Christina Bohannan interned at Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection
Democrats lie effortlessly. I assume sociopathy is requisite for the role [US Patriot]
Democratic congressional candidate Christina Bohannan often boasts that she once worked as an environmental engineer. She always fails to mention it was an internship.
On Thursday, the Iowa state legislator, who is running to represent the state’s first district in Congress, told a Pella, Iowa, audience that she worked as an “environmental engineer with the Department of Environmental Protection in Florida doing water quality work.” Her résumé shows this was an internship Bohannan held for four years while studying at the University of Florida. No further experience in the field is listed, and she still holds just an engineering intern license in the state.
Bohannan did not return a request for comment.
As a swing-district Democrat facing off against incumbent Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R.), Bohannan has tried to cultivate the image of a pragmatic moderate, burnishing her apparent engineering credentials to speak to local concerns. In a 2020 letter to the Iowa City Press-Citizen, a Democratic official said Bohannan’s experience was of “critical importance for improving Iowa’s water quality issues.”
Bohannan’s campaign website also says she is a “former engineer.” One progressive group touted Bohannan’s “pro-science policies” and experience as an environmental engineer in its endorsement.
In October, a Wikipedia user who identified as Bohannan’s “State House campaign manager” edited the candidate’s page to add she was an “environmental” engineer, the site’s revision history shows.
Bohannan’s effort to appear moderate has also led her to disavow past policy positions. In August, she scrubbed her old campaign site of endorsements for taxpayer-funded sex-reassignment surgeries and opposition to voter ID laws. Around 70 percent of Iowans support voter ID, a 2017 Des Moines Register poll found.
In 2019, Bohannan contributed to a bail fund for illegal immigrants maintained by a group that wants to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement and work toward a “world without police.” She has also opposed school choice as a lawmaker while sending her daughter to a private school.
Before her run for Congress, Bohannan served as a legislator in Iowa’s heavily Democratic 85th district. She has been a professor at the University of Iowa’s law school since 2000. Her résumé lists publications on antitrust and copyright law but nothing about environmental issues.
In July, an internal poll by Bohannan’s campaign revealed the Democrat trailing Miller-Meeks by 1 point, the Iowa-based Gazettereported. About 22 percent of the voters surveyed remain undecided.
Sean Casten holds up to $500,000 in company that is expected to benefit from Democrats’ so-called Inflation Reduction Act
Illinois Democrat Sean Casten is very happy with his party’s “historic” green energy spending. His latest financial disclosure may show why: The congressman holds up to $500,000 in a green energy company that will likely benefit from the spending.
Casten has spent much of the last week touting Democrats’ so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which is not expected to have “any measurable impact on inflation” but does funnel nearly $400 billion toward green energy initiatives. Casten in a statement last week called that spending “a historic win for American families and for the future of our planet.” It could also be a historic win for Casten’s investment portfolio.
That’s because Casten, according to a financial disclosure he filed last week, holds between $250,000 and $500,000 in Greenleaf Power, a Sacramento-based green energy company that sells “carbon-neutral electricity” to utility companies. The Casten-backed green energy bill contains specific provisions that are likely to benefit Greenleaf. The legislation, for example, allocates roughly $30 billion toward “grant and loan programs for states and electric utilities” that obtain “clean electricity” like that offered by Greenleaf. The bill also provides generous tax credits to property owners who install equipment to harness alternative energy sources such as biomass, in which Greenleaf specializes.
Still, none of Casten’s many statements touting the Inflation Reduction Act’s green energy spending disclose the Democrat’s six-figure stake in Greenleaf, which brought Casten up to $50,000 in “partnership income” in 2021 alone. Casten’s decision to fixate on Democrats’ work to “fight climate change,” meanwhile, may prove to be shortsighted as the congressman faces a competitive reelection campaign against Republican Keith Pekau. Only 35 percent of U.S. adults are “extremely or very concerned” about the effects of climate change, down from 44 percent just three years ago, according to an Associated Press poll.
Power the Future founder and executive director Daniel Turner called it a “shame that the American people are going to be on the hook” for “provisions that enrich this member of Congress.” He also argued that the “green energy” Greenleaf produces from biomass is not truly “green”—the company generates electricity by burning wood, a far cry from the wind and solar energy Casten has touted in the past.
“It just shows you the political motives behind this piece of legislation,” Turner told the Washington Free Beacon. “The fact that we consider biomass clean is really laughable, because biomass is really just burning trees. So why are we proud of that?”
Casten did not return a request for comment. The Democrat’s latest financial disclosure provides some clarity on his Greenleaf holding, as the congressman’s prior disclosure listed Greenleaf but claimed the asset had no value. Casten filed that 2020 disclosure as he urged Congress to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on “tax credits for clean energy.” In one case, Casten went as far as to attack fellow congressional Democrat Joe Manchin after the West Virginia senator expressed opposition toward the spending.
“We’re trying to drive a car into the future,” Casten said during an September 2021 MSNBC interview. “With all due respect to Mr. Manchin, until we’re lining up to take off the emergency brake this car ain’t driving very fast. It’s certainly not driving as fast as it needs to, and that’s the pressure we as Democrats have to keep focused on.” Casten’s past clean energy spending advocacy also excluded any mention of his Greenleaf investment.
Beyond the American public’s waning concern about climate change, it’s unclear if the Inflation Reduction Act, which Joe Biden signed into law on Tuesday, will have a sizable impact on climate change. A climate scientist who led an independent analysis of the package told the Associated Press the legislation will reduce global warming “not a lot.”
Data suggests ‘economic weakness will intensify and spread more broadly’
America’s recessionary drumbeat just got louder as a key economic gauge from the Conference Board dropped for the fifth month in a row, weighed down by a slowing job market, weak manufacturing new orders, and deep consumer pessimism.
The Leading Economic Index (LEI) for the United States, which is a forward-looking gauge designed to predict business cycle shifts including recessions, fell by 0.4 percent in July, following a 0.7 percent drop in June, the Conference Board said on Aug. 18.
“The U.S. LEI declined for the fifth consecutive month in July, suggesting recession risks are rising in the near term,” Ataman Ozyildirim, senior director for economics at the Conference Board, said in a statement.
While the U.S. economy met the common rule-of-thumb definition for a recession when gross domestic product (GDP) printed negative for two quarters in a row earlier this year, recessions are formally called by a panel of economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). They use a broader definition than the two-quarter rule, relying on a wide range of indicators, including the labor market, which has remained on a relatively solid footing.
The Biden administration has seized on the NBER’s criteria for declaring a downturn, insisting that the economy isn’t in a recession, with White House officials often citing labor market strength—though there are signs that it’s cooling.
Even though unemployment is at 3.5 percent and the latest non-farm payrolls report showed U.S. employers adding a forecast-beating 528,000 in July, a growing number of U.S. corporations have announced hiring freezes or layoffs, while the number of Americans filing for unemployment insurance has been slowly trending up.
Mild or Severe Recession?
The slowing labor market was one of the factors singled out by Ozyildirim in his comments on the LEI’s fifth consecutive monthly slump.
“Consumer pessimism and equity market volatility as well as slowing labor markets, housing construction, and manufacturing new orders suggest that economic weakness will intensify and spread more broadly throughout the US economy,” he said, adding that the Conference Board projects that the U.S. economy won’t grow in the third quarter and “could tip into a short but mild recession by the end of the year or early 2023.”
While the view that America’s recession will be short and mild has its advocates, economist Nouriel Roubini, who got the nickname “Dr. Doom” after correctly predicting the 2007–08 financial crisis, calls that view “delusional.”
Roubini said in a recent interview on Bloomberg TV that he believes persistently high inflation will force the Fed to keep monetary settings tight, which will tip the U.S. economy into a “severe recession and a severe debt and financial crisis” that will be long-lasting.
Similarly, former President Donald Trump recently warned that, unless the country changes course in key areas—including energy policy—he believes something worse than a recession is on the horizon.
“Not recession. Recession’s a nice word. We’re going to have a much bigger problem than recession,” Trump said at a rally in Arizona at the end of July. “We’ll have a depression.”
After criticism from conservative lawmakers and backlash from citizens nationwide, the Fargo Board of Education on Aug. 18 voted to reverse course on its previous week’s decision to stop reciting the Pledge of Allegiance before its meetings.
On Aug. 9, seven of the board’s nine members, including four newcomers who took office in June, voted to cancel a previous board measure that was instituted in March before the election.
Board vice president Seth Holden said at the Aug. 9 meeting that the Pledge of Allegiance was contrary to the district’s diversity, equity, and inclusion priorities.
“Given that the word ‘God’ in the text of the Pledge of Allegiance is capitalized, the text is clearly referring to the Judeo-Christian God, and therefore, it does not include any other faiths such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism,” Holden said, adding that this made the pledge of allegiance a “non-inclusionary act.”
Reciting the pledge is a “non-inclusionary act” and there is text within the pledge that is “simply not true,” Holden added.
“The statement that we are ‘one nation under God’ is simply an untrue statement,” Holden said. “We are one nation under many or no gods.”
Tracie Newman, who is board president, recommended that a member recite “a shared statement of purpose that would bring us all together” at the start of the meetings instead of the pledge, adding that it would be “unifying.”
“I’m just not sure that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance is a useful way to begin every one of our board meetings,” Newman said at the Aug. 9 meeting.
North Dakota’s Republican Party called the board’s Aug. 9 vote “laughable” and an “affront to our American values.”
Republican State Sen. Scott Meyer told North Dakota media outlets last week that he would start work on a school voucher bill draft to allow public money to pay for private school tuition.
“These positions like by the Fargo School Board just don’t align with North Dakota values,” he said. “The logical solution is to just give parents that option to help educate their kids.”
Robin Nelson was one of two board members who voted on Aug. 9 to keep the pledge.
“It was a very easy ‘no’ vote from me from the get-go. I knew right away it would be controversial,” Nelson told Fargo’s Valley News Live.
“Our focus should be on our great students and teachers and education, but this is going to detract from that and really shed more negative publicity on the Fargo school district, and quite frankly, we don’t need that.”
Nelson’s words were proved correct. The decision prompted an outcry across the country, which led the board to hold the Aug. 18 meeting to discuss reinstating the pledge.
“That is perpetuating Critical Race Theory, which is against the law in North Dakota,” Fargo parent Jake Schmitz told Fox & Friends last week following the initial vote to ban the Pledge of Allegiance.
“The next logical step in the progression is [they’ll] want to remove it from schools because it’s a non-inclusionary act which is a bunch of [expletive].”
At the special meeting on Aug. 18, the board discussed the volume of angry emails and voicemails directed at members.
Nyamal Dei, a refugee from war-torn Sudan, was among those who received messages from irate citizens.
Dei was one of the seven members who voted on Aug. 10 to eliminate the pledge. At the special meeting, she was the only board member to vote no on reinstatement.
“We won’t be rewarding our children or students in our district for acting in this way,” Dei said at the special meeting.
“But know that this moment will pass. Let’s get back to the work that we are elected to do and that is to find a solution to our teacher shortages, mental health issues, and academic achievement for our students.” (Sounds like you must miss Sudan. Can I buy you an airplane ticket to the toilet from which you came? [US Patriot])
Greg Clark, who also serves on the board, said that less than 20 percent of the “angry messages” were from Fargo residents.
He admitted that his vote to reinstate the pledge was influenced by people who do not live in the district.
“But I hope you’ll forgive me because I truly believe it is in the best interest of our schools to do so,” Clark said.
“The disruptions and the threats must end so that we can have a successful start to our school year.”
Holden voted to bring back the pledge, but not before expressing reluctance.
“Do you concede the battle to win the war?” Holden said.
“I’m also concerned about what might happen to this board in the future because we’re going to have to probably be prepared to take more heat than we normally do for decisions that we make because that there may be a perception of success.”
David Paulson, a former board member who proposed that the pledge be recited before meetings in March when he was still in office, said that the current board members were “misinterpreting” what the words mean.
The March motion passed 6-2. Holden was one of the two who voted no.
“We are misinterpreting the Pledge of Allegiance,” Paulson said at the Aug. 9 meeting.
“The pledge isn’t a show of our patriotism; it’s an affirmation of our commitment and our loyalty to the greater cause, and that greater cause is freedom.”
Fargo Public Schools begins a new school year on Aug. 25.
Since receiving Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, Bonnie Eisenberg experienced relapse of her breast cancer 8 years after being in remission.
The 73-year-old was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer in 2012. After successful treatment, she had been in remission since 2014.
Ever since then, her doctor has measured tumor marker levels in her body to monitor for relapse.
Tumor markers are usually proteins that indicate possible tumor or cancer growth. High levels of tumor markers may indicate cancer but it is not definitive.
There are many markers that can be tested, but the one that her doctor particularly focused on was the carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), a tumor marker common to cancers of the breast, colon and rectum, prostate, ovary, lung, thyroid, and liver.
Since 2014, Eisenberg dutifully took monthly CEA tests along with others. The tests continuously returned with numbers in the normal range, which her doctor said was from 0 to 4.0 ng/mL.
Eisenberg’s average CEA results had been at 0.4 ng/mL, indicating her cancer was under control.
“Everything’s been going fine,” Eisenberg told The Epoch Times, “I was one of his best patients. He never worried about me.”
However, that changed after she got vaccinated. She received her first Moderna shot in January 2021 and experienced various common adverse effects including fever, shakes, “you name it, I had it,” she said.
Bonnie Eisenberg and her husband. (Courtesy of Eisenberg)
That month, her CEA test rose to 3.7 ng/mL.
However, since it was still within the normal range, both Eisenberg and her doctor were not concerned.
After all, tumor cells are not limited to cancer patients. It is a known fact that everyone can have cancerous cells; what matters is whether the immune system can keep the cancer in check.
Eisenberg took her second shot in February 2021 and again suffered the same adverse effects.
Her CEA numbers jumped to 5.2 ng/mL that month.
This took her out of the normal range. Yet because Eisenberg has been such a stable patient, and because her result was so close to the normal range, both she and her doctor dismissed the results.
“Maybe I should have been a little more on the doctor. Since I was so good. We weren’t really that concerned about it.”
Boosters became available in October 2021. Eisenberg was not happy to take it given her previous adverse reactions, but she and her husband took it anyway. She experienced the same terrible adverse reactions.
In October 2021 and December 2021, she had CEA tests taken.
On Dec. 13, 2021 at 8 o’clock in morning, she received a call from her doctor. He was very concerned.
“When you’re getting a phone call that early in the morning, something’s wrong. He says to me: ‘Bonnie, we have to scan you.’ What’s the matter? [I asked]. My mark was up to 17.6 [ng/mL]—I was in trouble.”
Eisenberg was immediately sent for a CAT scan, as well as MRI and PET scans.
On the PET scans, it showed that her previously dormant breast cancer has “metastasized,” meaning that it has spread to locations outside the breast.
“When he hit me with this, even now … it’s just a very hard thing to accept. It’s just something that should have never taken place.”
“[The cancer] went to all my bones … it didn’t go to any of my body organs, but it was over every bone you could think of. On the PET scan I lit up like a Christmas tree.”
A metastasizing breast cancer would automatically put her in stage 4, the worst stage for cancers.
Eisenberg is convinced that the vaccine is responsible for her cancer recurrence. The increase in CEA levels correlated well with her vaccine timeline, and she is adamant that she will not get any more vaccinations, fearing that she will really die from it.
In the same month (December 2021), Eisenberg started targeted therapy. The main medication she takes for her cancer costs about $14,000 a month “but I just have a little copayment coverage for it.”
She also has a hormone blocker as well as a monthly injection of denosumab ($3,000 each) to prevent bone fractures. Luckily, her insurance covers the cost of denosumab.
Eisenberg has responded very well to her drugs, and her cancer is back in remission now.
Since she started treatment again, her CEA numbers dropped from 4.7 in January 2022 to below 1 ng/mL in June 2022. Her numbers are just like how she was before vaccination.
The bright spots representing cancer cells are also gone on her new PET scans.
Nonetheless, things have not returned to normal; the drug side effects Eisenberg complains of are likely to accompany her for the rest of her life.
“I have to be on [medication] for the rest of my life. I can’t stop it … he [the doctor] can lower the milligrams and stuff like that … but you always have to be watched. What I have is not going away.”
Her breast cancer medication reduces white blood cell counts, significantly weakening her immune system and puts her at risk of infections. This new worry hangs on Eisenberg’s mind, and in crowded places, she feels compelled to put on a face mask.
