physical evidence.

In Decembe 2015, Montgomery was debriefed for three hours at the FBI’s Washington D.C. Field Office, inside a secure room known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), where he gave a videotaped deposition.

“Montgomery laid out how persons like then-businessman Donald Trump were illegally spied upon by Clapper, Brennan, and the spy agencies of the Obama administration. He even claimed that these spy agencies had manipulated voting in Florida during the 2008 presidential election, illegal tampering that helped Obama win the White House.”

Devin Nunes:

“The Mueller report ignored a wide range of abuses committed during the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. And now, with the revelation that the Special Counsel was authorized at the outset to investigate Carter Page for allegedly colluding with Russians to hack the election, it’s clear that false allegations from the Steele dossier played a major role not only in the FISA warrant application on Page, but in the appointment of the Special Counsel as well,” the California Republican wrote in a statement.

“The biggest takeaway from the entire Russia hoax is that our nation’s counter-intelligence capabilities should never again be abused to target an administration’s political opponents,” he said. “Those who colluded in this effort — the media, Fusion GPS, Democratic Party leaders in Congress, the Clinton campaign, and partisan intelligence leaders — should apologize to the innocent people they maligned and to the American people they deceived.”

When Peter Strzok and the crazed Trump haters were fired from Mueller’s team, they were still part of Mueller’s team….

Since today was my only day off I spent it researching the unredacted parts of the Mueller Report.

It is largely a political document being filled with speculation, unchallenged testimony and hearsay. It seems the point of the document was to repeat over and over that there was no solid evidence of collusion, but to also imply the opposite.

It also intends to blur the lines between simply defending ones self from Mueller’s unfair investigation, tactics and leaks to the media (most of which were lies), that this somehow means he sought to obstruct justice.

So Hillary and her people pleading the 5th, destroying 30,000 subpoenaed emails, computers, cell phones hard drives and documents does not even raise the specter of obstruction, but Trump using Twitter, pointing out Mueller’s unethical tactics, obvious conflicts of interest and violating attorney client privilege is somehow really bad. How dare he resist being accused of treason by a bunch of dishonest partisan hacks….

It is worth pointing out that the Trump Administration, in spite of legit protests, cooperated with the Mueller investigation, unlike the Clinton and Obama Administrations who constantly, claimed executive privilege (usually tossed out by the court 9-0), plead the 5th, ignored subpoenas, violated court orders, destroyed evidence, and obstructed in every means possible.

John Stewart of the Daily Show illustrates this obstruction pretty well.

Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller

Imagine if your local prosecutor publicly accused you of crimes and leaked to the media lies and manufactured evidence that suggested your guilt, but when the time came to show his cards to the court he bailed?

Then he issues a report to the media and your enemies explaining how guilty you are, all without proving a thing, obeying the rules of evidence etc etc etc. But hey, in the process he used the taxpayer money to do all sorts of opposition research on you, some true some not true, about you and your friends, just to smear you.

This is why prosecutors and courts usually do not release this kind of thing and why the raw data from investigations and Grand Jury proceedings are kept secret (Rule 6E) as said information is full of one sided allegations and accusations that have not been properly vetted, challenged, or cross examined by the other side.

Democrats know this, heck all lawyers know this. Keep that in mind next time you see politicians yammering about transparency. It’s phony.

[Editor’s Note – I have seen that after reading this some people still do not understand, so let us paint a clearer picture:

The same reasons apply here as to why so much of the JFK Assassination evidence has been kept secret to this day – every piece of partial evidence, every coincidence, every false allegation and every piece of circumstantial evidence would be escalated to an accusation of murdering the President.

The result would be chaos, countless lives ruined with no chance of defending themselves. The presumption of innocence would be tossed out the window. This is why the Constitution guarantees a presumption of innocence, the right to face and cross examine your accuser, and a right to discovery.]

UPDATE – A prime example of the previously mentioned phoniness is provided by Democrat Jerrold Nadler who had a much different take on 6E covered evidence when President Clinton was impeached. Watch for yourself:

This is long overdue.

Fox News:

President Trump on Thursday signed an executive order to promote free speech on college campuses by threatening colleges with the loss of federal research funding if they do not protect those rights.

“We’re here to take historic action to defend American students and American values,” Trump said, surrounded by conservative student activists at the signing ceremony. “They’ve been under siege.”

“Under the guise of speech codes, safe spaces and trigger warnings, these universities have tried to restrict free thought, impose total conformity and shut down the voices of great young Americans like those here today,” he said.

A senior administration official said the order directs 12 grant-making agencies to use their authority in coordination with the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to ensure institutions that receive federal research or education grants promote free speech and free inquiry. White House officials have said it will apply to more than $35 billion in grants.

Public universities seeking funding would have to certify they comply with the First Amendment, which already applies to them. Private universities, which have more flexibility in limiting speech, would need to commit to their own institutional rules.

“Even as universities have received billions and billions of dollars from taxpayers, many have become increasingly hostile to free speech and the First Amendment,” Trump said.

I Grew Up in a Communist System. Here’s What Americans Don’t Understand About Freedom

by Carmen Alexe

Individual freedom can only exist in the context of free-market capitalism. Personal freedom thrives in capitalism, declines in government-regulated economies, and vanishes in communism. Aside from better economic and legislative policies, what America needs is a more intense appreciation for individual freedom and capitalism.