The drug also causes her hair to thin, and as a “hair girl,” Eisenberg is bothered by the reality that she can no longer straighten her hair.
The denosumab injections can also cause loss of bone mass leading to eventual breakdown. Eisenberg is glad to have greater intervals introduced between each injection and possible reduced dosages for her medications.
Given her stage 4 relapse, Eisenberg is considered fortunate to be back in remission.
Eisenberg shared her experience with other women also in remission who have not been recommended to do monthly tests, or women who responded very poorly to potent breast cancer treatments.
She hopes that her story will be able to help others so that the same does not happen to them.
“Whatever erupted inside me from the shot, something happened because they don’t even know what it does to the immune system … [the doctors, people at Moderna] don’t even know; there’s no answers. Nobody has any answers. I don’t care who you talk to. You’re not gonna get an answer. They don’t know.”
“There’s possibly other girls like me now. They don’t even know what’s happening inside them because if they’re not tested properly, they’re not going to know.”
In the history of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a total of 93 breast cancer cases have been reported as an adverse effect of a vaccine, of which 77 of the cases are reported after COVID-19 vaccines.
What Current Research Shows Us
The current research suggests the COVID shots altered the innate immune system, which is likely to alter the adaptive immune system.
Within the body, we have the innate immune cells that are quick-acting, inflammatory, and target all foreign molecules the same way.
Some of these innate immune cells will eventually activate adaptive immune cells, called the T and B cells. These cells begin to work a few days after infection and require activation from innate immune cells to function properly. These T and B cells target infections and cancers through specific and varied pathways. They create an immune memory afterwards so that the immune system will be able to act faster the next time.
Innate Immune System Alterations: Interferons
Interferons (IFN) are antiviral proteins. There are three major types: type I, II, and III, categorized based on the receptors each IFN binds to.
One of the most important IFN is type 1 IFN; it acts globally, targeting many tissues and organs to protect from infections, autoimmune diseases, as well as cancers.
Studies show that they are particularly important in the early response to infection and cancer.
“Impaired type I IFN signaling is linked to many disease risks, most notably cancer, as type 1 IFN signaling suppresses proliferation of both viruses and cancer cells by arresting the cell cycle,” the authors, led by Dr. Stephanie Seneff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote.
Dr. Stephanie Seneff. (Courtesy of Stephanie Seneff)
IFN-alpha and IFN-beta are type 1 IFNs; these molecules alert other cells of a virus or cancer, and also stop infected and cancerous cells from proliferating, causing diseased cells to die.
However, research on spike protein and mRNA vaccines suggests that IFN-alpha action may be impaired when exposed to spike protein.
A study that exposed human cells to spike protein DNA to induce the cell to produce spike protein found that the cell shipped out the spike protein with two forms of microRNAs (miRNAs) that inhibited molecules that activated IFN-alpha/beta.
miRNA are short strands of RNA molecules that bind to the DNA in cells and can therefore regulate cell activity. These two miRNA inhibited an essential protein that activates the IFN-alpha/beta pathway. This implies that vaccinated individuals will have a reduced IFN-alpha/beta response and poorer immune clearance.
Seneff said that the reduced symptoms in the vaccinated are likely because of this reduced pathway, since the initial symptoms of COVID-19 are caused by actions of the interferon action. This is why many vaccinated individuals are getting infected with rebound symptoms.
“[The vaccinated] don’t get the symptoms … don’t feel as sick, but actually, you’re spreading the disease like crazy because you’re not fighting it off.”
This also means that the virus will stick around in vaccinated individuals for longer, and if the disease is not cleared after a long period of time, it can cause severe disease down the line.
This hypothesis also concordant with hospitalization and mortality rates in New South Wales, an Australian state where over 95 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated, with many people receiving one or two boosters.
Hospitalitization rates and mortality rates are significantly higher in the boosted and fully vaccinated cohort, with lower rates in the unvaccinated and patients that have only received one dose.
Reduced T-Cell Response
T-cells and B-cells are adaptive immune cells, meaning that they engage in specific and targeted attacks rather than attacking all foreign invaders the same way, which is what innate immune cells do.
Both cell types are very powerful, but both need to be activated first through innate immune system pathways to develop strong, specified attacks.
Killer T-cells engage in close combat with diseased and cancerous cells by punching holes into them whereas B plasma cells work long-range, releasing antibodies into fluids in the body to surround and neutralize toxins, bacteria, and viruses. B-cells also play a role in cancer, though their function and importance are not well understood.
T-cells have been extensively studied for the important role they play in cancer by killing cancer cells directly. The activity of T-cells have often been used to predict disease outcomes in cancer patients.
However, recent studies have shown that innate immune function has been altered in those injected with the COVID shots. A preprint study found receptors that activate T-cell action, including TLR7/8 (toll like receptors 7 and 8), are reduced in vaccinated individuals.
Further, a Chinese study of people who have been vaccinated with the spike protein-inducing COVID-19 shots found that gene activity for what proteins and pathways are turned on and off have changed across most immune cells.
This raises questions about our traditional understanding of the innate immune cell to T-cell activation pathway and whether vaccinated individuals will have an immune system that responds similarly to how it was before vaccination.
The study found T-cell activity was reduced as well as an increased inflammatory response in the immediate weeks following vaccination, which, in the long-term, puts people at risk for cancer.
“These data suggested that after vaccination, at least by day 28, other than generation of neutralizing antibodies, people’s immune systems, including those of lymphocytes (T-cells, B-cells, natural killer cells) and monocytes (innate immune cells), were perhaps in a more vulnerable state,” the authors wrote.
These findings overlap with pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole’s observations at his medical laboratory, Cole Diagnostics.
Cole told Jan Jekielek on American Thought Leaders that after vaccinations started rolling out in the older population, he noticed the reappearance of Molluscum contagiosum, a parapoxvirus that most people get in childhood and is kept in check by the immune system from the teenage years onward.
Though the uptick is unusual, as Cole saw more cases he grew concerned that the vaccines may be driving a form of “immune dysregulation,” meaning a possible breakdown to established immune controls. Since these viruses are normally kept in check by T-cells, which also keep cancers in check, a loss of immune memory against viruses could be a sign of loss of control in cancers.
“About a month or two later, all of a sudden there are certain types of cancers that I commonly see in the laboratory, after 500,000 patients … I started seeing endometrial cancers go up and there’s certain type … Melanomas, I started seeing thicker and earlier as well.”
Since then he has shared his findings in other lectures and found that other doctors and nurses around the world have made similar observations of increased rates of cancer cases.
An analysis by The Expose on VAERS data also indicated an uptick of cancer after COVID-19 vaccines by 143,233 percent.
An undated photograph of Cheryl Rolf and her late husband John Rolf (Courtesy of Cheryl Rolf).
Developing Cancer After Vaccination
In addition to cancers relapsing, there are also cases of sudden cancer development in previously cancer-free people after vaccination.
Cheryl Rolf shared her late husband John Rolf’s experience with a sudden onset of esophageal cancer within a month or two after vaccination.
“He was vaccinated with the first vaccine March 1st of 2021, and then the second vaccine on March 29th,” Cheryl Rolf, his wife told The Epoch Times during a phone call.
A few days after his second vaccination, John, who had always been healthy, started to cough, and soon he would sporadically choke on his food, and “that gradually increased in frequency over time.”
In August, John’s doctor sent him for a scan, showing suspicious growth at the base of the esophagus, and by late August, John was diagnosed with stage 3 esophageal cancer.
“The oncologist said he marked [John] curative,” Rolf said. “He planned for him [John] to fully recover from this.”
Esophageal cancer is a rarer form of cancer that predominantly affects men aged 45 to 70. Smoking, long-term heavy consumption of alcohol, bile reflux, nerve problems in the esophagus, and obesity are all risks of esophageal cancer.
Considering John’s age of 68 years at the time, he was at risk. However, he had no medical or family history of cancer. He also did not have stomach reflux, nor did he smoke, and only drank alcohol occasionally. He was not obese.
In early September, John started his chemo and radiotherapy and it was a particularly tortuous experience for him.
John’s trouble with swallowing soon worsened, coupled with nausea and an altered sense of taste from chemo, he soon “seemed to have given up trying to eat or drink.”
“[John] was supposed to be taking more food and fluids in—he was getting some in—but he was also spitting up an awful lot of yellow phlegm … he couldn’t just drink things like you and I do. He gets to take a sip and try to get it down.”
Dehydration and weight loss meant that he also needed hydration once every three days.
John finished his treatment regimen in mid-October 2021 and doctors planned for him to make a physical recovery from the therapy, gain his strength back, and then remove his tumor through surgery.
However, on Oct. 25, three days after he received his last hydrofusion, John passed away in his sleep.
“I got up and he said ‘I want to sleep some more’ and he didn’t get up. I went and looked [later] and he had passed away.”
Rolf called 911 and moved John onto his back and gave compressions until the paramedics came, but John was gone.
“It was a horrific experience.”
Fourteen cases of esophageal cancers have been reported to VAERS in total for all vaccines, of which one included metastatic cancer (stage 4). Eleven esophageal cancer cases were reported as an adverse event of COVID-19 vaccine, including the single stage 4 cancer case.
Multiple Myeloma After mRNA Vaccination
Stanley Pruszynski also shared his wife’s sudden development of multiple myeloma after two doses of the COVID-19 Moderna vaccine.
Multiple myeloma is a “cancer in the blood … there’s no cure for it because you can’t cure blood cancer,” Pruszynski said.
It affects immune cells, making patients particularly at risk of dying from infections.
The majority of multiple myeloma patients in remission relapses in a few years, and most will later succumb to complications of the disease, particularly infections.
Pruszynski’s wife, Bonnie, then 69 years old, has been very healthy throughout her life. She was adopted into her family, therefore it is unknown if her family has a medical history of cancers, but she had no medical history of previous cancers.
Pruszynski said that Bonnie was very fit. The two would go on walks of five miles a day, and usually it would be him who would want to take a break.
However, two weeks after her second Moderna dose in February, Bonnie developed flu symptoms with constant coughing and night sweats and would get little sleep.
These symptoms persisted and medication did little to improve her condition. She began to feel weak and would ask for breaks on walks before Pruszynski did. She was often scared, she would fall and need to hold onto the walls when navigating their apartment.
In April, Bonnie fell and was taken to the emergency room.
On admission, her hemoglobin level was so low that she was given a blood transfusion.
“They [doctors] tried running some blood tests; the blood wasn’t separating properly to do the testing … well, it turns out that it was because of her hemoglobin levels,” Pruszynski said.
In June, Bonnie was diagnosed with multiple myeloma and started chemotherapy. She started stem cell therapy in December 2021 and spent Christmas in the hospital.
Stem cell therapy is a dangerous yet ambitious therapy to reset the immune system.
First, stem cells will be harvested from the body and stored. The other white blood cells in the body will then be wiped out, often using chemo and radiotherapy. Once the immune system is obliterated, the stem cells will be transferred back into the body to restart the immune system anew.
Bonnie’s fatigue improved and her cancer went into remission, but she still feels weak. The two now walk a quarter of a mile a day, compared to the five miles they used to.
Bonnie now works remotely with reduced hours. Pruszynski estimates that her salary is likely halved.
Pruszynski said that Bonnie has had high blood protein levels for many years. This condition can be a precursor to diseases and often comes with symptoms, though Bonnie was not affected.
Pruszynski therefore suspects that the vaccine, particularly the spike protein it generates, which is known to be toxic, may have triggered something in Bonnie’s immune system leading to blood cancer.
“They give her an estimate of maybe five to 10 years, maybe less. They don’t really know. They don’t have a clue but eventually it will kill her.”
There are a total of 89 multiple myeloma cases reported to VAERS, including plasma multiple myeloma, recurrent myeloma, and recurrent plasma multiple myeloma for all vaccines, and 65 of the cases were reported for COVID-19 vaccines.
The FBI division overseeing the investigation of former President Trump’s handling of classified material at his Mar-a-Lago residence is also a focus of Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation of the bureau’s alleged abuses of power and political bias during its years-long Russiagate probe of Trump.
The FBI’s nine-hour, 30-agent raid of the former president’s Florida estate is part of a counterintelligence case run out of Washington—not Miami, as has been widely reported—according to FBI case documents and sources with knowledge of the matter. The bureau’s counterintelligence division led the 2016–2017 Russia “collusion” investigation of Trump, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane.”
Although the former head of Crossfire Hurricane, Peter Strzok, was fired after the disclosure of his vitriolic anti-Trump tweets, several members of his team remain working in the counterintelligence unit, the sources say, even though they are under active investigation by both Durham and the bureau’s disciplinary arm, the Office of Professional Responsibility. The FBI declined to respond to questions about any role they may be taking in the Mar-a-Lago case.
In addition, a key member of the Crossfire team—Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten—has continued to be involved in politically sensitive investigations, including the ongoing federal probe of potentially incriminating content found on the abandoned laptop of Biden’s son Hunter Biden, according to recent correspondence between the Senate Judiciary Committee and FBI Director Christopher Wray. FBI whistleblowers have alleged that Auten tried to falsely discredit derogatory evidence against Hunter Biden during the 2020 campaign by labeling it Russian “disinformation,” an assessment that caused investigative activity to cease.
Auten has been allowed to work on sensitive cases even though he has been under internal investigation since 2019, when Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz referred him for disciplinary review for his role in vetting a Hillary Clinton campaign-funded dossier used by the FBI to obtain a series of wiretap warrants to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Horowitz singled out Auten for cutting a number of corners in the verification process and even allowing information he knew to be incorrect slip into warrant affidavits and mislead the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court.
In congressional testimony this month, Wray confirmed that “a number of” former Crossfire Hurricane team members are still employed at the bureau while undergoing disciplinary review. In the meantime, Wray has walled off the former Russiagate investigators only from participating in FISA wiretap applications, according to the sources.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has asked Wray for copies of recent case files and reports generated by Auten and whether he is included among the team the FBI has assembled to determine which of the seized Trump records fall within the scope of its counterespionage investigation and which fall outside of it.
Some former FBI officials worry that Auten, a top bureau expert on Russia and nuclear warfare, will have a hand in analyzing the boxes of documents agents seized from Trump’s home on Aug. 8 to help determine if any of the alleged Top Secret material he kept there might have been compromised, potentially putting national security at risk.
“It is a disgrace that Auten is still even employed by the bureau,” said 27-year FBI veteran Michael Biasello. “I would substitute other analysts and agents.”
An examination of the bureau agents involved in the Mar-a-Lago raid reveals other connections between them and FBI officials who played key roles in advancing the Russiagate hoax.
Sources told RealClearInvestigations that Jay Bratt, the top counterintelligence official in Justice’s national security division, who happens to be a Democratic National Committee donor, has been coordinating the Mar-a-Lago investigation with Alan Kohler, who heads the FBI’s counterintelligence division.
Kohler replaced Bill Priestap in that post after Priestap stepped down from the bureau amid criticism of his role in the Russiagate probe. Kohler had worked at FBI headquarters under Priestap, specializing in countering Russian intelligence threats.
Before that, he worked in London as the FBI’s liaison with British intelligence and law enforcement. The sources say Kohler was close to Stefan Halper, an academic and longtime FBI contractor whom the bureau ran as an informant in a failed effort to suborn Trump campaign officials. He also worked closely with Stephen Somma, a lead case agent in the Crossfire Hurricane probe whom Horowitz said was “primarily responsible” for some of the worst misconduct in the FISA warrant abuse scandal. Somma is a counterintelligence investigator in the FBI’s New York field office, where he has been reassigned to the China desk.
In 2019, Kohler was promoted to special agent in charge of the counterintelligence division at the FBI’s Washington field Office, where he worked alongside then-assistant agent-in-charge Timothy Thibault, who was reassigned by Wray just days prior to the Mar-a-Lago raid, after whistleblowers raised questions about political bias. They asserted that Thibault, who has taken aim at Trump and Republicans on social media, worked with Auten to falsely discredit evidence of alleged money laundering and other activities against Hunter Biden and prevent agents from investigating them.
The Washington field office’s counterintelligence division is now run by Anthony Riedlinger, who previously worked at FBI headquarters as a section chief under Priestap. Some of the agents involved in the raid on Trump’s home came from that Washington field office, according to the sources and FBI case documents.
Bratt, the top counterintelligence official at Justice, traveled to Mar-a-Lago in early June and personally inspected the storage facility while interacting with both Trump and one of his lawyers. Trump allowed the three FBI agents Bratt brought with him to open boxes in the storage room and look through them. They left with some documents. After leaving, Bratt made a request to Trump’s lawyer for increased security at the facility and asked to see surveillance footage from the security cameras. The lawyer complied with the requests. Months went by before the Justice Department took the politically explosive step of sending FBI agents unannounced to Trump’s home, seizing documents, photos, and other items not just from the storage facility but from multiple rooms on the property, including the former president’s office.
Former assistant FBI director Chris Swecker said the search warrant that agents obtained is quite wide-ranging. He pointed out that it authorized the seizure of any information in any form related to “national defense information,” which he said “does not necessarily include classified material.”
“This is a huge, broad search warrant and a huge, broad investigation leveled against the former president,” Swecker said.
What’s more, he said the physical search of the former president’s residence was far more sweeping than first reported and included unsupervised snooping in several dozen bedrooms, as well as numerous storage rooms and closets, including those of the former first lady. FBI agents took numerous boxes and containers of documents and other material, including several binders of photos and even three passports held by the former president.
Although Attorney General Merrick Garland has said that the DOJ seeks to “narrowly scope any search that is undertaken,” details of the warrant reveal agents had the authority to seize entire boxes of records—including those potentially covered by attorney-client privilege and executive privilege—if just a single document inside the container were marked with a classified marking.
Agents were allowed to also seize any containers or boxes “found together with” ones containing classified papers, according to ATTACHMENT B (“Property to be seized”) of the warrant. In addition, the FBI agents were given the authority to confiscate “any government and/or presidential records created between Jan. 20, 2017, and Jan. 20, 2021,” which covers Trump’s full term in office. That meant they were able to take any item related to the Trump administration.
All told, dozens of boxes and containers were removed from Trump’s residence, very few of which actually contained classified information, the sources said.
According to Federal Election Commission records, Bratt has given exclusively to Democrats, including at least $800 to the Democratic National Committee. The sources said he is close to David Laufman, whom he replaced as the top counterintelligence official at Justice. An Obama donor, Laufman helped oversee the Russiagate probe, as well as the Clinton email case, which also involved classified information.
A Senate investigator told RCI that Laufman was the “mastermind” behind the strategy to dust off and “weaponize” the rarely enforced statutory relic—the Foreign Agents Registration Act—against Trump campaign officials, a novel legal move that the investigator noted is similar to the department’s current attempts to enforce the Presidential Records Act against Trump—which is a civil, not a criminal, statute—by invoking the Espionage Act of 1917.
Laufman signed off on the wiretapping of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, which the Department of Justice inspector general determined was conducted under false pretenses involving doctored email, suppression of exculpatory evidence, and other malfeasance.
Suddenly resurfacing as a media surrogate for the Justice Department defending the Mar-a-Lago raid, Laufman has been a key source for stories by the Washington Post, CNN, and other outlets.
On CNN, for instance, he claimed the documents seized from Trump’s storage were “particularly stunning and particularly egregious,” and their discovery ”completely validates the government’s investigation” into the former president—though he quickly added, ”Whether this investigation transforms into an outright criminal prosecution remains to be seen.”
Swecker said that there is strong reason to fear that the FBI’s counterintelligence division might politicize this case.
“For sure, the FBI has dug themselves into a huge hole because of how they handled the Clinton (email) case and then Crossfire Hurricane and Hunter Biden,” Swecker said. “Myself and many of my colleagues think they are treading on very thin ice here.”
“Unfortunately,” he added, “you can’t recuse an entire FBI division.”
Patel: ‘It’s Just Insane’
Former federal prosecutor and Trump administration official Kash Patel said the FBI may have a personal interest—and a potential conflict—in seizing the records stored by Trump.
He noted that Trump in October 2020 authorized the declassification of all the investigative records generated from the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane as well as the Clinton email investigation, codenamed “Midyear Exam,” and he said that the FBI may have confiscated some of those records in its raid, ensuring they won’t be made public. In addition, he said, the agency may be digging for other documents to try to justify, retroactively, their questionable, politically-tinged 2016 opening of the Trump-Russia “collusion” case, which came up embarrassingly short on evidence.
“Tragically, the same FBI characters that were involved in Russiagate are the same counterintel guys running this ‘national security investigation’ against Trump,” said Patel, who deposed Crossfire Hurricane team members as a former House Intelligence Committee investigator.
Patel noted that the Horowitz report indicated FBI analyst Auten hid exculpatory information about Trump’s adviser Page from other investigators and the FISA court, which should be more than enough to keep him at arm’s length from other investigations involving Trump.
“And to top it all off, this guy admits [to Horowitz’s investigators] he’s unrepentant about his role in making up the biggest hoax in election history, and Wray still lets him be a supervisor at the FBI,” he said. “It’s just insane.”
The Justice Department’s national security division has ultimate authority over the grand-jury probe of Trump for possible violations of the Espionage Act, including alleged mishandling of classified material—the same statutes invoked in the Clinton email investigation. (In that case, in contrast, the FBI never searched the former secretary of state’s Chappaqua, N.Y., mansion, where she set up an unsecured basement server to send and receive at least 110 classified emails and where she also received government documents by fax.)
Former FBI counterintelligence official and lawyer Mark Wauck said he is troubled by signs that the same cast of characters from the Russiagate scandal appears to be involved in the Mar-a-Lago investigation.
“If these people, who were part of a major hoax that involved criminal activity and displays of bias and seriously flawed judgment, are still involved, then that’s a major scandal,” he said in an interview.
Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, a key figure in a December 2020 White House meeting seeking to encourage then President Donald Trump to investigate allegations of election fraud, has filed a motion in the Department of Justice’s investigation of Trump, calling for the release of the key document justifying the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.
Agents on Aug. 8 seized more than two dozen boxes of records from Trump’s Florida resort, which contained 11 sets of documents with classified markings, according to an FBI property receipt made public on Aug. 12.
Trump has said that he had declassified all the confiscated records before leaving office and demanded the immediate release of unredacted affidavit behind the FBI warrant.
Byrne, who recently testified before the House Jan. 6 Committee, argued in his Aug. 18 motion that Trump had such powers to declassify as president, citing a meeting in the Oval Office in December 2020 where he said the former president twice exercised the same presidential authority.
The affidavit should be unsealed along with other records shedding light on the raid to promote transparency and accountability in government, Byrne argued in the court filing.
“Trump’s position was that … if this was not just some police state raid but there was a good reason for this raid, then, let’s see it,” Byrne told The Epoch Times.
“If Trump was telling the truth” and he in fact declassified all the documents, and the FBI submitted an affidavit accusing Trump of mishandling classified documents, “that means they were lying to the court,” he said.
“Trump was only mishandling classified documents if those documents were in fact, classified, but if he declassified then he was not mishandling classified documents.”
Byrne during the closed door meeting at the White House on Dec. 18, 2020, urged the former president to launch a probe into the election fraud allegations.
Frustrated with the suggestion of having former Trump attorney Sidney Powell appointed special counsel to spearhead a limited investigation into alleged fraud, then White House Counsel Pat Cipollone allegedly told Trump: “Hey if you want to do this you don’t need my permission. You don’t even need a pen or a piece of paper. You can just say, ‘I hire Sidney Powell as White House Special Counsel,’ and it’s done,” Byrne wrote in the filing.
Former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne is surrounded by private security as he arrives at the Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. House Office Building to be interviewed by the House select committee investigating the events on January 6, on July 15, 2022. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Later, responding to questions about Powell’s lack of a security clearance, General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who was present at the meeting, allegedly told Trump that he could “ do the same thing with a clearance.”
“You can grant any clearance you want, on the spot, verbally,” according to a sworn affidavit by Byrne filed with the court.
According to him, Trump acted on the suggestions, verbally appointing Powell a White House special counsel and granting her top secret security clearance. He says after that the White House attorneys angrily left the room but didn’t dispute Trump’s actions.
Trump ultimately rescinded the decision upon the persuasion of his then-personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, according to Byrne.
“He doesn’t have to sign anything, if he gives an order, that makes it legally effective,” Byrne told the court, describing it as “the Trump White House standard operating procedure.”
Backing Trump’s Claims
Mike Davis, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, has also backed Trump’s claims.
Trump “has the constitutional authority to declassify anything he wants,” he told NTD, a sister media of The Epoch Times, in a recent interview. “And so, when he sent boxes out of the White House, he declassified them.”
Davis said the Justice Department should have released the affidavit but would likely try to “hide it as much as they can.”
A federal judge on Friday signaled a willingness to release a redacted version of the affidavit despite opposition from the government lawyers, who argued that doing so could undermine ongoing investigations and imperil the safety of witnesses involved.
Secret Service personnel in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on Aug. 8, 2022. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images)
Byrne saw the judge’s move as a “judicious decision.”
“The FBI should not have to reveal whoever was their sources, they should protect their sources,” he said. “But beyond that, they shouldn’t be able to keep this affidavit a secret.
“I think the country needs to know what the FBI is saying that caused the attorney general to sign off on this extraordinary application. Unprecedented.”
Because of the raid and activities of the kind, the FBI has become “so delegitimized now in the eyes of so much of the public,” Byrne said. “It’s creating a terrible fear and oppression in the minds of the American public.”
“I talked to a lot of non-Republicans and they’re all starting to sound like Republicans. They see this as police state tactics.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray has come out in defense of his agency, saying agents have received “deplorable and dangerous” online threats in the wake of the raid.
“I like Christopher Wray,” said Byrne. “But I think he’s got a very narrow window to save his organization. And I hope he does.”
A document made public on Aug. 18 for the first time shows that an FBI agent authored the request for a search warrant for former President Donald Trump’s resort in Florida.
The document, an application for a warrant (pdf), was made by an FBI special agent.
The document also shows that an agent, possibly the same one, authored the affidavit, or a sworn statement that outlined to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida why it should grant the application.
The identity of the agent who signed the application and the name of the agent who signed the affidavit are redacted.
The application was made on Aug. 5, and approved the same day by U.S. District Judge Bruce Reinhart, who approved the unsealing of the application on Aug. 18.
Agents executed the warrant on Aug. 8, taking boxes of items and documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
While opposing the release of the affidavit, government lawyers said in a recent filing that they did not object to making public other documents related to the raid, including the application, as long as minor redactions could be made “to protect government personnel.”
Releasing the affidavit, on the other hand, would harm an ongoing investigation into potential criminal conduct by Trump, the lawyers argued.
Reinhart on Friday ordered them to produce a redacted version of the affidavit to him by Aug. 25 at noon. He said he was leaning towards releasing a redacted copy, though a lawyer for media outlets calling for its release said the process will take weeks.
“I find that on the present record the Government has not met its burden of showing that the entire affidavit should remain sealed,” Reinhart said in a written order after a hearing.
A slew of documents have been filed under seal in the case. Some, including the warrant itself, were unsealed by Reinhart with light redactions on Aug. 12.
Neither federal lawyers nor Trump’s counsel opposed the release of those documents, which indicated that the FBI’s Washington Field Office was running point on the raid. The warrant was predicated on the belief that Trump has likely violated laws governing the transmittal of defense information, concealment of records, and destruction of records. Trump has said he is innocent and being politically targeted.
U.S. lawyers filed the application with the court on Aug. 15. Until Friday, none of its details could be viewed by the public.
Other documents were also unsealed: a criminal cover sheet showing U.S. Attorney Juan Gonzalez or the Southern District of Florida stating the case did not originate from several pending matters, a motion to seal the warrant and related documents, and the approval of the motion to seal.
Correction: This article has been updated to clarify the government did not object to the release of some warrant materials, and to show the judge approved the unsealing of the application on Aug. 18. The Epoch Times regrets the errors.
For a damning picture of the modern left, it doesn’t get much clearer than this.
The Democratic Party, which spent the 2020 presidential election year trashing the police and cheering on rioting mobs wreaking havoc on American cities is now desperately trying to rebrand itself for the midterm election year as the party of loyalty to federal law enforcement agencies hellbent on pursuing former President Donald Trump and his supporters.
But as a Twitter post published Wednesday by a member of the previous Democratic administration shows, all it’s really proving is basic ignorance, or utter contempt, for the foundations the country was built on.
The post was published by Tommy Vietor, now a co-host of the blasphemously liberal podcast “Pod Save America,” but a man who rose to public attention as one of the more abrasively juvenile members of the Obama administration.
The tweet included a link to a CNN report (of course) about the surveillance footage that was taken of last week’s FBI raid on Trump’s home in South Florida’s Mar-a-Lago Club, and a comment from Vietor that probably said more about the mindset of the modern left than Tommy ever intended.
The staff at the Trump household had refused an FBI request to turn off surveillance cameras in the home, which would have left the agents free to do anything they chose without fear of exposure.
“Very confused about how you can refuse a direct order from the FBI while they are in the process of executing a search warrant, especially given the context here when the concern is about unauthorized release of highly classified information,” Vietor wrote.
Very confused about how you can refuse a direct order from the FBI while they are in the process of executing a search warrant, especially given the context here when the concern is about unauthorized release of highly classified information. https://t.co/J6l1gtMpMc
He’s “very confused” about an American household disobeying an order from the FBI? And a “direct order” at that?
It’s a good bet he wasn’t at all confused by the George Floyd rioters failing to follow the orders of local police as they set about looting and torching businesses in the name of “social justice” in the summer of 2020.
For many Democrats, anarchy in the streets, theft and destruction of property, even outright murder are completely acceptable (just ask the gangsters who benefited from the bail organization Vice President Kamala Harris supported).
But failing to fall into lockstep obedience with the feds when they show up armed with a search warrant and plenty of weaponry? That passes Vietor’s comprehension.
Naturally, being a blue-checked liberal, Vietor has plenty of simpering sympathizers in the social media world (even the Twitter bots Elon Musk talks about have more brains than that herd), but fortunately for the future of the republic, there were more than a few responses to set Vietor straight:
You say, “No thank you, I prefer to film my home during your official duties.” The official duties of the officer are not private, and first amendment permits filming officers.
Now, it’s easy to dislike Vietor and the rest of the coterie of sophomoric arrogance that surrounded the Obama White House. (The State Department’s Marie Harf was another, along with Harf’s old boss Jen Psaki.)
With Obama administration posts that included membership in the National Security Council and special assistant to the president, Vietor helped saddle the country with the bogus Iran nuclear deal that even Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor to the Obama White House, admitted had been sold in an “echo chamber” of mainstream media ignorance. (And to New York Times Magazine, no less.)
But he’s worth paying attention to, if only to see where the leftists of the Obama years are leading their party and — regrettably — the country today.
His podcast is an influential voice in leftist politics — the DigitalTrends website ranked it as the third-best political podcast for 2022. (No. 1 was NPR’s “The NPR Politics Podcast,” which says everything that needs to be said about DigitalTrends’ political preferences.)
To his marginal credit, Vietor appeared to learn something from his Twitter post, as one respondent explained a search warrant does not give law enforcement — even the big, bad FBI — powers to do more than search the premises involved.
“A search warrant authorizes…a search, per 4th Amd. It does not create other powers or cancel out civil liberties,” the user wrote.
“I remember when people used to be skeptical of the police, *especially* when they were dealing with someone we thought was a criminal.”
Vietor seemed to get the message — or maybe he’d just finally realized how cringingly submissive his initial tweet came off and remembered that he’s supposed to be a man.
“Interesting — thank you. Wonder if they made this ‘order’ because of the risk of exposing the information, but that does seem a little ridiculous,” he wrote.
Interesting — thank you. Wonder if they made this “order” because of the risk of exposing the information, but that does seem a little ridiculous.
“A little ridiculous” should have been a first reaction to the blatantly political operation. “Outrageous!” “Infuriating!” “Totalitarian BS!” would have been even better.
But for the leftist mindset of 2022, steeped in the openly anti-American tradition birthed by the disastrous Obama years, the initial reaction is not to defend American freedoms but to question why Americans can refuse a “direct order.”
This is a man who served in the Obama White House, remember, where the abuse of power at federal agencies — such as the IRS, with the likes of Lois Lerner; the FBI with the “leadership” of James Comey; and the Justice Department under political grifters like Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch — had to have been considered almost commonplace.
It’s a basic distortion of the country’s foundation of law and order, pervasive among leftists in the mainstream media, in popular culture and in the Democratic Party from local governments through the House, the Senate and the White House:
They have nothing but contempt for the law; they worship orders.
There are many sorry countries, with many sorry histories, where that attitude is the norm. The United States isn’t one of them.