I was born and raised in communist Romania during the Cold War, a country in which the government owned all the resources and means of production. The state controlled almost every aspect of our lives: our education, our job placement, the time of day we could have hot water, and what we were allowed to say.

Like the rest of the Eastern European countries, Romania was often referred to as a communist country. In school, we were taught it was a socialist country. Its name prior to the 1989 Revolution to overthrow the Ceausescu regime was the Socialist Republic of Romania.

From an economic standpoint, a petty fraction of property was still privately owned. In a communist system, all property is owned by the state. So if it wasn’t a true communist economy, its heavy central planning and the application of a totalitarian control over the Romanian citizenry made this nation rightfully gain its title of a communist country.

Socialism Creates Shortages

Despite the fact that Romania was a country rich in resources, there were shortages everywhere. Food, electricity, water, and just about every one of life’s necessities were in short supply. The apartment building in which we lived provided hot water for showers two hours in the morning and two hours at night. We had to be quick and on time so we didn’t miss the opportunity.

Wrigley’s chewing gum and Swiss chocolate were a rare delight for us. I remember how happy I was when I’d have a pack of foreign bubblegum or a bar of delicious milk chocolate. I’d usually save them for special occasions.

Fruity lip gloss, French perfume, and jeans were but a few of the popular items available only on the black market and with the right connections. God bless our black-market entrepreneurs! They made our lives better. They gave us the opportunity to buy things we very much desired, things we couldn’t get from the government-owned retail stores which were either half-empty or full of products that were ugly and of poor quality.

The grocery stores were not any better. I get it, maybe we didn’t need to be fashionable. But we needed to eat. So, the old Romanian adage “Conscience goes through the stomach” made a lot of sense.

During the late 1970s, life in Romania started to deteriorate even more. Meat was hardly a consumer staple for the average Romanian. Instead, our parents learned to become good at preparing the liver, the brain, the tongue, and other giblets that most people in the West would not even consider trying.

When milk, butter, eggs, and yogurt were temporarily available, my mom—like so many others of our neighbors—would wake up at 2:00 a.m. to go stand in line so she’d have the chance to get us these goodies. The store would open at 6:00 a.m., so if she wasn’t early enough in line she’d miss the opportunity.

In 1982, the state sent their disciples to people’s homes to do the census. Along with that, food rationing was implemented. For a family of four like us, our rationed quota was 1 kilogram of flour and 1 kilogram of sugar per month. That is, if they were available and if we were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time when they were being distributed.

The one television channel our government provided for us often focused on programs related to crime and poverty in the western world. After all, people were poor and suffering because of capitalism, so we were told, so we needed socialism and communism to solve the inequalities of humanity.

Capitalism Advances Private Property

Considering the shortages created by the government-controlled economy of my birth country, I came to understand and appreciate capitalism, the one system that had the most dramatic effect in elevating human civilization.

The layman definition of capitalism is the economic system in which people and businesses engage in manufacturing, trading, and exchanging products and services without government interference. A free-market capitalist system works in a more efficient manner when not tampered with by government or central bank intervention in the credit markets, monetary policy, and interest rate fixing.

Private property and private property rights are at the core of capitalism. When in school, we learned that private property makes people greedy and is considered detrimental to society. Private property was associated with capitalism, the system that our textbooks claimed failed.

Allocation Of Resources

Romania was rich in natural resources, yet the difference between our standard of living and those from the West was quite dramatic. It was indicative of a flawed economic system that most countries in Eastern Europe adhered to during the Soviet Era. But one may ask why was there so much poverty when natural resources are so abundant?

Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses. Efficiency is thus of primary concern when the goal is economic progress.

In a centrally-planned environment, the various government individuals who are assigned the task of planning the economy could not possibly know how to properly allocate the scarce resources of an entire nation, no matter how smart or educated they are. Shortages are one of the consequences of improper allocation of the scarce resources.

The free market, however, through the multiple spontaneous interactions of businesses and consumers, directs the allocation of resources via the amazing process of supply and demand. It is precisely due to the profit and loss events that economic efficiency is stimulated.

Free Markets Attract Capital

Due to its profit incentives, capitalism encourages innovation. Innovation leads to progress and an increase in the standard of living. But progress and the climate which offers humans a high standard of living cannot be created without the capital to transform and turn resources into the final products that give us the—relatively—cheap energy and food, smartphones, fitness gyms, and overall the life we currently afford. Capital moves in the direction of less regulation, less government intervention, and less taxation. In short, capital moves to where there’s more economic freedom.

In contrast, communism, socialism, fascism, or just about any government-controlled system lacks the profit incentive. The people, who are the human resources, have no desire to engage in a business where the reward is not attainable (unless it’s done in the black markets). They accept the state and its bureaucratic cronies to dictate their faith.

Capital is chased away due to the high risk associated with governments who engage in high levels of controlling their economies and, often, corruption. The overall standard of living is dramatically lower than in most capitalist places, and the poverty is higher. Consequently, the collectivist country falls into an economic and social trap from which it is hard to escape. Only capitalism can save a nation from the failure of its central economic planning.