The media has been hiding economic reports over the last few weeks. As we get closer to the midterms, they will be doing what they can to protect Democrats.
But Americans continue to suffer from inflation, high gas prices, and other stains on their wallets. And now, another sign has come out that the recession is already on us.
From Washington Examiner:
Housing starts measure the annualized change in the number of new residential buildings that began construction. Last month, they declined by a hefty 9.6% to a 1.45 million annualized rate after posting slight gains in June, according to a Tuesday report from the Commerce Department.
If the rising price of ground beef or unleaded regular didn’t tip you off that the economy isn’t great, this will.
The number of housing starts in July fell a steep 9.6%. This number measures how many new residential buildings begin construction.
Even a slight drop suggests a weakening economy. The housing market is always the first industry to suffer in a recession (or a depression).
When things are bad, people cut back on spending. The bigger expenses, like houses and cars, are cut first.
Then everything else quickly follows. These cutbacks force companies to make cuts themselves. In some cases, they lay off as many workers as possible.
So, this number is much more important than you might realize. New housing products dropped last month.
That’s consistent with other numbers that have come out recently. Inflation is hitting construction, as everything is costing more.
The housing bubble from 2020 long burst. Americans don’t want to risk moving or buying a new home, because it’s just too expensive.
The rest will come shortly, whether Biden believes it or not.
UPDATE: And just in, now housing sales just smashed through the floor. From CNBC:
Sales of previously owned homes fell nearly 6% in July compared with June, according to a monthly report from the National Association of Realtors.
Sales dropped about 20% from the same month a year ago.
“In terms of economic impact we are surely in a housing recession because builders are not building,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the Realtors.
The fallout from Biden’s leadership just keeps piling up, folks.
A new report connects a case involving tapes made by former President Bill Clinton with the FBI’s raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
“Judge’s ruling over audio tapes hidden in Bill Clinton’s sock drawer could significantly impact Donald Trump’s effort to contest FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago,” journalist John Solomon tweeted Thursday.
Judge’s ruling over audio tapes hidden in Bill Clinton’s sock drawer could significantly impact Donald Trump’s effort to contest FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago | Just The News https://t.co/MBCisbJ1rg
The ruling involved audio tapes Clinton stashed in a sock drawer that he used for his autobiography and that were also mined by writer Taylor Branch in Branch’s book, “Wrestling History: The Bill Clinton Tapes,” about Clinton, according to CBS.
The tapes became controversial when the watchdog group Judicial Watch went to court to demand the tapes be given to the National Archives and Records Administration, so the American people could hear them.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson rejected the suit in March 2012.
In a report for Just the News, Solomon pointed to a few paragraphs of the 27-page ruling as significant because they indicated a president had wide latitude concerning documents under the Presidential Records Act.
“Under the statutory scheme established by the PRA, the decision to segregate personal materials from Presidential records is made by the President, during the President’s term and in his sole discretion,” Jackson wrote.
“Since the President is completely entrusted with the management and even the disposal of Presidential records during his time in office, it would be difficult for this Court to conclude that Congress intended that he would have less authority to do what he pleases with what he considers to be his personal records,” the judge wrote.
“Because the audiotapes are not physically in the government’s possession, defendant submits that it would be required to seize them directly from President Clinton in order to assume custody and control over them,” Jackson noted. “Defendant considers this to be an ‘extraordinary request’ that is ‘unfounded, contrary to the PRA’s express terms, and contrary to traditional principles of administrative law.’ The Court agrees.”
So how does that connect to Trump? As Solomon noted, the former president has said records that were seized were both declassified and personal.
Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, said the connection between the cases is profound.
“The government, the lawyer for the Archives, said, ‘You know what? If documents are in the former President’s hands, where they’re presumptively personal, we just, you know, we presume they’re personal,’” Fitton said, Just the News reported.
“The Justice Department previously had told us in response to a question about Bill Clinton: ‘Tough luck, it’s his.’ But they changed their mind for Donald Trump?” he said. “The law and court decision suggests that Trump is right. And frankly, based on this analysis, Trump should get every single document they took from him back. It’s all personal records.”
As noted by Politico, Fitton felt differently at the time.
“We respectfully disagree with the Court,” he said then. “The idea that a president could spirit official recordings and documents out of the White House and that there is nothing that can be legally done about it is a misreading of the Presidential Records Act. It is ironic that a law passed in response to the Nixon tapes controversy would allow Bill Clinton to keep tapes of his official actions secret and unavailable to the American people.”
Kevin Brock, former assistant FBI director for intelligence, said the search warrant used by the FBI was faulty and over broad, according to Just the News.
“Specificity is important in order to protect Fourth Amendment rights from exuberant government overreach designed to find whatever they can,” he said.
The warrant “apparently makes a novel legal assertion that any presidential record kept by a former president is against the law,” Brock said.
“You have to wonder what the other living former presidents think about that. They have the right and, apparently, clear desire to remain silent.”
In a master-level stroke of inversion, former President Donald Trump has found a new use for his ability to all but ensure the success of Republican candidates.
On Wednesday via Truth Social, Trump unleashed his “endorsements” against three Democrats: Daniel Goldman, a former federal prosecutor who is campaigning for New York’s 10th Congressional District, Carolyn Maloney of New York and Rep. Jerrold Nadler. Both Maloney and Nadler are competing for a redrawn 12th Congressional District.
Based upon context, these “endorsements” from Trump can be considered to be either darkly disingenuous or delivered sarcastically with a proverbial wink to his supporters. Judge for yourself.
On Truth Social, Trump wrote first about Goldman, “Lawyer Dan Goldman is running for Congress, NY-10, and it is my great honor to Strongly Endorse him. I do this not because of the fact that he headed up the Impeachment Committee and lost, but because he was honorable, fair, and highly intelligent. While it was my honor to beat him, and beat him badly, Dan Goldman has a wonderful future ahead….”
“….He will be very compassionate and compromising to those within the Republican Party, and will do everything possible to make sure they have a fair chance at winning against the Radical Left Democrats, who he knows are destroying our Country. I would like to thank Dan for fighting so hard for America, and for working so tirelessly to stop “Trump.” He was not easy to beat, but winning against him made me realize just how very talented I am!” he continued.
Trump suggested that Goldman will be a moderate “very compassionate and compromising to those within the Republican Party” a damning descriptor in the uber-radicalized far-left of the 2022 Democrat party.
Minutes later, a similar “endorsement” for Maloney, with some kind words for her opponent Nadler appeared on Trump’s account.
“A vote for Carolyn Maloney in NY-12 is a vote for the future! She is a kind and wonderful person, who has always said terrific things about me, and will support me no matter what I do, just as I supported her very early on. She begged for a check with no quid pro quo, and I gave it to her. In fact, I gave her many….”
According to the Federal Elections Commission, Trump did in fact donate to Maloney’s campaign in 1993, 1994, 1998, 2006 and again in 2009 for a total of $4,000.
He continued and even took aim at Jerry Nadler. “….On the other hand, Jerry Nadler is likewise a hard driving man of the people, whose energy and attention to detail is unlike anyone else in Congress. He is high energy, sharp, quick-witted, and bright. You can’t go wrong with either, but Carolyn Maloney is the better man. She will lead our Country into a very GREEN and prosperous future. Carolyn has my Complete and Total Endorsement, she will never let our Conservative Movement down!”
The highlight of the snarky message is definitely the combined swipe at both Maloney and Nadler, “You can’t go wrong with either, but Carolyn Maloney is the better man.”
Naturally, Goldman and Maloney both vehemently rejected the “endorsement” from the 45th President. Goldman’s campaign attempted to turn the joke around on Trump in a statement reported by The Blaze.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Thursday that 20 serious felons will face arrest for allegedly illegally voting in the state’s elections.
“The state of Florida has charged and is in the process of arresting 20 individuals across the state for voter fraud,” DeSantis said at a news conference.
DeSantis and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement are identifying those charged as convicted murderers and sex offenders who voted without receiving restoration of voting rights from the governor.
A 2018 ballot amendment restored the voting rights of Florida felons who serve their sentences.
However, this amendment made an exception for those convicted of murder and felony sexual assault.
Criminals in those categories don’t automatically get their voting rights back.
“They are disqualified from voting because they’ve been convicted of either murder or sexual assault, and they do not have the right to vote. They’ve been disenfranchised under Florida law.”
A majority of the alleged illegal voters cast ballots in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties, according to the governor.
DeSantis did not specify whether the charges stem exclusively from the 2020 election or subsequent state or local contests.
They’re facing a charge of voter fraud — a third-degree felony punishable by five years in prison in the state.
DeSantis alluded to the possibility of more charges for election crimes.
The governor referenced ongoing investigations into illegal aliens voting in elections, as well as voters who cast more than one ballot in multiple jurisdictions.
Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigated the cases of alleged fraud.
DeSantis is touting his state’s commitment to election integrity and pointing to the charges as a warning to those who would exploit the system.
The governor signed a bill to strengthen voter ID requirements in April, as well as creating an entity to investigate and prosecute violations of the state’s election laws.
“Today’s actions send a clear signal to those who are thinking about ballot harvesting or fraudulently voting. If you commit an elections crime, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler may have violated basic ethics rules for United States representatives, a government watchdog group said.
Americans for Public Trust told Fox News it believes a senior staffer for Naddler may be providing legal services for him, which would violate House rules.
“The outside employment restrictions define certain activities for which senior staff (as well as House Members and officers) may not receive any compensation whatsoever,” the House Committee on Ethics states on its website.
“The restrictions prohibit senior staff from, among other things, (1) receiving compensation for practicing any profession that involves a fiduciary relationship, including, for example, law or accounting, and (2) serving for compensation as an officer or director of any entity.”
This could be a problem for Nadler because district director, Robert Gottheim, received money from Nadler while he was a senior staffer between 2019 and 2021.
According to Federal Elections Commission data, Gottheim was paid a total of $81,345.00 between 2019 and 2021 for what was categorized as “legal and political consulting.”
It sounds dangerously similar to “fiduciary services,” for which Nadler is expressly prohibited from compensating Gottheim, according to House ethics rules.
Speaking to Fox News, a representative for Nadler’s campaign denied wrongdoing and said Gottheim “doesn’t practice law in any capacity, including the campaign.”
“He’s a campaign advisor, which doesn’t have any fiduciary responsibility. When the campaign files the quarterly reports the treasurer must choose a category to list his expenditures, so they chose ‘legal & strategic advising.’ He’s a strategic advisor, not a lawyer.”
Gottheim is listed on the New York City West Side Democrat’s website as the organization’s treasurer, and his bio says he has been working as a Counsel for Nadler for Congress since 1997.
Specifically, it said Gottheim has been “handling all campaign finances & compliance issues with the FEC.” Again, this would be prohibited for a senior staffer.
While Nadler’s campaign paid Gottheim for services from 2003 to 2018, he did not meet the senior staff threshold until 2019, Fox News reported.
APT executive director Caitlin Sutherland slammed Nadler for what she said was a violation of the law.
“Jerry Nadler brags about being the ‘conscience of the House,’ yet he can’t even ensure that his top staffer is in compliance with simple House ethics rules,” Sutherland told Fox News.
“It is absolutely against the law to be compensated for campaign work that involves fiduciary duties, and accordingly, we will look into filing a complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics.”
If the allegations against Nadler are true, they would be especially disturbing given his position. As the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Nadler is supposed to uphold justice and fairness for all, especially himself.
In addition, Democratic leaders have frequently praised Nadler for having outstanding character. When she was serving as House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi even called Nadler “the conscience of the House,” Fox News reported.
A full investigation should be launched into Nadler’s finances because Americans deserve to know our political leaders are being held accountable. If he is determined to have broken ethics rules, it would be a massive blow to the Democrats and any remaining credibility they have.
Several establishment media giants have asked a court to unseal all of the documents related to the FBI’s search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home last week.
The move came after the Justice Department filed its own request for some of the materials to be released, CNN reported.
Lawyers representing major media outlets like CNN, The Washington Post and NBC News appeared on Thursday before Judge Bruce Reinhart, who approved the warrant for the Mar-a-Lago raid, according to The Epoch Times.
Reinhart said he was “inclined” to release some of the affidavit from the raid and instructed the DOJ to redact any parts of the document that would undermine its investigation, The Washington Post reported. The judge said he would make a decision after the department submits its proposed redactions next Thursday.
Trump himself has said that he wants the affidavit unsealed.
“In the interest of TRANSPARENCY, I call for the immediate release of the completely Unredacted Affidavit pertaining to this horrible and shocking BREAK-IN,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Tuesday.
The news outlets cited “the public’s clear and powerful interest in understanding what occurred in these circumstances” in their filing with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
The DOJ itself set things in motion last week when Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the department’s request for documents to be released. Garland said the DOJ wants the search warrant and property receipt from the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago.
However, unlike the media companies, which asked for all the documents to be unsealed, the DOJ did not seek the release of the affidavit filed in support of the search warrant.
In fact, federal prosecutors investigating Trump asked a judge on Monday not to release the affidavit for national security reasons, The Hill reported.
“There remain compelling reasons, including to protect the integrity of an ongoing law enforcement investigation that implicates national security, that support keeping the affidavit sealed,” a filing from the prosecutors reads.
But the media companies argued in their request that “the tremendous public interest in these records in particular outweighs any purported interest in keeping them secret.”
For once, these outlets may be correct.
Though they wave the flag of “public interest” in requesting the unsealing of the documents, make no mistake — the media would simply make more money and be able to drag this story out longer if all the documents were revealed.
But though the media’s motivation may be selfish, it actually would benefit the American people to have access to the documents.
The raid is a very public issue, and since it concerns a former president, the citizenry should (at least in principle) have the information, particularly surrounding what led to the search warrant.
Some have suggested that federal prosecutors’ attempt to keep the affidavit sealed is actually just an attempt to cover up some sort of corruption in the process of the search.
The media outlets are even being reasonable in their request for the documents. If national security is at risk, the government has the right to redact parts of the documents. But that doesn’t mean they should be sealed altogether.
“Even when the government can demonstrate compelling interests, the court must examine ‘whether there are alternative means available’ to address them, such as redaction of a document rather than sealing it in its entirety,” the filing reads.
It doesn’t make sense any longer to keep all the documents sealed. The details of the raid, how it was conducted, the nature of the documents searched for and more have already been made very public. Trying to hide anything else at this point smells of corruption.
The media outlets are right. It’s time to unseal the documents.
“Transparency serves the public interest in understanding and accepting the results. That’s good for the government and for the court,” Charles Tobin, a lawyer representing the outlets, said in court on Thursday, according to The Washington Post.
Mike Franken also took money from disgraced former senator Al Franken
Iowa Democratic Senate candidate Mike Franken pledged to run for office “without taking one dime of corporate PAC money.” That promise didn’t preclude him from taking thousands from corporate-funded groups.
“I don’t take any corporate PAC money,” Franken said in June. “Not a penny.” But that same month, the Iowa Democrat received $5,000 from Sen. Tim Kaine’s (D., Va.) Common Ground PAC, which accepted donations from Pfizer, Capital One, and Amazon. Franken took $2,500 from Sen. Mark Kelly’s (D., Ariz.) Liftoff PAC, which is funded by the National Association of Realtors, and another $2,500 from Sen. Tina Smith’s (D., Minn.) Velvet Hammer PAC, which boasts contributions from Wells Fargo, Delta Air Lines, and Goldman Sachs.
The donations could spell trouble for the Senate candidate, who has decried “corporate greed” and accused incumbent Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) of being beholden to “corporate donors.”
The Senate candidate also took $2,500 from disgraced former Democratic senator Al Franken’s Midwest Values PAC. The ex-comedian resigned in 2018 following accusations of sexual harassment, but said last year he is open to running again for office. His PAC raised hundreds of thousands of dollars even after his departure.
A Franken campaign spokesman said the candidate “has never taken a dime from corporate PACs.” He did not comment on any other corporate donations.
Franken, a retired Navy vice admiral, came under fire in July when he said he “did not serve” to defend the rights of people who criticize Joe Biden. He is the third Iowa Democrat to skirt a self-imposed corporate PAC donation ban after Rep. Cindy Axne and Abby Finkenauer, whom Franken bested during the Senate primary.
Finkenauer lost by 15 points in June during the Democratic primary to Franken, who was defeated in 2020 by failed Democratic Senate candidate Theresa Greenfield. Sen. Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) beat Greenfield in the general election by 6 points, though the Democrat raised twice as much money for her campaign.