Capitalism Helps Us Be Better Individuals

Similar to the old Soviet lifestyle, let’s remember what the typical Venezuelan family of our times worries about on a daily basis. Food to put on the table and the safety of their children. They wake up in the morning wondering how many meals they can afford that day, where to get them from, and how to pay for them.

We, the lucky ones to live in a relatively free-market system, don’t have these kinds of worries. We go to work, get leisure time to be on Facebook, watch TV, be with our families, read books, and enjoy a hobby or two. In short, we have the personal freedom to engage in and enjoy a variety of life events because of capitalism.

But there’s another important motive to desire to live in a capitalist society. We are free to create and come up with all kinds of business ideas, no matter how crazy some might be. Because we don’t have to worry about tomorrow, we have—or make—the time to read, explore, and innovate.

Capitalism makes it possible for us to challenge ourselves, to have goals, and to put forth the sweat to achieve them. It gives us the freedom to try new things and explore new opportunities. It gives us the chance to create more opportunities. It helps us build strong character because when we try, we also fail, and without failure, how do we know we’ve made mistakes? Without failure, how do we know we must make changes?

Individual Freedom Can Only Exist In The Context Of Free Markets

Before immigrating to the U.S., I had to go through a rigorous process. One of the events was the immigration interview with the American counselor who, among many other questions, asked why I escaped Romania and why I wanted to come to America. My short answer was freedom. Then he posed the interesting question: “If America was to go through a period of economic devastation with shortages similar to Romania, would you still feel the same way?” I didn’t think too much about it, and I said, “Yes, of course, as long as I have freedom.”

In retrospect, that was a dumb answer on my part. After several decades, I came to believe that the human condition of individual freedom can only exist in the context of free markets. Shortages are created by the intrusion of the state into the complex activity of the markets, whether it’s price controls or poor allocation of resources.

When shortages are powerful and long enough to dramatically affect lives, people resort to revolt. Large revolts call for serious governmental actions including, but not limited to, eroding or completely eliminating individual rights (the right to free speech and to bear arms), the institution of a police state, and the enacting of a powerful state propaganda system. Capitalism is the path to the individual rights and liberty that build the solid foundation of a free society.

Is America A True Capitalist Economy?

The short answer is no. Most of the world refers to the American system as being a capitalist one. Based on my short definition of capitalism, it is obvious that it is not quite a pure one, and I wish to clarify that the U.S. is not a truly free-market capitalist system.

The economic policy of the 19th Century with limited regulations and minimal taxation attracted the needed capital to our country. The Industrial Revolution made spectacular advancements in human conditions due to the capital concentrated in the region. America lost its number one place due to legislating higher regulations, taxation, and protectionist policies.

But we are still enjoying some of the fruits today. Compared to many countries in the world, we still maintain stronger capitalist traits than most, however Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, New Zealand, and a few other nations who lead the way in economic freedom have surpassed us (see the latest statistics).

What America Needs

Aside from better economic and legislative policies, what America needs is a more intense appreciation of individual freedom and capitalism. Such a crazy idea is not acquired through public schools or becoming a public servant. Young people don’t need more years of schooling with more worthless college degrees and student loans in default. America needs more entrepreneurs and businessmen. It needs more people with drive and ambition, more self-starters, more innovators, more people who are willing to take chances.

It starts in our own backyard, in our home, in our small group, in our community. It starts with loving, involved, and dedicated parents who’d instill the values of personal responsibility and delayed gratification in their children. It continues with an education that entails both theory and hands-on practice in environments conducive to learning how to think independently and how to acquire life- and work-skills. It evolves into a purpose-driven life rich in learning and experiences. And this may be just the beginning of attaining the intellectual maturity to perceive the value that free markets and individual freedom afford most of us.

—

Carmen Alexe escaped Communist Romania during the Cold War. Her motive was individual freedom. She has close to 30 years in the lending industry, currently working as a Commercial Real Estate Consultant. She’s been a real estate investor since 2001. She’s also a passionate Salsa dancer. She’s a free spirit doing research on and practicing how to live free in an unfree world. She shares her zeal for free markets, individual freedom, and personal responsibility by writing on her blog.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Why is Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez so popular with Millennial’s? As foolish and naive as we may see her, there is one thing that she understands that rings true with millions.

There is ONE thing that the left is quite correct about. Many of our publicly traded corporations have become greedy and in spite of the fact that their companies are quite profitable they seek to screw their employees out of proper pay and benefits even if it is to the detriment of their own customers.

We see profitable corporations who deliberately run their employee retirement plans into the ground so they can dump them on the federal retirement insurance backup. These companies are ran by bean counters who never see a customer’s face or feel the hardship faced by their own employees or retirees.

You see shows such as “Undercover Boss” and the CEO is, more often then not, shocked to see how the employees of his own company are treated and how hard they struggle. They simply had no idea.

When you see millennial’s such as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez talk about socialism, it is not just far left school indoctrination that put here there. Her entire adult life was during a time of economic hardship in the United States. Banks and insurance companies lied to everyone, many employers treated their employees like chattel, keeping employees rotating in and out so they could not eventually earn to much money, and paying employees so low that the employers were showing their own employees how to get on public assistance while having a full time job. There are companies that lobby for open borders so they can fire American workers to hire immigrants, illegal or otherwise, for pittance wages.

I myself have been offered jobs that take years of schooling and experience to get the required skills only to be offered a pittance wage. If this is what “capitalism” means than they want no part of it and who can blame them? Their view is not entirely without merit.

Kellyanne Conway is the most talented political strategist alive today, rivaled only by Dick Morris.

Today Kellyanne went nuclear on lying Democrats and their elite media masters:

Press Secretary Sarah Sanders responds brilliantly:

Lara Logan, Sara Carter and Laura Ingraham hit the fake news networks right where it hurts:

More from Tucker Carlson:

Internet “Trolls” who come into private groups and message boards do so with a single goal in mind, to fatigue and/or bore honest contributors in hopes to prevent them from contributing. Their tactics amount to the internet version of a “heckler’s veto”. They hope to take over your message board or private group by driving the good people away. Their tactics are almost always the same.

At first they start out civilly, they claim you are wrong and might post an outdated piece something with an anonymous source from the NYT or WashPo or an unverifiable opinion piece from a smear outfit like Think Progress.

When an honest contributor then posts superior evidence such as on the record statements, court documents etc, such evidence filled pieces are a bit more complicated, as it always takes more explanation to unravel a lie, then it does to simply make a dishonest accusation.

The Troll will post laughter, call someone a liar and then post again the same accusation or inferior evidence piece again, without actually responding to the specific points or evidence made by the honest participant. The Troll simply goes on as if the superior evidence was never posted in the first place and keeps repeating the same debunked nonsense in hopes of fatiguing honest participants into just abandoning the thread and going away. The Troll will also hope that readers of the thread or group will not take the time to read the entire thread carefully, fully understanding that the honest contributor will have longer posts most likely skipped by lazier readers because, as pointed out earlier, it takes more space to unravel a lie than to simply make a bogus accusation.

Then the Troll goes into rinse & repeat mode: tell people that they are liars, and then when faced with superior evidence otherwise simply ignore it, repeat their original assertion and/or make new accusations, throw in some virtue signalling – and THEN in the ultimate act of chutzpah, once the thread gets long enough, accuse the honest participants of not posting any evidence.

Eventually, someone calls out the Troll on their tactics and blasts their behavior. This is when the Troll calls for an administrator and pulls the victim card, claiming that the honest posters are being uncivil and picking on them rather than posting evidence. If said administrator does not read the whole thread carefully to see what is going on, they fall for it and scold or ban the honest contributor.

It gets better, the Troll will often start a new thread on the same subject complete with the same anonymous/debunked claims to start the cycle over again.

In thread after thread, the Trolls will do this over and over and over again until honest participants just move on for good, essentially all but shutting down participation in your group.

This post is a direct response to a piece that appeared on the Huffington Post titled “My Evangelical Church Is Gaslighting Me, But I Refuse To Fall For It Anymore.”

The article linked above is chock full of dishonest accusations and talking points that typically appear on MSNBC which cannot withstand five minutes of serious cross examination. I was content to let it go and simply blow it off as just another smear from the left that most anyone with access to an internet search engine could debunk for themselves within minutes, until I came across a section that enraged me personally:

In the summer of 2017, when the Republican Party began trying in earnest to repeal the Affordable Care Act and cut Medicaid funding, I cried out in protest. I have a medically fragile child, and insurance that covers his multiple pre-existing conditions as required by the ACA, as well as Medicaid, is one reason he is still alive today. But, for the most part, the Christians I pleaded with ignored me or made flimsy excuses for supporting the Republicans’ efforts to destroy the ACA.

There is a laundry list of directly implied lies in this paragraph that angered me personally and to understand why I first need to explain something about myself.

My adopted daughter had her first heart surgery when she was eight days old. To put it simply most of the plumbing that connected her heart and lungs was defective. My daughter went on to have multiple heart surgeries as well as multiple eye surgeries by the best eye surgeons in the world. My daughter has multiple severe to catastrophic medical conditions including being special needs.

My wife and I had good private insurance that was affordable, which was a blessing because the medical bills amounted to millions. We had occasionally encountered some resistance in getting everything paid for in a timely manner, so I went to Indiana insurance school and passed the state insurance exam on the first attempt so that I could become an expert in the insurance policy and laws. That expertise helped me to navigate an at times complex billing system, but in the long run, private insurance served our needs better than most anyone could have hoped for…….that is, until Obamacare passed the Congress by the slimmest of margins.

President Obama and Democrats en-bloc promised, “If you like your health care plan you can keep it”:

President Obama promised that health insurance would cost less than a phone bill:

The promises made by Democrats were so outrageous that they even made the left leaning Politifact’s Lie of the Year in 2013.

The affects on my family proved disastrous. We received a letter stating that in order to comply with the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) our employer based health plan was being canceled, the new ACA compliant plan, subsidized by my wife’s employer, was quite a bit more expensive and had larger deductibles, but we could still afford it.