Franken raked in $1.7 million during the last fundraising period, outraising Grassley by more than two to one. The Republican still holds more cash in hand, and won his last election by a nearly 25-point margin.
Grassley campaign manager Matt Dailer told the Washington Free Beacon that Franken should either return the donations or “admit his pledge was nothing more than a hollow stunt.”
“Mike Franken hasn’t even been elected to office and he’s already breaking his word to Iowans,” Dailer said. “He can make up any excuse he wants, but Iowans see through his dishonest word games.”
State CFO proposes 4-pillar protection plan to fight back
The IRS has already been tracking annual sales of $600 or more on eBay and other selling platforms. eBay sent me a letter regarding this change (AKA a warning notice). What person making over $400,000 is going to bother selling items on eBay? [US Patriot]
PUNTA GORDA, Fla.–On Aug. 16, small business owners and independent contractors across Florida became fearful of their futures as Gov. Ron DeSantis questioned the sanity of Washington.
On that day, Joe Biden signed into law the “Inflation Reduction Act,” giving the IRS nearly $80 billion, with $45.6 billion going towards “enforcement,” which requires hiring more agents.
But what stood out the most among Florida’s small business owners was who the expanded agency would target for auditing.
At a press event on Aug. 17, DeSantis expressed frustration.
“What have they done? … 87,000 new IRS agents and they are going after you.”
They will be unleashed on American taxpayers, he said. ” … they are gonna go after independent contractors.”
Uber drivers, handymen “and others” are identified as independent contractors and all are “contenders” for audits, DeSantis said. “They’re going to crush a lot of people by doing that.”
Not only will small businesses be targeted, but also “people that the government doesn’t like,” the governor said.
“Let’s just be honest,” he said. “We’ve seen how this operates–you have these enforcement agencies that basically represent one faction of the country and they are going after the other.”
Even though IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said in an Aug. 4 letter to Congress that the billions in funding won’t increase “audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans,” others beg to differ.
Bobby Gross Jr. is part owner of his family’s 50-year-old paving company located in Port Charlotte and believes that the IRS is coming after small businesses like his.
“They’re (IRS) there to hunt, and we’re the prey,” Gross told The Epoch Times on Aug. 17. “The government is going to pay for the Inflation Reduction Act on the backs of small businesses.”
Gross believes small businesses are the key to raising the $750 billion price tag for the new law because “there aren’t that many billionaires in the country,” that can “generate enough money to pay for it.”
Florida’s Chief Financial Officer, Jimmy Patronis in April 2022. (Courtesy, CFO Jimmy Patronis)
Florida’s Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis agreed and will propose in the upcoming legislative session what he calls the “Four Pillars of IRS Protection.” He is doing this to “get in front of” whatever the IRS has planned. But make no mistake, he says, “Florida is a target,” especially conservatives.
“Even though the Free State of Florida cannot control the insanity of Washington we must do what we can to protect our small businesses,” Patronis told The Epoch Times on Aug. 18. “This massive super expansion of the IRS is concerning to me. I think Washington is totally disconnected from what real Americans and Main Street is feeling.”
The four pillars of protection Patronis is suggesting involve requiring state-chartered banks to generate a regular report on IRS engagement in order to identify if patterns of “targeting the middle class and small businesses are ongoing. Second, establishing a Civil Liability Trust Fund to help small businesses defend themselves–or sue the IRS–in cases of politically motivated audits or any federal overreach. Third, requiring new IRS agents coming into the state to have a Florida license. And last, establishing criminal penalties by enforcing laws based on viewpoint or political discrimination.
Political discrimination, as Patronis called it, is a concern for Carl Mottler, who owns a land-clearing company in Southwest Florida.
“I think every conservative, every conservative business, every conservative-run state and city will be targeted because that’s exactly what we have seen in the past,” Mottler told The Epoch Times on Aug. 17. “We saw it with the IRS targeting the Tea Party when Obama was president.”
In 2013 Lois Lerner “retired” from her position as the director of Exempt Organizations of the IRS. She was found guilty of “neglect of duties” after she testified in a Congressional oversight committee hearing that the IRS had “wrongly scrutinized conservative groups” and that it “had been going on for years.”
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the IRS projects to bring in almost $204 billion in revenue from 2022 to 2031. In the fiscal years 2015 and 2019 IRS audits declined by 44 percent, according to a 2021 Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report.
Mottler said the process in any IRS audit is “unfair” and that the IRS has an “unfair advantage.”
“The problem with the IRS is that they are judge, jury, and executioner of all things financial,” he said. “There’s no due process, they can take and seize everything you have, and you have to try and show that you’re in the right; and you have to because they’re the ones who judge whether you’re right or wrong, and then they’re the ones who impose the sentence.”
Mottler said the IRS needs an “overhaul” not hiring more agents–especially ones that carry firearms.
Nurse practitioner Lisa Ransom said she has the same fears and doesn’t understand why IRS agents would carry a firearm and be asked to possess the “fortitude to pull the trigger.”
“These political people who held office … being arrested and strip-searched. Well, look at Trump—if they can do that to him and other people what will they do to us? “she asked. “This is still America. Are they really going to force their way onto your private property?”
Ransom who began her private medical practice three months ago said she is bothered and upset at the prospect of losing everything she has worked for because of the new law.
“Without any notice, they can just seize your assets and bank accounts before you have had a chance to defend yourself,’ she said. “They can put you out of business.”
Above all, Ransom said she worries about what IRS scrutiny could do to the economy.
“People will just stop using their bank accounts and go straight to operating on a cash basis,” she predicted. “I guarantee that’s what’s going to happen because you can’t track cash.”
Patronis said Ransom’s concerns are justified.
“Lisa is right, it’s gonna have a chilling effect on commerce,” Patronis said. “You will have people hoarding cash, out of just a simple fear.”
Gross said he wonders if cash apps like PayPal will be affected by the new legislation.
“What if you want to sell your couch on Craigslist to pay bills,” he said. “Will the IRS track that and wonder what you did with the money?”
“What strikes me as odd is the way the government is going about this … like World War II stuff where they are tracking our every move and we will be labeled and targeted based on our political views and affiliations,” he said. “What happens after the audit—financial concentration camps?”
A new video that focuses on the gender-transition madness sweeping America has resonated with the Twittersphere with more than half a million views as of Wednesday.
The video, posted to Twitter on Sunday on the Libs of TikTok account, shows an unidentified man sitting in the front passenger’s seat of a car as he recounts an experience he said he had with a doctor.
The date the video was made isn’t clear.
“So we just took my 3-year-old son to the doctor for a checkup — my 3-year-old son,” the man begins. “And there’s a reason why I’m emphasizing that, and you’re about to know why.
“So my wife and I are waiting in the room with our son, and the doctor comes in, and he sees my son sitting there at the table, and the first question that he asks him is, ‘Are you a boy or are you a girl?’”
The man said he and his wife exchanged “what the f***” looks of concern and bafflement.
This is really scary. Dad claims doctor asked his 3-year-old if he’s a boy or a girl at a routine check-up pic.twitter.com/rwOVNJeDHU
“So luckily my son understands obvious tenets of biology at 3 years old and says that he’s a boy, just like his chart says,” the man said.
“The rest of the appointment I couldn’t even focus because I’m wondering why in the world this guy is asking the question. And then I remembered, ‘Oh, yeah, I live in California.’”
The man noted that his concern is not just based on his experience, but what is taking place around him.
“Call me paranoid, but this is where I think we’re heading based on other things that have happened,” he said.
This is sick & evil.
Boston Children’s “gender clinic” sees toddlers as young as 2 & 3 years old.
Claims babies in the womb know they’re transgender.
Warns parents if they don’t “support” gender identity & trans, it will lead kids to suicide.
The man referenced a 2018 story from The Washington Times headlined “Religious parents lose custody of transgender teen for refusing hormone treatment.”
In the clip, the man also referenced a 2019 BBC story with the headline, “Texas parents battle in court for custody of transgender child.”
The man also cites a 2019 Heritage Foundation article that said the Equality Act “could lead to more parents losing custody of kids who want ‘gender transition.’”
Reminds me of this video where this mom explained how her toddler came out as trans after the doctor asked if he’s a boy or a girl. https://t.co/8oq461Ntlc
“So again, call me paranoid, but I’m wondering if the doctor’s asking the question of my son to see if he can establish a pattern over time that shows that my son wants to be a girl,” the man said in the video.
“But here’s the thing: My son is 3. I’m not even going to let him choose what he wants for dinner. And some days, my son thinks he’s a dinosaur. But I’m not going to let him transition to a dinosaur. …
“I don’t think it’s going to be long before we start seeing parents lose custody of their young kids because they’re not letting them transition to the opposite gender. And I think pediatricians are going to be the ones who are going to start calling it out.”
Voters are more worried about Bidenflation than about abortion rights, polls show
Abortion advocacy group Planned Parenthood will pour a record-breaking $50 million into November’s midterm election in an attempt to galvanize voters after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.
The group’s massive spending will go to Senate, House, and gubernatorial races in nine swing states, with the AP reporting that Planned Parenthood wants to “drive turnout by Democratic and independent voters” who support abortion rights.
Democratic strategists have said, however, that abortion is unlikely to drive people to the polls, the Washington Free Beacon has reported, with pollster Josh Ulibarri asking, “Is that more powerful than when a voter looks at their receipt when they check out at Target?”
A majority of mostly pro-choice suburban Phoenix women told Reuters in June that they are more worried about sky-high inflation under Joe Biden than about abortion rights. And multiple polls have shown that Americans still rank inflation as the most important issue facing the country.
Planned Parenthood officials nevertheless say that abortion will energize voters this cycle, with super PAC executive director Jenny Lawson insisting that “abortion access is absolutely one of the defining issues this November.”
Since we learned of the unprecedented raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound last week, millions of Americans have questioned the political neutrality of the Department of Justice. Federal law enforcement is facing a legitimacy crisis—at least in the eyes of half the country—thanks to the fake and overhyped scandals it drummed up during the Trump years.
So MSNBC’s Morning Joe invited the former FBI official Peter Strzok to assure viewers the bureau was on the level. “Absolutely the American public should trust what the FBI is doing,” he said Monday.
You may remember Strzok from such FBI scandals as Russiagate, the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, or his affair with FBI lawyer Lisa Page. As the man in charge of investigations into the two candidates in the 2016 presidential election, he was constantly texting Page about his hatred for Trump. Asking this man to vouch for the integrity of the FBI is like putting Bernie Madoff in charge of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Strzok’s commentary is a microcosm of the mainstream media’s approach to coverage of the Mar-a-Lago raid, about which we still know precious little— except, we are told, that the integrity of our law enforcement officials shall not be questioned!
“The FBI is not the enemy,” was the headline of the Washington Post’s lead editorial. The New York Times over the weekend labored to link a nutjob who shot up an FBI office in Ohio with, you know, the “bellicose, dehumanizing, and apocalyptic” language of people like us. It’s extraordinary to hear that sort of tut-tutting from the same crowd that insisted for most of Trump’s presidency that he was a fascist and a Kremlin agent.
Strzok would know something about that—in fact, he’s free to run his mouth on television because the FBI canned him after the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded his anti-Trump texts cast a cloud over the bureau’s investigation into Trump. Strzok personally interfered with the agent overseeing the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn to stop him from closing the file after the evidence against him didn’t pan out.
And his team pushed to include opposition research paid for by the Clinton campaign in an application for a secret surveillance warrant on former Trump adviser Carter Page. That debacle led to the nullification of two of the four warrants and a scathing inspector general’s report that “identified multiple instances” in which the factual assertions the bureau made in the application for the Page warrants “were inaccurate, incomplete, or unsupported by appropriate documentation, based upon information the FBI had in its possession at the time the application was filed.”
Perhaps, when we know all the facts, we will find that the FBI raid on Trump’s Florida home was justified. Until then, we reserve our right to question the integrity of the federal law enforcement officials who have demonstrated their willingness to behave like political hacks and abuse the power with which they are entrusted to punish their political opponents.
Former President Donald Trump will likely not be arrested on charges stemming from the FBI’s raid last week, according to a former Harvard Law School professor.
“Yes, it’s possible [but] I don’t think it’s going to happen,” Alan Dershowitztold Newsmax on Tuesday about whether Trump would be arrested. People who believe that prosecution and an indictment would keep Trump away from the 2024 campaign are “dead wrong,” he remarked.
“He can run for president even if he’s indicted, convicted, and wearing striped shirts, prison garb,” he added to the channel. “The Constitution provides only four bases for disqualification for president, and being convicted of a crime is not one of them. Congress can’t change the criteria that are in the Constitution for the election of the president.”
Echoing statements made by Trump and some Republicans, Dershowitz said the affidavit used to justify the FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago should be released.
“You can redact the names of agents, you can redact sources and methods, but what we want to know is what the basis of probable cause that they have,” he said.
A U.S. magistrate judge in the case, Bruce Reinhart, ordered the unsealing of a warrant and property receipt. The warrant shows Trump is under federal investigation for possibly several U.S. Code violations, while the receipt shows agents found allegedly classified and top secret material at Trump’s home.
Affidavit
Reinhart scheduled a Thursday hearing on whether the affidavit and other materials related to the case should be released.
Lawyers for the Department of Justice on Monday argued that releasing the affidavit would damage the agency’s investigation and argued that unsealing a version with redactions “would not serve any public interest.” Several media outlets, watchdogs, and other entities have filed motions to release the affidavit.
“Disclosure of the government’s affidavit at this stage would also likely chill future cooperation by witnesses whose assistance may be sought as this investigation progresses, as well as in other high-profile investigations,” the Justice Department wrote. “The fact that this investigation implicates highly classified materials further underscores the need to protect the integrity of the investigation and exacerbates the potential harm if information is disclosed to the public prematurely or improperly.”
The former president on Monday said that FBI agents took three passports from him before a spokesperson confirmed that a Department of Justice official said they were returned. Hours later, he called for the Justice Department to release the affidavit, which would provide insight into why the Department of Justice believes it is justified in trying to obtain the search warrant.
“There is no way to justify the unannounced RAID of Mar-a-Lago, the home of the 45th President of the United States … in the interest of TRANSPARENCY, I call for the immediate release of the completely Unredacted Affidavit pertaining to this horrible and shocking BREAK-IN. Also, the Judge on this case should recuse!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
WORKING AMERICANS ARE SUFFERING TREMENDOUSLY AT THIS TIME OF “ZERO INFLATION.”
Biden claimed on Wednesday, August 10 that, “today we received news that our economy had zero percent inflation in the month of July – zero percent,” despite the fact that the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the measure of inflation, was up 8.5 percent versus July 2021. While the CPI was down from its 9.1 percent June number, it is still extremely high, and certainly not zero.
The decrease in acceleration of the inflation rate was driven primarily by a decrease in gas prices. Per Bloomberg, “while a drop in gasoline prices is good news for Americans, their cost of living is still painfully high, forcing many to load up on credit cards and drain savings.” Per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the price of gasoline dropped 7.7 percent in July, but is still up 44 percent for the twelve months ending July 2022, with all energy commodities up 44.9 percent.
On the day the CPI numbers were released (August 10), the national average for a gallon of gas was $4.03, down from record highs of $5.02 per gallon, but significantly higher than the August 2019 average of $2.70 per gallon. That is nearly $80 more a month to fill-up a 15-gallon tank on a weekly basis, nearly $1,000 more per year.
The Biden administration has taken credit for the decrease in the price of gas – even though the stated reason for the original increase in the price of gas was the “Putin Price Hike.” The decrease in the price of gas is actually due to a reduction in demand, as Americans put off summer driving vacations, something many can no longer afford. In addition, the futures markets are worried about the US economy and a further decline in demand as the recession continues to take hold of the economy. The strong dollar has also helped to drive down demand as well.
So, if the price of gas is down, what is driving 8.5 percent inflation? The two primary drivers are the cost of food and the cost of housing.
The “food at home category, which tracks the cost of groceries, surged 13.1% over the last year, the most significant increase since March 1979.” This food inflation is hitting basic staples, not just champagne and caviar. Staples such as eggs are up 38 percent, chicken is up 16.6 percent, milk 15.6 percent, potatoes 13.3 percent, rice 12.7 percent, and fresh fruits and vegetables 8.2 percent.
The cost of shelter also continues to rise. “Shelter costs – which account for roughly one-third of the CPI…have climbed 5.7%” over the past year, the fastest since February 1991.
The impact on working-class Americans has been devastating, and the headlines are misleading. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “nonfarm payroll employment rose by 528,000 in July and the unemployment rate edged down to 3.5%.” The corporate media tells us that this is a huge success for Biden. However, if you dig into the numbers, it is not all good news. There are two disturbing statistics contained in the BLS report:
“The labor force participation rate, at 62.1%, and the employment-population ratio, at 60.8%… remain below their February 2020 values.”
“The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons increased by 303,000 to 3.9 million in July. The rise reflected the increase in the number of persons whose hours were cut due to slack work or business conditions.”
This means that fewer people are participating in the workforce, which drives the unemployment rate down. And 3.9 million Americans are working at least two jobs just to make ends meet. This is unacceptable in the United States.
The impact of the poorly performing economy is starting to show in the data.
“Midyear 2022 U.S. foreclosure filings hit 164,581,” an increase of 153 percent from the same time period a year ago. In addition, car repossessions are exploding. According to Barron’s, vehicle repossessions have doubled among “prime” borrows, which includes “borrowers with good credit scores.” According to the same article, “most of the loans on recently repossessed cars originated in 2020 and 2021,” showing that much of the COVID stimulus money was spent on cars people could not afford.
Sadly, it doesn’t stop there. “An estimated 34 million US consumers, or roughly 13%, spent more than they earned in the past six months, underscoring how Americans are having difficulty managing their finances amid decades-high inflation.”
According to the same article, 55.6 percent of Americans have less than $5,000 in savings.This also helps to explain the rapid growth in US consumer borrowing.
“US consumer borrowing surged in June, reflecting a jump in credit card balances and a record increase in non-revolving lending that includes auto and school loans.” The same report showed that “revolving credit outstanding, which includes credit cards, increased $14.8 billion. Non-revolving credit increases $25.4 billion.”
To summarize, we are in a situation where Americans are working multiple jobs, spending more than they earn, losing their homes and cars, eroding their savings, and borrowing more than ever. All of this at a time when, according to Biden, “we have zero inflation.”
It is likely to get even worse. The Federal Reserve is expected to “stick with hawkish rate hikes until data show further slowing in inflation,” with an increase of 50 or 75 basis points likely in September. This will make the exploding credit card debt more expensive to pay as interest rates rise and adjustable-rate mortgages more expensive, which will cause more foreclosures.
Working Americans are suffering tremendously at this time of “zero inflation.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence broke with former President Donald Trump and other Republicans and said Wednesday they should stop criticizing the FBI following the bureau’s raid targeting the former president’s home.
“I also want to remind my fellow Republicans, we can hold the attorney general accountable for the decision he made without attacking the rank-and-file law enforcement personnel at the FBI,” said Pence during an event at St. Anselm College.
“The Republican Party is the party of law and order,” Pence stated, according to The Associated Press. “Our party stands with the men and women who stand on the thin blue line at the federal and state and local level, and these attacks on the FBI must stop. Calls to defund the FBI are just as wrong as calls to defund the police.”
Pence also told a crowd he would give “due consideration” if he is asked to testify before the House Jan. 6 committee.
Trump and some Republicans say the FBI has unfairly targeted conservatives and has not done enough to curb left-wing extremists, including those who threatened pro-life groups and pregnancy centers this summer after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Some have also pointed to how some Jan. 6 detainees have been treated while under federal custody.
Two-Tiered System?
Former Trump administration official Kash Patel told The Epoch Times last week, that after the raid, the United States is descending toward the third world and that Americans are suffering under a two-tier system that treats Republicans and Trump less favorably than Democrats.
Examples he gave include the FBI’s apparent hesitance to investigate Hunter Biden’s laptop and overseas business deals as well as the bureau illegally spying on Trump’s former aide, Carter Page.
With his comment on Wednesday, Pence appears to be strategically distancing himself from his former boss. Observers say Pence, with recent speeches and events, is trying to gear up for a 2024 presidential run.
Last month, Pence and Trump appeared at separate rallies in Arizona, with Pence backing GOP gubernatorial candidate Karrin Taylor Robson, who was ultimately defeated by Trump-backed Kari Lake.
Their paths diverged on Jan. 6, 2021, as Trump criticized the former vice president for not objecting to or delaying the certification of the election. Earlier this year, in February, Pence again claimed that he had no power during the Jan. 6 certification process.
“If the Vice President [Mike Pence] had ‘absolutely no right’ to change the Presidential Election results in the Senate, despite fraud and many other irregularities, how come the Democrats and RINO Republicans … are desperately trying to pass legislation that will not allow the Vice President to change the results of the election?” Trump said in a statement in February after Pence’s comment.
Former President Donald Trump suggested that the Jan. 6 committee should be dissolved, following the defeat of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) in a GOP primary on Aug. 16, calling the vote a “referendum” and that “the people have spoken.”
“Congratulations to Harriet Hageman on her great and very decisive WIN in Wyoming. This is a wonderful result for America, and a complete rebuke of the Unselect Committee of political Hacks and Thugs,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Aug. 16.
“Liz Cheney should be ashamed of herself, the way she acted, and her spiteful, sanctimonious words and actions towards others,” Trump continued. “Now she can finally disappear into the depths of political oblivion where, I am sure, she will be much happier than she is right now.”
“Thank you WYOMING!” Trump added.
Wyoming Republican congressional candidate Harriet Hageman waves as she takes a picture with children during a primary election night party in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on Aug. 16, 2022. (Michael Smith/Getty Images)
Cheney was defeated by Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman, a natural resources attorney from Fort Laramie. As of early Wednesday morning, the Wyoming Secretary of State’s Office reported (pdf) that Hageman garnered 113,025 votes, compared to Cheney’s 49,316.
The result was not unexpected, considering that nearly 70 percent of Wyoming residents voted for Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Cheney is one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump and serves as the co-chair of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.
“I assume that with the very big Liz Cheney loss, far bigger than had ever been anticipated, the January 6th Committee of political Hacks and Thugs will quickly begin the beautiful process of DISSOLUTION?” Trump wrote in another Truth Social post on Tuesday.
“This was a referendum on the never ending Witch Hunt. The people have spoken!” Trump added.
During her concession speech on Tuesday, Cheney called out Trump directly.
“I will do whatever it takes to ensure that Donald Trump is never anywhere near the Oval Office and I mean it. I love my country more,” she said. “This primary election is over. But now the real work begins.”
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) speaks to supporters at a primary night event in Jackson, Wyoming, on Aug. 16, 2022. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Writing on Truth Social, Trump said Cheney’s speech was “uninspiring.”
“Liz Cheney’s uninspiring concession speech, in front of a ‘tiny’ crowd in the Great State of Wyoming, focused on her belief that the 2020 Presidential Election was not, despite massive and conclusive evidence to the contrary, Rigged & Stolen,” Trump wrote. “It was, and that’s not even counting the fact that many election changes, in numerous States, were not approved by State Legislatures, an absolute must.”
Hageman will now face Democratic nominee Lynnette Grey Bull in the Nov. 8 general election, in the fight for Wyoming’s lone seat in the House of Representatives.
Several GOP lawmakers have welcomed Hageman’s victory on Tuesday.
“Congratulations to Harriet Hageman on her massive Republican primary victory in Wyoming over Nancy Pelosi’s puppet Liz Cheney. I was proud to join President Trump and Leader Kevin McCarthy in endorsing Harriet,” House GOP Conference Chairwoman Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) said in a statement.
“Harriet is a true America First patriot who will restore the people of Wyoming’s voice, which Liz Cheney had long forgotten,” Stefanik continued. “I cannot wait for Harriet to join Republicans in Congress so that we can stay laser-focused on our work to save America. ”
Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.), a member of the House Freedom Caucus, echoed Trump’s comment about the Jan. 6 committee.
“Tonight was not just a defeat for Liz Cheney, but a massive rejection of the sham ‘Jan 6’ witch hunt Committee and the authoritarian politics of the DC establishment,” Miller wrote on Twitter. “Congrats to my friend Harriet Hageman, President Trump & the MAGA movement!”
Elon Musk has eked out a legal victory in his battle with Twitter, as a judge has ordered information about fake accounts to be handed over to Musk.
Delaware Chancery Court Judge Kathaleen McCormick handed Musk a defeat as well in ruling that 21 other people from whom Musk wanted data do not have to provide him with information, according to TechSpot.
Information from Twitter’s former head of consumer product, Kayvon Beykpour, must be released.
According to Reuters, Musk’s team of lawyers had identified Beykpour as “a key figure in calculating the amount of fake accounts on the platform.”
Beykpour was fired by current Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal in May.
“We look forward to reviewing Beykpour’s communications and will continue to seek information and witnesses until the full truth comes out,” said Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Musk, according to Bloomberg.
The issue of fake accounts emerged as a major bone of contention in Musk’s proposed purchase of the social media platform. Twitter estimates that about 5 percent of its accounts are bots. Musk has said the figure is closer to 20 percent.
Musk said he decided not to go through with the $44 billion deal because he could not verify the number of fake accounts. Twitter then took Musk to court to force him to buy the company.
Dan Brahmy, CEO of the Israeli tech company Cyabra, agrees that Twitter has lowballed its number of fake accounts, according to Reuters.
“They have underestimated that number,” he said, putting the share of fake accounts at 13.7 percent.
In a countersuit filed against Twitter, Musk argued that “misrepresentations or omissions” by the company have inflated Twitter’s actual value, The Washington Post reported.
The countersuit said Twitter has 65 million fewer monetizable daily active users — people who can be seeing ads — than the 238 million that Twitter says it has.
Twitter undercounted bots as part of a “scheme to mislead investors about the company’s prospects,” Musk’s countersuit alleged, according to The Guardian.
Lawyers for Musk and Twitter will meet in court in October to debate whether the deal must be completed, the Washington Examiner reported.
Joe Biden is set to cancel $3.9 billion in student loans, announcing that the federal government will discharge all remaining federal student loans for students who attended the ITT Technical Institute.
The student loan borrowers who attended the now-defunct institute will receive a discharge through “borrower defense to repayment” according to Forbes and do not need to apply to have their loans canceled.
“It is time for student borrowers to stop shouldering the burden from ITT’s years of lies and false promises. The evidence shows that for years, ITT’s leaders intentionally misled students about the quality of their programs in order to profit off federal student loan programs, with no regard for the hardship this would cause,” Secretary of Education Dr. Miguel Cardona said.
“The Biden-Harris Administration will continue to stand up for borrowers who’ve been cheated by their colleges while working to strengthen oversight and enforcement to protect today’s students from similar deception and abuse.”
The ITT Technical Institute was a well-known private technical institute based in Indiana with approximately 140 satellite campuses all over the United States. The institute operated until announcing on Sept. 6, 2016, that it would “discontinue academic operations at all of its ITT Technical Institutes permanently”.
Since taking the White House in 2021 Biden has canceled almost $32 billion in student loans, essentially subsidizing the educational expenses of a combined 1.8 million borrowers spread across “borrower defense to student loan repayment and school closures,” “public service loan forgiveness” and “total or permanent disability”.
Democrats continue to call for Biden to “#CancelStudentDebt“, a move that conservatives believe would obfuscate the transfer of debt from the individual borrowers to the American taxpayer.
Democratic Rep. Pramila Jaypal of Washington urged Biden to cancel all student debt.
Student loan payments are set to resume in 16 days. With the stroke of a pen, @POTUS can bring relief to millions of people across the country. Let’s get it done.
Representative Cori Bush of Missouri also joined the refrain.
Right now, millions of people are living in limbo, unsure if student loan payments will resume in 16 days. Canceling student debt would provide immense relief to numerous borrowers.@POTUS, now is the time. #CancelStudentDebt
Conversely, Republicans have heavily criticized student loan forgiveness.
“Expansive student loan forgiveness does nothing to solve the problems in higher education and exacerbates the economic disaster fueled by the President’s lack of fiscal responsibility,” Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina said according to Forbes.
“Time and again, Biden operates as if he can issue any decree he wants on student loan forgiveness, even if it means exercising authority that he does not have.”
In an Op-Ed for Fox News, Foxx and Sen. Richard Burr, also of North Carolina, wrote, “By caving to progressives, Biden is breaking his promise to over 100 million taxpayers without student debt who are subsidizing this boondoggle.”
They pointed the finger squarely at their Democrat colleagues in Congress, “Yet, when in the position to actually legislate, House and Senate Democrats are (un)surprisingly quiet on student loan debt. Rather than do their jobs, top Democrats are asking the president to do their dirty work for them, calling for an additional extension through the end of the year and debt forgiveness by executive fiat.”
The GOP legislators also voiced concerns that the proposed student loan cancelation would “easily push inflation above 9 percent” back in April when the piece was written.
Inflation hit 9.1 percent in June before pulling back slightly to 8.5 percent in July, according to Trading Economics.
Border security group supports Republican over Dem challenger Mandela Barnes
A leading border security advocacy group is throwing its support behind Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) in his reelection bid, citing the lawmaker’s “unique insight into the root cause of the out-of-control flood of illegal immigrants and deadly drugs into our country.”
The National Border Patrol Council, an advocacy group comprised of some 18,000 Border Patrol agents, said Johnson—a member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee—”has devoted more time and attention to securing our border than virtually any other member of Congress,” according to a statement by the group provided to the Washington Free Beacon.
Johnson is facing a tough reelection battle in Wisconsin as Democrats try to flip the seat for challenger Mandela Barnes, the state’s far-left lieutenant governor, who is being bankrolled by anti-police groups. In an election cycle where the porous southern border is likely to galvanize voters, Johnson’s endorsement by the National Border Patrol Council could help tip the scales in his favor.
“The National Border Patrol Council has personally witnessed Senator Johnson’s dedication to and care for all Wisconsinites,” the group said in its statement. “Wisconsin and America need Senator Johnson’s strong voice, caring spirit, and leadership in the U.S. Senate, which is why we are proud to endorse Senator Johnson to continue to be your advocate.”
Johnson, the group said, was instrumental in Operation Safe Return, a bipartisan federal program initiated in 2019 that humanely deported illegals back to their countries of origin. The program was used as a model by the Department of Homeland Security when it developed its own programs to reduce the flow of undocumented children and families into America.
“By reducing the number of illegal border crossers, Senator Johnson was instrumental in allowing law enforcement to target criminal cartels and their profit,” the group said.
Johnson is one of the most vocal proponents for increased border security and policies that will help stem the flow of undocumented migrants into the United States. Apprehensions at the border have crossed 4,000 per day on Biden’s watch, according to figures published by Customs and Border Protection. The crisis has spiraled as drug cartels exploit children and families seeking to illegally enter America, leading to an increase in rape, crime, and other instances of abuse. Nearly 8,000 illegals are believed to be crossing the border each day, according to Johnson.
Experts expect two million illegal immigrant encounters in this fiscal year, according to research published Tuesday by the Republican National Committee.
“President Biden completely dismantled the very policies that had ended the surge. The border is now in a crisis that far exceeds anything during the previous administrations and the media is silent,” Johnson’s office said in an analysis published on his website.
Johnson has organized congressional trips to the border, most recently in July. The senator met with law enforcement officials to discuss the challenges they face, and he also spent time with local landowners to discuss the fallout they are facing due to the rising number of illegals.
“Open borders, a flood of illegal immigrants, a flood of deadly drugs, 40-year high inflation, record gasoline prices—these things didn’t just happen,” Johnson said during a press conference at the time. “These are the direct result of [Biden’s] policies. But if you look very closely at this chart, we pretty well had the border solved. That’s just another tragedy here. We had this problem fixed until Democrat presidential candidates started talking about the fact they would not deport and they would offer illegal immigrants free health care.”
Gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams was ‘honored’ to co-chair an organization that gave tens of thousands of dollars to anti-police activists
Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who says she opposes defunding the police, co-chaired a left-wing group that gave tens of thousands of dollars to defund-the-police activists, Fox News reported Tuesday.
Abrams in April 2021 became the co-chairwoman of the Black Voices for Black Justice Fund, saying in a press release that she was “honored” to join the fund, which works with “Black activists on the ground who understand how racism plays out.” The fund, which is bankrolled in part by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s foundation, has awarded thousands of dollars to activists who support abolishing the police.
Abrams is best known for losing the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election to incumbent Republican Brian Kemp, whom she is again facing in this year’s election, and then falsely claiming that Kemp stole the election from her. Her fellow Democrats, many of whom have called former president Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud an existential threat to democracy, have not criticized her claims.