Every year the premium increases and deductible increased jumped significantly, every year the money out of pocket for my daughter took more and more away from us, until eventually we could no longer afford the insurance and our daughter had to go on Medicare. We were not alone. Countless millions of Americans were put in the same boat:

Why didn’t we just buy an “affordable” Obamacare plan for our daughter? Because both my wife and I worked we did not qualify for the subsidy. Affordable meant premiums in access of $700 per month with deductibles up to $6,000.

My wife and I were forced to deal with a disturbing new realization. While we had private insurance we had access to the best doctors in the world for our daughter, but a great many doctors do not take Obamacare or Medicare, so the choice and quality of doctors became drastically limited.

More people lost insurance than gained it with Obamacare. What did the Democrats have to say? They said that it was a good thing because private plans like I had “are phony plans” (their words) and we were better off without it… well no we weren’t.

But what about pre-existing conditions Democrats shout?

MY DAUGHTER HAD PRE-EXISTING CONDITIONS THAT WERE ALREADY COVERED BY LAW WITH OUR PRIVATE EMPLOYER PROVIDED HEALTH PLAN.

Let that sink in for a minute.

Employer based health plans are group plans. Group plans by law, according to Public law 104-191 also known as HIPPA – Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act – of 1996 outlined in sections 2741, 2742 and 2744 the role that both health insurers and state regulators must play in ensuring coverage for those with preexisting conditions. That law was supported by both Democrats and Republicans for more than a decade before Obamacare.

The vast majority of Americans with insurance, my family included, already had coverage for pre-existing conditions with insurance bought through their employer. Plans that the so called Affordable Care Act took away from them. The simple fact is that it is Democrats who took pre-existing condition coverage away from countless millions of Americans, not Republicans. Millions more people lost their insurance than gained it with Obamacare plans and my family is among them.

In-spite of outrageously dishonest Democrat campaign ads this past election season, the Republican plan to replace Obamacare, the AHCA, includes $100 billion to insure coverage for pre-existing conditions.

The Huffington Post article goes on to blast Republicans for cuts in Medicaid funding. The Affordable Care Act only increased funding to state Medicaid programs for a set number of years until it incrementally sunsets, so Medicaid subsidies were already set to be cut by the Affordable Care Act, a law that passed without a single Republican vote.

At least the Huffington Post writer was careful enough not to mention the $716 BILLION the Affordable Care Act cut from Medicare in order to help pay for itself.

There is so much more in the Huffington Post smear piece that is easily debunked and all it would take is space and links to verifiable evidence, but for the sake of brevity I will pick just one other part to respond do.

Under the section marked “Purity and Politics” the Huffington Post writer states:

The church’s obsession with sexual purity defined my adolescence. The ethics of sexual behavior limited physical intimacy to the marriage of man and woman. And at the time, the political values of Christians lined up with this teaching. Bill Clinton’s infidelity was unforgivable as well as evidence of a political party embraced by Satan.

But when the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape leaked to a shocked nation in 2016, Christian Republicans doubled down on their support of a man who openly bragged about sexual assault.

“I don’t even wait,” Trump told the show’s co-host Billy Bush. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

I cannot read those words without having a visceral physical reaction. I am sickened by Trump’s words themselves…

It is certainly no secret that Donald Trump has a past of being a near stereotypical billionaire playboy. He was one and he acted like one. No one disputes this. My objection is the drawing a moral equivalence, or even presenting Trump’s behavior as morally inferior to the Clinton’s.

I hate to split hairs Miss Huffington Post writer, but “if they let you do it” it is not an assault. No one is saying or has said, “Donald Trump raped me.” In fact, Trump’s ex-girlfriends, in spite of the lies published by the New York Times, have defended (2) him.

Bill Clinton has multiple, credible allegations of rape and genuine sexual assault against him. Two of the dozens of women who have spoken out are Juanita Broaddrick (2) and Kathleen Willey.

In the case of Kathleen Willey the Clinton’s hired thugs like Anthony Pellicano to threaten and silence various Clinton accusers. Willey was followed one day when she went jogging. A jogger ran up to her, threatened her, mentioned her children’s names in a threatening manner and spoke the name of her cat in the past tense. When she came home she found her cat dead on her front porch. While Donald Trump has a record of being a playboy in years past this occurred while Clinton was President of the United States.

Willey is not alone in reporting such incidences. According to Disk Morris, who was the Clinton’s closest political advisor for years, Hillary was the Chief of what he called the “Clinton Secret Police” that routinely threatened and intimidated those who could do them political harm. Morris really liked Bill Clinton, but has always said that Hillary is too corrupt to be President:

People are losing faith in the government and it’s legitimacy, due in no small part to the fiasco that is our federal judicial system.

The courts and appeals process are overworked and have a huge backlog of cases largely in part to lower court judges who make decisions that they full well know have no basis is law or established legal tests and guidelines. Aside from political hacks, some judges are lazy, some have questionable mental health and some are just bad lawyers.

According to the SCOTUSBlog Statistic Archive the majority of lower court rulings as well as appeals rulings are overturned if they can make it to the Supreme Court. The following is the reversal rate for the ten judicial circuits:

6th Circuit – 87 percent;

11th Circuit – 85 percent;

9th Circuit – 79 percent;

3rd Circuit – 78 percent;

2nd Circuit and Federal Circuit – 68 percent;

8th Circuit – 67 percent;

5th Circuit – 66 percent;

7th Circuit – 48 percent;

DC Circuit – 45 percent;

1st Circuit and 4th Circuit – 43 percent;

10th Circuit – 42 percent.