The Black Voices for Black Justice Fund awarded $20,000 to Education Leaders of Color CEO Sharhonda Bossier, who tweeted in May 2020 that “it means nothing that these elected officials are expressing support for ‘peaceful protests'” and that politicians should instead support efforts to “defund the police.” Bossier repeated the call in April 2021, tweeting, “We spend SO MUCH money on officer training, etc. If we cannot expect that police can respond to incidents without killing people we should… DEFUND & ABOLISH THE POLICE.”
The fund this year gave out awards to Black Lives Matter Global Network founding member Kei Williams, who has repeatedly expressed support for police defunding, and activist William Jackson, who has tweeted, “I’m for abolishing the police.”
Black Voices for Black Justice’s website listed Abrams as its co-chairwoman as recently as November, Fox News found. The site now showcases a picture of Abrams and lists her as one of the group’s two “co-chairs emeriti.”
Abrams’s campaign told Fox that the candidate “does not and never has supported defunding the police.” The campaign did not respond to Fox’s request for comment on whether Abrams disavows the group.
In addition to the Black Voices for Black Justice Fund, Abrams remains a board member of the Marguerite Casey Foundation, which this year expressed support for defunding the police.
House candidate scrubs radical views from campaign site after bitter primary fight
South Texas Democrat Michelle Vallejo won a bitter primary fight by embracing a slew of far-left policies. Now, the congressional hopeful is abandoning those progressive positions as she approaches a difficult general election campaign.
Vallejo emerged from a tight primary runoff in Texas’s 15th Congressional District in May, defeating fellow Democrat Ruben Ramirez by just 30 votes. At the time, the self-described “progressive small business owner” was openly touting her support for Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee, and student debt cancellation—policy positions that landed her endorsements from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.). Vallejo’s campaign site also expressed resentment for America’s “racist criminal legal system” and called to protect “trans and queer South Texans.”
But now, as Vallejo faces an uphill general election battle against Republican Monica De La Cruz, she’s running away from the same policies that helped her attract liberal primary voters just a few months ago. Between late July and mid August, internet archives show, the Democrat updated her campaign site to remove all mentions of “Medicare For All,” a “federal jobs guarantee program,” and the need to “forgive all student loan debt.” Vallejo’s “LGBTQ+ Justice” section, meanwhile, no longer includes the word “trans,” and the Democrat’s border policy blurb now calls to invest in the same immigration enforcement system she used to call “racist.”
Vallejo’s campaign site overhaul is an obvious attempt from the progressive Democrat to rebrand herself as a moderate as she runs in a newly drawn district that President Donald Trump won by nearly 3 points. It’s also an implicit admission that the Democratic Party’s liberal wing has become too “woke” for many South Texas Hispanics—a development that Republicans say has helped them make inroads in the Rio Grande Valley, a historic Democratic stronghold.
Still, Vallejo’s decision to abandon the progressive positions that defined her primary campaign could divide the district’s Democratic voters with November fast approaching. In addition to Warren and Jayapal, Vallejo earned a primary election endorsement from Lupe Votes, a liberal South Texas group that supports Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee, student loan cancellation, and other progressive policies. Texas College Democrats also backed Vallejo ahead of the May primary, citing the Democrat’s “unapologetically progressive campaign.” Neither of those groups returned requests for comment. Vallejo’s campaign also did not return a request for comment.
As a whole, almost none of Vallejo’s pre-primary policy “priorities” made it to her general election campaign site.
The Democrat’s health care section used to be titled “Health Care for All” and included explicit support for a “single-payer universal healthcare system.” That section is now labeled “Affordable High Quality Health Care” and replaces the call for Medicare for All with a watered-down pledge to “expand Medicare.”
Similarly, Vallejo removed the word “climate” from her energy policy header. She also replaced her support for a Green New Deal-esque “federal jobs guarantee”—which would cost up to $44.6 trillion—with a line touting the “bipartisan infrastructure law that will bring billions of dollars to South Texas.”
Vallejo also touts her newfound bipartisan bonafides in her updated policy sections on the southern border and Second Amendment.
Her “Immigration” policy blurb—which used to be titled “Embracing the Border + Immigration Justice”—no longer attacks America’s “racist criminal legal system” and calls to “pass a pathway to Citizenship for all 11 million undocumented Americans.” Instead, it states the need to make “an investment in border infrastructure” and only naturalize illegal immigrants “who have worked hard, followed the law and contributed to their communities.” Vallejo added a line to her “End Gun Violence” section, meanwhile, that ensures voters that the Democrat “grew up shooting at gun ranges and hunting on family ranches” and “strongly supports the bipartisan gun safety bill written by Texas Sen. John Cornyn.”
Beyond the border and gun rights, Vallejo’s “LGBTQ+ Justice” policy portion once said “lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer South Texans deserve equal protection and justice.” It now reads, “Every South Texan deserves equal protection and justice.” Furthermore, Vallejo’s new segment on “Affordable Education” was once titled “Free Public College and Trade School + Eliminating Student Debt.” The Democrat’s updated version no longer calls to “forgive all student debt,” but it does note that Vallejo is “still paying off her student loans,” which she acquired as an Ivy League student at Columbia University in New York City.
There is one policy position, however, that Vallejo is standing by after her primary win. Both her old and new issue pages stress the need to “end mandatory minimum sentencing, cash bail, solitary confinement, private prisons, qualified immunity, and prioritizing investing in mental health resources and services for our community.”
Vallejo’s decision to abandon her public support for various left-wing policies comes after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee added the South Texas congressional hopeful to its “Red to Blue” program, which “arms top-tier candidates with organizational and fundraising support to help them continue to develop strong campaigns and win in November.” It’s unclear if the group had a hand in Vallejo’s flip-flopping, as the DCCC did not return a request for comment.
Vallejo will face De La Cruz in November. The Republican in 2020 narrowly lost to incumbent Democrat Vicente Gonzalez in a closer-than-expected race—Gonzalez subsequently opted to run in a nearby district that is more solidly blue. De La Cruz, who describes herself as a “proud small business owner” and “woman of strong faith,” has raised $2.9 million to Vallejo’s $700,000.
John Bridgeland worked on Obama White House council, cheered Biden victory
On the campaign trail, Rep. Tim Ryan (D., Ohio) touts the endorsement of a man named John Bridgeland as evidence of his cross-party appeal.
There are just a few details the congressman leaves out, at least when he’s trying to win over voters in his increasingly red state: Bridgeland worked in the Obama administration, celebrated Joe Biden’s election, and cofounded a nonprofit dedicated to remaking policing.
The founder of “Republicans for Tim Ryan,” Bridgeland has worked on left-wing policy initiatives for years. Former president Barack Obama in 2010 appointed Bridgeland to the White House Council for Community Solutions. Bridgeland also cofounded a firm, COVID Collaborative, that works with the Biden administration on vaccine messaging. In December 2020, Bridgeland wrote an op-ed for the website of Maria Shriver, a Democratic activist and member of the Kennedy family, about how he was “so encouraged” by Biden’s win.
Democrats touting endorsements from nominal Republicans who routinely attack the Republican Party is a familiar strategy. Lawmakers who have been rubber stamps for Biden’s agenda, such as Ryan, are hoping that voters forget their records. Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), who is running in a competitive race this cycle, recently released a list of endorsements from Republicans, several of whom work for the the Lincoln Project, an activist group dedicated to electing Democrats but helmed by individuals who once considered themselves Republicans.
Bridgeland’s endorsement comes as Ryan seeks to separate himself from the president. Biden’s approval rating is 23 points underwater in Ohio—a state that former president Donald Trump won twice. When Biden traveled to Ohio for a speech last month, Ryan scheduled campaign stops hundreds of miles away.
Ryan shared Bridgeland’s endorsement on Twitter and wrote he was “proud” to have Bridgeland on his “team.”
“Republicans for Ryan is a platform for Republicans to sign up to help Tim Ryan. I am a registered Republican and vote in Republican primaries and in general elections,” Bridgeland told the Free Beacon. “I believe in limited, effective government, … civil society and the nonprofit and private sectors, and respecting both individual rights and responsibilities.”
Bridgeland worked from the mid-1990s to 2003 as a senior official in then-representative Rob Portman’s (R., Ohio) office and in former president George W. Bush’s administration. In an op-ed for a local Ohio newspaper, Bridgeland wrote that he supports Ryan’s “love of our democracy” and “many of his policies.”
Bridgeland attacked Ryan’s Republican Senate challenger, J.D. Vance, as “lacking the energy of the U.S. senator he is trying to replace—Rob Portman.” Portman endorsed Vance immediately after Vance in May won the Republican nomination.
Bridgeland’s endorsement of Ryan was leaked to Politico days prior as part of a story about the Ryan campaign’s strategy of appealing to Republican voters. That story also featured Bridgeland speaking favorably about Ryan and how Ryan could make inroads with Republican voters in Ohio. Missing from Politico‘s story was any mention of Bridgeland’s work since he left the Bush administration in 2003.
Ryan did not respond to a request for comment.
Other than Bridgeland, no appointees with experience in Republican politics were appointed to Obama’s White House community solutions council. There, Bridgeland worked alongside the likes of Laurene Powell Jobs and Jon Bon Jovi to provide advice to the president on “innovative community solutions and civic participation by all Americans.”
Bridgeland later cofounded ACT NOW, a nonprofit that works “to reimagine ‘public safety’ … and eliminate the root causes of systemic racism.” ACT NOW’s staff includes Ray C. Kelly, who in 2018 received an award from George Soros’s Open Society Institute-Baltimore.
According to internal voter data obtained by the Free Beacon, Bridgeland voted in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. A June column he wrote for the Cincinnati Enquirer called for new gun control measures. The column also touted his work with a group called the People’s Filibuster for Gun Safety. That group, according to its website, partners with left-wing nonprofits such as the Anti-Defamation League and March for Our Lives to pass gun-control legislation.
Bridgeland’s cheerleading for Biden appears out of step with Republican voters. Following Biden’s State of the Union address in March, Bridgeland celebrated the speech as passionate and “articulating values and ideas that transcend our divisions.” A Reuters poll released Aug. 9 found 86 percent of self-identified Republicans disapprove of Biden.
Ryan will face Vance in November. There is little high-quality polling of the race available, although most political analysts believe Vance is the favorite. Portman’s seat has been held by a Republican since 1999.
A former Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whistleblower has said that the Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will see the government target middle-income Americans with increased scrutiny and audits.
William Henck previously worked as a lawyer for the IRS for 20 years until 2017, when he was terminated for allegedly revealing sensitive information to the media about how the IRS had reportedly failed to identify a multi-billion-dollar corporate tax credit scheme involving a source of energy known as burning pulp byproducts, or black liquor.
Speaking to Fox Business, Henck disputed claims by the IRS and other officials who have said that increased funding for the agency under the IRA, which is set to be signed into law by Joe Biden this week, would only lead to more audits for wealthy millionaires and billionaires and large corporations.
“The idea that they’re going to open things up and go after these big billionaires and large corporations is quite frankly [expletive],” Henck said in the interview on Aug. 15. “It’s not going to happen. They’re going to give themselves bonuses and promotions and really nice conferences.”
“The big corporations and the billionaires are probably sitting back laughing right now,” he said, adding that it was “insane” to double the IRS budget.
Henck also said he believes that the agency will go after businesses that don’t have enough money to hire Washington lobbyists.
(L-R) Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) leave the Senate Chamber after final passage of the Inflation Reduction Act at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Aug. 7, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
‘Absolutely Not’ Being Used to Target Middle-Income Americans
The Democrat-controlled House passed the IRA in a strictly party-line vote on Aug. 12. It includes nearly $80 billion in IRS funding, including $45.6 billion for “enforcement.”
A Treasury Department report from May 2021 (pdf) estimated that such an investment would enable the agency to hire roughly 87,000 employees by 2031.
Amid mounting fears, the IRS has said it will “absolutely not” be using the extra money to increase audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans.
IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig stated in a letter to members of the Senate on Aug. 4 that the extra resources will instead serve to help the agency in “challenging” areas such as audits of large corporate and global high-net-worth taxpayers.
“These resources are absolutely not about increasing audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans,” Rettig wrote in the letter. “As we’ve been planning, our investment of these enforcement resources is designed around the Department of the Treasury’s directive that audit rates will not rise relative to recent years for households making under $400,000.”
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre have also doubled down on their rhetoric regarding reports about the extra funding being utilized to target middle-income Americans, stating that there would be no new audits for individuals earning less than $400,000 per year.
Henck disagrees.
‘Unlimited Resources And No Accountability’
“There will be considerable incentive to basically to shake down taxpayers, and the advantage the IRS has is they have basically unlimited resources and no accountability, whereas a taxpayer has to weigh the cost of accountants, tax lawyers—fighting something in tax court,” he told Fox Business.
“If you own a roofing company, you better count on getting audited because that’s what they’re going to be doing,” he continued. “They’re going to be going after your car dealerships, roofing companies.”
Henck’s comments come after the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that working-class Americans will end up paying billions of dollars in new taxes thanks to the IRA.
Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee said on Aug. 12 that they had received the information from the CBO confirming that under the new legislation, lower- and middle-income Americans will pay an estimated $20 billion more in taxes over the next decade.
This confirms that “at least $20 billion of the $124 billion in new revenue expected by a supercharged IRS will be coming from higher audits on low- and middle-income Americans” and that this would be “in addition to existing audits on these income levels,” GOP lawmakers said in a statement.
The Epoch Times has not received a response for comment from the CBO.
Moderna documents regarding their COVID vaccine trial on animals, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by Judicial Watch, showed that some of the offspring of rats that were injected with Moderna’s mRNA shot developed rib malformations.
The 700 pages contain a portion of the formal Biologics Licensing Application (BLA) package that a manufacturer is required to submit to the FDA for approval.
The documents have not yet been made public, but were analyzed by former pharma executive Alexandra Latypova and reviewed by The Epoch Times.
Included in the documents are test results that show that Moderna mRNA shots caused statistically significant skeletal malformations in the offspring of the rats that took the mRNA-1273 (Spikevax mRNA) doses.
“mRNA-1273-related variations in skeletal examination included statistically significant increases in the number of F1 rats with 1 or more wavy ribs and 1 or more rib nodules. Wavy ribs appeared in 6 fetuses and 4 litters with a fetal prevalence of 4.03% and a litter prevalence of 18.2%. Rib nodules appeared in 5 of those 6 fetuses,” according to Moderna’s internal documents.
F1 refers to the rat offspring and litter indicates a group-birth of rats.
“Maternal toxicity in the form of clinical observations was observed for 5 days following the last dose (Gestation Day 13), correlating with the most sensitive period for rib development in rats (Gestation Days 14 to 17)” the documents state.
A document package on biodistribution studies obtained by Judicial Watch. (Courtesy of Alexandra Latypova)
“Wavy ribs” refers to ribs not properly shaped.
In other words, 6 out of about 149 baby rats had wavy ribs and 5 of those also had rib nodules.
According to Latypova’s analysis, only female rats were studied (male rats were not treated with the Moderna vaccine).
The females got a human dose of 100mcg Spikevax mRNA, 28 and 14 days prior to mating and gestation days 1 and 13.
“1/2 rats euthanized before delivery to examine fetuses, the rest followed to 21 days after delivery,” Latypova stated, “No numbers are provided for the study size.”
In addition, there is no study report, but only Moderna’s own interpretation of the outcomes.
The results were part of reproductive toxicology tests done by Moderna, which is the only reproductive toxicology test for the product, according to Latypova.
It is not known how the dose translates from humans to rats.
“Neither Moderna nor Pfizer provided any dose calculations or justification information for dose selection in animal studies,” Latypova told The Epoch Times.
“Doses of drugs, or especially biologics do not necessarily have linear relationships with toxicity or efficacy. It is likely a much more complex relationship and unfortunately not known at all.”
“Reproductive toxicology is the study of adverse effects of medicinal products on reproduction. The FDA requires reproductive toxicity testing for any NME to be used in women of childbearing potential,” added Latypova, who has worked in more than 60 pharmaceutical companies, mainly focusing on creating and reviewing clinical trials, many of which were submitted to the FDA.
Despite the abovementioned lab results, the FDA issued a statement on Jan. 30 saying that there were no adverse effects on postnatal developments.
“No vaccine-related fetal malformations or variations and no adverse effect on postnatal development were observed in the study,” the FDA stated on the label for Moderna’s Spikevax vaccine.