This list does not even include the outright legal malpractice coming from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) that not only approved federal wire taps on political campaigns for clearly political reasons, it also approved search warrants covering millions of Americans at once with no probable cause, no accusation of a crime, and no due process, in spite of the fact that the 4th Amendments is clear that search warrants are to be specific to the time, place,  as well as specific items and persons to be searched, with probable cause, based on oath or affirmation by a law enforcement official.

This is why great legal minds should be nominated to all federal court positions, not just donors and political hacks.

Today’s ruling on CNN’s White House Pass goes against everything a law student is supposed to learn in a First Amendment case-law course.

Judge Timothy J. Kelly, a Trump appointee, ruled that Acosta’s First Amendment rights overruled the White House’s right to have orderly news conferences, Kelly also ruled that he agreed with the government’s argument that there was no First Amendment right to come onto the White House grounds. But, he said, once the White House opened up the grounds to reporters, the First Amendment applied. Judge Kelly also ruled that the White House violated due process.

Nothing in Judge Kelly’s ruling can pass long-standing constitutional tests as established by the Supreme Court and quite frankly, these rulings can not even pass the snicker test. Here is why.

1 – Acosta’s First Amendment rights overruled the White House’s right to have orderly news conferences…

This goes against long-established Supreme Court precedents that says that government can restrict time place and manner of speech if the reasons are compelling and make common sense.

For example, one cannot put a sign in the middle of a highway at rush hour or stage a mass protest on Interstate 5, because the primary impact of such “speech” is to disrupt, not to speak. In that same regard one cannot engage in a “heckler’s veto” – meaning one cannot stand up in the middle of class at school and start reciting the Declaration of Independence because it disrupts the class, prevents the teacher from doing his/her job and affects the other student’s ability to learn.

CNN’s Jim Acosta essentially does the same thing, he yells out things in the middle of events, he hogs the microphone and stages his protests in a presser so that other reporters cannot get a turn to quarry the President or one of his officials. OANN, a competitor of CNN’s filed a brief with the court stating that they agreed with the White House because there have been times when Jim Acosta’s antics prevented OANN from having a chance to ask any questions at all.

2 – Judge Kelly agreed with the government’s argument that there was no First Amendment right to come onto the White House grounds. But, he said, once the White House opened up the grounds to reporters, the First Amendment applied…

So, I can’t break into a movie theater, but once they open their doors to the public the First Amendment lets me shout my protests once inside….and all I have to do is claim that I am a journalist.

If there is anyplace on Earth where government has a compelling interest to maintain an orderly environment it is the White House.

The First Amendment is not a license to disrupt, never has been, and the courts throughout the decades have ruled so time and time again.

3 – Judge Kelly also ruled that the White House violated due process…

Due Process rights apply when one is charged criminally, or in cases where one is the target of an administrative punitive action like an IRS ruling against you or an Article 15 if you are in the military.

The government, specifically the President, gets to decide who has access to highly secured areas of sensitive government buildings. If a grade school bans me from coming on their grounds do I get to claim due process rights? Of course not. Who has access to secured government buildings is determined at the pleasure of those in charge of such buildings and secured areas. Judge Kelly’s opinion is even more silly than those who said that former CIA employees have a constitutional right to a security clearance and access to confidential information. In short, it’s nuts.

The White House should file an appeal immediately and Republicans should make certain that Judge Kelly never gets appointed to a higher court. His ruling is breathtaking in its idiocy and would receive a failing grade in most any First Amendment case-law course.

UPDATE:

This case is quintessential example of why it is important to have good defense lawyers who understand bogus arguments and are ready for them. The President’s lawyers seem to have dropped the ball.

1 – CNN’s lawyers said that Acosta had his credentials yanked because of the CONTENT of his reporting, therefore it was the President Trump trying to regulate the content of CNN’s speech which would be a violation of the 1st Amendment.

This argument is easily refutable. CNN has plenty of reporters with government press passes, did they have their passes removed? The other CNN reporters put out the same content as Jim Acosta. Acosta is typical of the reporting at CNN. This was not about what Jim Acosta says, it is the fact the he disrupts, calls names, filibusters and prevents other reporters from having a turn. IF CNN’s lawyers are so confident that Acosta’s conduct is not the issue then why don’t they behave the same way to the judge and see what happens? If Jim Acosta had behaved that way in a church or a city counsel meeting etc he would be thrown out in a heartbeat, rightfully and legally so.

2 – Should the court decide who gets a white house press pass and who does not? What gives one reporter priority over any other? Rush Limbaugh, who does news and opinion from a different angle than CNN, has a many times the audience of CNN. Should he get a guaranteed White House Press Pass by the court? This is why Separation of Powers matters.

EDITOR’S NOTE:

Article II of the Constitution states “The Executive Power rests with the President of the United States of America.” Who has access to secured government and military facilities is clearly an executive function.

There is no way to honestly make the case that the 1st Amendment or the 5th Amendment somehow gave the courts some magical power to violate Separation of Powers and dictate to the President who gets a security pass to the White House (his residence) and who does not.

Jim Acosta and CNN can publish all they want and broadcast all the fake news they like. They can protest President Trump all they like, but nothing in the Constitution mandates that Jim Acosta be able to do so within the President’s residence. The last I checked there is no judicial supremacy clause in the Constitution. All too often these judges outright deny reality, create their own construct, then demand that we acknowledge their artificial creation as absolute proof.

The judiciary is out of control. It needs to be reigned in and straight up defied when Constitutionally appropriate. This is one of those times.

….and the media thought it was cool.

Politico 11/21/13:

“I write to express my concern about threats to national security resulting from the increasing number of people with eligibility for access to classified national security information, particularly Top Secret (TS) and Top Secret/Secure Compartmented Information (TS/SCI),” Clapper wrote in a three-page memo, dated Oct. 31 and cited at a Senate hearing Wednesday.

The hypocrisy is off the charts…

Just in case Politico scrubs it, here is a screen shot:

This is our response to the outrageous propaganda hit piece that appeared in Politico entitled, “Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle“.

NOTE: Politico’s politics chief secretly colluded with the Hillary campaign in the 2016 election (2) to the point of submitting his work to the campaign in advance for approval.

Politico’s hit piece starts with a single fact that essentially refutes the rest of the entire hit piece:

Wolf-Leib Glosser, fled a village where his forebears had lived for centuries and took his chances in America. He set foot on Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 to his name. Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English.

Before 1965, with only a few exceptions, the United States generally brought in about two hundred and fifty thousand immigrants per year and the demand for work in the early 1900’s and before was exponentially higher. In 1903, just a few miles inland from the coast or largest cities, our population was sparse with a nationwide population of only 80 million. By contrast 80 million is the population of New York, California and Florida today.

Since immigration reform in 1965 over a million legal immigrants per year have been let in by Congress which doesn’t count the unknown millions of those who enter or stay illegally.

In 1903 the United States did not have huge multi-trillion dollar welfare programs, today we do and that is why merit based immigration is key to not overwhelming our safety net which is exactly what is happening now. Our prison system is also being overwhelmed. ICE reports that of all the foreign born in prisons only 8% are citizens. Non citizen federal inmates are almost 22% of the entire federal prison population.

Those numbers will continue to get worse. Why? In 1903 immigrants were expected to learn English and become Americanized and embrace our way of life. They did. Today any attempt at prompting assimilation, including learning the language, are called racist, nativist etc by Democrats. That leads to balkanization which is one of their chief policy goals.

To get a better idea of the size and scope of the immigration problem, watch the video below:

A must read from Dr. Hanson. Much of what you need to debunk the CNN talking points (lies).   Via American Greatness:

One strange trait of the die hard NeverTrump Republicans and progressives is their charge that Donald Trump poses an existential threat to democracy. Trump, as is his wont, says a lot of outrageous and weird things. But it is hard in his 16 months of rule to findany proof that Trump has subverted the rule of law.

Most of the furor is over what we are told what Trump might do, or what Trump has said, or which unsavory character in Europe likes Trump. These could be legitimate worries if they were followed by Trump’s anti-democratic concrete subversions. But so far, we have not seen them. And there has certainly been nothing yet in this administration comparable to the Obama-era efforts to curb civil liberties.

While we understand those on the left refuse to believe that a constitutional “legal scholar” like Obama would even think of allowing the executive branch to go rogue, it is indeed strange that in almost every NeverTrump attack on Trump’s conduct, there is almost no recognition or indeed worry that we have been living through one of the great challenges to constitutional government in our history.

Does anyone remember that the Obama Administration allowed Lois Lerner (“Not a smidgen of corruption”) more or less toweaponize the IRS to help the Obama 2012 reelection effort? Does anyone remember Eric Holder’s surveillance of the Associated Press journalists and Fox News’s James Rosen? Why have conservative constitutionalists focused on what Trump has said rather than the strange treatment accorded to investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson by U.S. intelligence and investigatory agencies? Do we even remember the Benghazi pseudo-video narrative and the strange jailing of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula?

Is there even curiosity about why and how the departing Obama Administration suddenly and vastly expanded the number of agencies that could have access to classified surveillance in its aftermath? Do we remember the more than 20 times Obama warned before reelection that he was not a “king” and, as a constitutional scholar, could not by fiat offer blanket amnesties? Do the authorities in California realize that they are resorting to the extralegal states-rights arguments that South Carolina on the eve of the Civil War and Alabama in the early 1960s used to nullify federal laws?

But stranger still is what we already know of the 2016 election, and the lack of outrage from constitutionalists, who daily warn us of what Trump might do—when we already know what the U.S. government has done in violation of civil rights, constitutional principles, and likely federal laws. So far there is no information that Stephen Bannon ordered taps on reporters, or that Nigel Farage was hired by Trump to find Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton, or that Stephen Miller requested the unmasking of surveilled names associated with the Clinton campaign and then leaked them to the press.

But we do know that U.S. officials, including the head of the FBI and chief deputies in the Justice Department, misled a FISA court to obtain intelligence surveillance on U.S. citizens, by providing information that they knew at the time, but did not disclose to the court, was by their own private admission unverified, compiled by a foreign national whom they had used and fired as an unreliable informant, paid for by the Clinton campaign, and served as the basis for news accounts that were used in circular fashion to verify to the court the dossier’s contents.

We do know that members of the Obama intelligence and national security teams—Susan Rice and Samantha Power among others—requested the names of American citizens surveilled (likely obtained through improperly obtained FISA warrants) to be unmasked. Then someone illegally leaked their names to the press to damage the Trump campaign and his presidential transition.

We do know that FBI Director James Comey, in succession, has admitted that he in singular fashion took notes of a confidential one-on-one meeting with the president, briefed him on the existence of a campaign dossier on him, did not disclose that it was purchased by the Clinton campaign, assured him that he was not the subject of a FBI investigation at a time either he or his subordinates were leaking the opposite to the media, and then, after being fired, leaked those memos (at least one of which was classified) to the media to ensure the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the president, who turned out to be a friend of Comey’s, Robert Mueller. Comey by his own admission has also stated that he calibrated the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton to the likelihood of her election to the presidency. FBI directors in a lawful society are not supposed to do such things.

We do know that the FBI placed some sort of an informant in the camp of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign in association with gathering information about data used by a foreign national and a paid operative of the Clinton campaign, Christopher Steele, in his effort to collude with Russians against the campaign efforts of Donald Trump.

We do know that the deputy director of the FBI is currently under investigation for lying to federal investigators, on at least four occasions, about his own conduct in investigating candidate Hillary Clinton—at a time not long after Clinton-related political action committees gave several hundred thousand dollars to the political campaign of his wife.

We do know now that both James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, and John Brennan, head of the CIA, knowingly gave false testimony under oath to Congress. Clapper has previously lied about the surveillance of American citizens; he has lied about his knowledge of the Steele dossier, and likely also lied about leaking its contents. Brennan had lied under oath to Congress about the U.S. drone assassination program, lied about CIA surveillance of computers used by U.S. Senate staff, lied about leaking the existence and promulgation of the Steele dossier, and lied yet again to Congress that the dossier was not used to prompt a CIA investigation into so-called collusion.

Again, the government’s two highest intelligence officials did not tell the full truth about their knowledge of the Steele dossier or their own roles in promulgating its contents. In a constitutional republic both such reprehensible officials who betrayed the public trust would be subject to criminal investigations for knowingly lying under oath to Congress and undermining the sinews of constitutional government.

We do know that senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr met with the architects of the Steele dossier and that at the time his wife was working on the Clinton-purchased Fusion/GPS Steele dossier, information not disclosed as required by the law on a federal form.

Mueller’s special investigatory team, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, and the media have not yet found any credible evidence of Trump-Russian collusion. Indeed, it is more likely that the indictments and confessions of some Trump campaign officials and Michael Flynn, on counts having nothing to do with collusion, either will be dropped, retracted, or will not lead to convictions, given much of the information used against them was obtained by misleading a FISA court judge and through improper conduct at the highest level of the FBI.

There is a reason why over a half-dozen top FBI officials either have been fired, reassigned, resigned, or retired. We have not yet seen the inspector general’s full report, but its publication may lead to more departures from both the FBI and the Justice Department, if not to criminal prosecutions.

If the present constitutional crisis really involves high federal officials and former federal officials who were colluding with foreign governments, then we have ample evidence that 1) Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation received large sums of money from Russian-related interests in association with ongoing requests to buy into companies that might control North American uranium stocks; that 2) John Kerry has met clandestinely with members and former members of the Iranian government to craft joint strategies to save the so-called Iran Deal, from which the president of the United States just withdrew; and that 3) Hillary Clinton’s campaign hired a foreign national to use sources from other foreign nationals to help subvert the campaign of her 2016 opponent.

We are all worried, on occasion, by nationalist and anti-democratic movements abroad in former democratic countries. We all sometimes wish Donald Trump would ignore personal spats and curb his tweeting and thus let his considerable accomplishments speak for themselves.

But that said, the current and chief threats to Western constitutional government are not originating from loud right-wing populists in Eastern Europe, or from Trump wailing like Ajax about the rigged deep state.

Rather, the threat to our civil liberties is coming from supposedly sanctimonious and allegedly judicious career FBI, Justice Department, and intelligence agency officials, progressive and self-described idealistic former members of the Obama national security team, and anti-Trump fervent campaign operatives, all of whom felt that they could break the law—including but not limited to illegally monitoring American citizens, and seeking to warp federal courts and even the presidential election because such unsavory and anti-constitutional means were felt necessary and justified to prevent and then subvert the presidency of Donald J. Trump.   

It is willful blindness for progressives and NeverTrump Republicans to overlook what has happened only to damn what has not happened. The dangers in America are not from transparent right-wing authoritarians (who are easily spotted in their clumsiness), but from mellifluous self-styled constitutionalists, whose facades and professions of legality mask their rank efforts to use any anti-constitutional means necessary to achieve their supposedly noble egalitarian ends.

This is the way democracies end—not with a loud boisterous bang, but with insidious and self-righteous whimpers.