“In a developmental toxicity study, 0.2 mL of a vaccine formulation containing nucleoside-modified mRNA (100 mcg) and other ingredients that are included in a 0.5-mL single human dose of SPIKEVAX was administered IM to female rats on four occasions: 28 and 14 days prior to mating, and on gestation days 1 and 13,” reads the FDA publication.
Pfizer Vaccine Also Caused Abnormal Ribs in Rats
In August of 2021, Elsevier published a peer-reviewed study (pdf) titled “Lack of effects on female fertility and prenatal and postnatal offspring development in rats with BNT162b2, a mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine.”
BNT162b2 is the Pfizer jab.
All the authors of the publication were employed by Pfizer, BioNTech, or Charles River, a Pfizer contractor.
This publication suggests that there was a “lack of effects” in postnatal offspring development, but the study shows that there was a 295 percent increase (8.3 percent compared to 2.1 percent in the control group) in abnormal ribs in vaccinated rat offspring. A huge increase in what is described as the “supernumerary lumbar.”
‘This Was an Extremely Dangerous Warning’
“Skeletal abnormalities in the bony rib cages are absolutely important and were statistically increased in the rat offspring of the experimental group compared with the placebo group,” James Thorp, an MD board-certified in obstetrics and gynecology, as well as maternal-fetal medicine, told The Epoch Times after reviewing Latypova’s analysis of Moderna’s BLA package.
“In clinical obstetrics and maternal-fetal medicine we see similar findings in skeletal abnormalities prior to birth that are extremely serious and often lethal. This was an extremely dangerous warning signal in reproductive toxicology studies and was never brought to the light of day to protect our global citizens. The CDC, Pfizer, Moderna, and the flagship medical journals of the medical industrial complex lied to the American public and should be held accountable,” Thorp said.
Thorp recently analyzed and verified the most recent Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) data related to COVID-19 vaccines and compared them to the influenza vaccines, finding numerous abnormalities.
The CDC website recommends the COVID vaccines during pregnancy in order to “prevent severe illness and death in pregnant women.”
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists also “strongly recommends that pregnant individuals be vaccinated against COVID-19,” adding that pregnant women’s complete vaccination should be a “priority.”
Moderna and the FDA did not respond to a request for comment.
The Epoch Times reached out to Pfizer and CDC for comment.
A NEW STUDY REVEALS JUST HOW DAMAGING THE POLICY WAS.
COVID-19 lockdowns could be responsible for claiming 20 times more lives than they were advertised to save, according to a new analysis published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
The paper, which bases its conclusions on a comprehensive review of other relevant, lockdown-focused literature, was authored by researchers at the Jerusalem College of Technology.
“In this work, we performed a narrative review of the works studying the above effectiveness, as well as the historic experience of previous pandemics and risk-benefit analysis based on the connection of health and wealth,” summarized the article, titled “Are Lockdowns Effective in Managing Pandemics?”
“The comparative analysis of different countries showed that the assumption of lockdowns’ effectiveness cannot be supported by evidence—neither regarding the present COVID-19 pandemic, nor regarding the 1918–1920 Spanish Flu and other less-severe pandemics in the past,” argue the researchers.
The team proceeds to quantify the estimated number of lives lost due to the COVID-19 mitigation measure, which drew strong support from Democrats and public health officials including Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Mike Pence:
The price tag of lockdowns in terms of public health is high: by using the known connection between health and wealth, we estimate that lockdowns may claim 20 times more life years than they save.
The paper also exposes how governments and international health organizations’ embrace of lockdowns was at odds with their stance on the public health policy prior to COVID-19.
“It should be mentioned that the same conclusions—no clear benefit of lockdowns in case of pandemic—were made by national and international bodies before COVID-19 emerged. Namely, several governments prepared detailed plans of response to influenza- like pandemics years ago—see the programs of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (2007) and the Israeli Ministry of Health (2007),”
Researchers singled out the World Health Organization (WHO), which published a comprehensive 91-page preparedness plan in October of 2019 that explicitly mentioned that:
• social distancing measures “can be highly disruptive” and should be carefully weighted; • travel-related measures are “unlikely to be successful”; “border closures may be considered only by small island nations in severe pandemics”; • and contact tracing and quarantine of exposed individuals are not recommended in any circumstances.
The paper doesn’t argue that lockdowns were merely ineffective; however, adding that they actually claimed the lives of the people public health officials claimed to be protecting.
“The lockdown policies had a direct side effect of increasing mortality. Hospitals in Europe and USA were prepared to manage pretty small groups of highly contagious patients, while unprepared for a much more probable challenge—large-scale contagion. As a result, public health care facilities and nursing homes often became vehicles of contamination themselves—to a large extent because of the lockdown-based emergency policy implementation,” explained the paper, citing New York as an example.
“While our understanding of viral transmission mechanisms leads to the assumption that lockdowns may be an effective pandemic management tool, this assumption cannot be supported by the evidence-based analysis of the present COVID-19 pandemic, as well as of the 1918–1920 H1N1 influenza type-A pandemic (the Spanish Flu) and numerous less-severe pandemics in the past,” concludes the paper.
The findings follow the publication of other studies finding sizable drawbacks to lockdowns and other popular COVID-19 mitigation measures such as mask mandates.
State files appeal against decision as midterms approach
Some 5,000 Texans who used a P.O. box as a voter registration address will likely be able to cast a ballot in the state’s midterm elections after a federal judge blocked a 2021 state election law.
Senate Bill 1111 attempted to tighten residency guidelines for Texas voters, but was struck down this month by U.S. District Court Judge Lee Yeakel, an appointee under former president George W. Bush.
Yeakel, who presides over the Austin Division for the Western District of Texas, found in a summary judgement that the state used vague language in the election law and parts of it failed constitutional scrutiny.
Texas’ Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed the decision last week to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, according to State Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R-Houston), who authored the election bill.
Texas’ Attorney General Ken Paxton speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas at the Hilton Anatole Aug. 5, 2022. (Bobby Sanchez/The Epoch Times)
“There is no one that can live inside a P.O. box,” Bettencourt pointed out in a statement earlier this month.
Bettencourt told The Epoch Times he was disappointed in the decision against a “common-sense voter integrity bill.”
The bill required people registering to vote with a P.O. box to show proof of address such as a driver’s license or utility bill.
Some 5,000 people were registered to vote in Harris County alone using a P.O. box in 2020, Bettencourt said.
As of this month, the number is around 4,800 because some of the records were processed before the law was blocked.
The actual number using P.O. boxes to register statewide would make the total higher, he added, saying he expects the number could climb before voter registration ends in October without the law.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (3R) signs Senate Bill 1, also known as the election integrity bill into law with others clapping and looking on in Tyler, Texas, on Sept. 7, 2021. (Marina Fatina/NTD)
The Republican-led Texas Legislature passed the bill along with others in an attempt to guard against election fraud after the 2020 election.
The lawsuit filed by the Texas chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens and Voto Latino, a nonprofit that seeks to mobilize voters, called those requirements in SB 1111 an unnecessary burden on voters.
The Latino groups claimed voter suppression against six large counties controlled by Democrats: Travis, Bexas, Harris, Hidalgo, Dallas, and El Paso.
“This measure imposes vague, onerous restrictions on the voter registration process, chilling political participation and further burdening the abilities of lawful voters to cast their ballots and make their voices heard.” Texas LULAC state director Rodolfo Rosales said in a statement after filing the suit.
Maria Teresa Kumar, president and CEO of Voto Latino, celebrated the decision.
“The true intent of this discriminatory measure has always been about suppressing voter turnout—especially among young people, communities of color, low-income voters, and other historically marginalized groups,” she said in an August statement.
The State of Texas was not a party to the lawsuit at first and had to intervene in order to appeal the decision. Had that not happened, it would have been up to the Democratic controlled counties to appeal.
Bettencourt said suits filed against Democratic-controlled local governments by friendly liberal organizations is a new tactic to get around Texas’ voter integrity laws because the entity being sued will “agree with the suit.”
Hans von Spakousky, an election law reform manger for the Heritage Foundation, said every state has residency requirements.
For a judge to rule against a state law requiring verification of residency would appear political, he said.
Friendly groups suing each other is a tactic to get a favorable outcome, he said. “They’re hoping for a collusive settlement.”
Only a few days after the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky publicly demanded the repeal of the Espionage Act.
The Department of Justice is presumably weighing whether or not to indict former President Donald Trump for allegedly violating the act by taking classified documents with him upon leaving office (although, whether the documents in question were actually “classified” is up for dispute).
According to the official search warrant, the FBI raided the Trump resort on Aug. 8 to look for said documents as well as any evidence that the documents had been knowingly altered, destroyed or hidden.
Without mentioning the president or the Mar-a-Lago raid, Senator Paul took to Twitter Saturday to demand the act be repealed.
The espionage act was abused from the beginning to jail dissenters of WWI. It is long past time to repeal this egregious affront to the 1st Amendment.
“The espionage act was abused from the beginning to jail dissenters of WWI. It is long past time to repeal this egregious affront to the 1st Amendment,” Paul tweeted.
In the 2019 article, Jacob G. Hornberger, the foundation’s founder and president, argues that the Espionage Act is “a tyrannical law” which can be, and has been, used to punish government whistleblowers.
The most obvious example of this comes in the form of Julian Assange, the head of Wikileaks who was indicted for violating the act.
“Some news media commentators are finally coming to the realization that if the Espionage Act can be enforced against Assange for what he did, it can be enforced against anyone in the press for revealing damaging inside information about the national-security establishment — i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA and the NSA,” Hornberger wrote.
“Therefore, they are calling on the Justice Department to cease and desist from its prosecution of Assange.”
Hornberger alleges that the Espionage Act, enacted in 1917, was created for this very purpose — to punish American citizens for criticizing the government’s decision to intervene in World War I.
“The law converted anyone who publicly criticized the draft or attempted to persuade American men to resist the draft into felons. And make no mistake about it: U.S. officials went after such people with a vengeance, doing their best to punish Americans for doing nothing more than speaking.”
At least one source close to Trump maintains he, much like Assange, took the documents because “he thought the American public should have the right to read” them.
“Trump declassified whole sets of materials in anticipation of leaving government that he thought the American public should have the right to read themselves,” Kash Patel, a former Department of Defense official under Trump, told Breitbart News.
“The White House counsel failed to generate the paperwork to change the classification markings, but that doesn’t mean the information wasn’t declassified,” he continued. “I was there with President Trump when he said ‘We are declassifying this information.’”
“This story is just another disinformation campaign designed to break the public trust in a president that lived on transparency. It’s yet another way to attack Trump and say he took classified information when he did not.”
In a stunning move, Joe Biden disbanded a federal employee labor union, but only after it endorsed his opponent in the 2020 election and criticized his policies.
The Federal Labor Relations Authority ruled last week to disband the “National ICE Council,” which represents 7,600 employees of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
It was one of the few labor unions to endorse President Donald Trump and has been critical of Biden’s policies. It has also been critical of alleged corruption by union bosses supporting Biden.
Chris Crane, president of the council, said the government colluded with AFGE to silence the organization and its members.
“There is no doubt that ICE and DHS leadership worked in unison with corrupt union bosses to make this happen,” he said. “DHS and AFGE leadership both wanted desperately to silence ICE Council whistleblowers. Without a union, it’s doubtful those whistleblowers will have jobs much longer.”
He also called the FLRA’s decision “the largest single act of whistleblower retaliation in United States history” by depriving union members of their representation.
“We did what we were supposed to do. We reported to the Department of Labor that union bosses at AFGE were allegedly spending dues money on prostitutes and strippers, sexually assaulting their own employees, engaging in payoffs and coverups, and other unlawful and egregious acts. It was supposed to be investigated. We were supposed to be protected,” he said.
He added: “Federal employees must be alerted immediately that they have no protection from corrupt unions when reporting allegations to the Department of Labor. This can’t happen again.”
It’s not the first time Biden is alleged to have officially retaliated against critics of his border policies.
In January FBI agents raided the home of Congressman Henry Cuellar, a Democrat representing a district on the Texas/Mexico border.
Cuellar has been openly critical of Biden’s border enforcement policies, and the raid came just days before ballots were to be mailed out in a Democrat primary between Cuellar and a nationally-supported-and-funded liberal challenger.
Despite the raid Cuellar narrowly won his primary. The FBI has not announced any charges or allegations against Cuellar.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
John Fetterman linked to creepy anime demon best known for enslaving a child
Republicans and other anti-grooming activists are seething after a photo resurfaced of Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman’s family posing with a controversial anime character best known for enslaving a child.
The photo, which Fetterman posted on Twitter in April 2019, shows the candidate’s wife and three children posing with an exceedingly large man in a creepy demon mask and long black cloak. Experts familiar with the anime genre tell the Washington Free Beacon the masked individual was portraying the character Elias Ainsworth from the Japanese manga series The Ancient Magus’ Bride.
tbc this is NOT me in the mask. I swear, I was in Blair County. You can be sure because, quite frankly, the head isn’t cut off. 🙄🙄 pic.twitter.com/nVHJk1YlMr
Fetterman claims to have been in Blair County, Pa., at the time the photo was taken at the Tekko anime convention in Pittsburgh. Nevertheless, the fact that he would even allow his children to be exposed to a character as creepy and problematic as Elias Ainsworth raised serious questions about his parenting.
Blog posts reviewed by the Free Beacon suggest the series is incredibly problematic due to how it depicts the relationship between Ainsworth, “a seven-foot-tall humanoid with an animal skull for a head,” and Chise Hatori, the 15-year-old orphan he buys at a slave action in London for five million pounds. According to a listicle published on the Comic Book Resources website, this is one of five reasons why “Chise and Eilas are [not] the perfect couple.”
A scathing review posted on tumblr.com awarded the show a score of 3/10 despite acknowledging there was “so much to love” about the anime series. “Chise and Elias could have been terrific characters in their own right but their relationship is marred by their creepy creators’ bad writing,” wrote tumblr user juneboba. “So many things Elias says reeked of things predators actually say to their victims and romanticizing it is gross. He even admits outright that he’s grooming Chise and ‘raising’ her to be perfect for his use.”
The reviewer was especially put off by the fact that Elias kept “invading [Chise’s] privacy and trying to touch and bathe her without her permission,” noting that Elias’s character “understood that what he was doing to a child was morally reprehensible” yet was portrayed as having “saved” Chise by purchasing her at auction and making her his child bride. “That’s not how human trafficking works and glorifying it is despicable,” juneboba wrote.
Fetterman’s decision to glorify the despicable character, months after taking office as lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, is the latest in a series of scandals plaguing the state’s Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. He was widely criticized, for example, for holding an innocent black jogger at gunpoint in 2013. Fetterman has refused to apologize for his racially charged vigilantism. The candidate suffered a nearly fatal stroke in May after repeatedly ignoring his doctor’s advice and has rarely ventured out on the campaign trail since then. Video evidence suggests Fetterman is nearly as incapable as Joe Biden when it comes to speaking in coherent sentences.
Rep. Danny K. Davis rents his Chicago office from a convicted drug pusher
Rep. Danny K. Davis (D., Ill.) rents his district office from a convicted cocaine dealer who was once affiliated with a Chicago drug ring, according to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Since January 2017, Davis’s campaign account has cut regular $600 checks for “office rent” to Mario’s Butcher Shop, FEC records show. The shop, which is registered as a corporation with the state, lists Mariano “Mario” Lettieri and his wife as the sole members of its board of directors and was at the center of Lettieri’s 1990 conviction for drug trafficking.
Lettieri, whom the Chicago Tribune described as “reputedly tied” to a “crime syndicate,” was sentenced to nearly 16 years in prison after authorities identified him as the primary supplier of cocaine to a major Chicago drug ring led by an ex-cop. The Drug Enforcement Administration reported that Lettieri trafficked as much as 80 pounds of cocaine over a six-month period. Lettieri also allowed heroin to be packaged in his butcher shop’s boiler room and used “rib-eye steaks” as a code word when discussing drug prices.
Lettieri is an odd landlord for Davis, who has long championed efforts to fight drug abuse. Davis in 2006 called for $4 million in emergency aid funds to be allocated to Cook County to address the growing heroin problem in the area. Last year, Davis announced that he had formed a coalition of drug prevention organizations in Chicago to help address the growing opioid crisis. He told the local press that “there is no part of Chicago that is worse hit than the West Side.” The West Side of Chicago is where Lettieri ran his drug operation in the 1980s.
Tumia Romero, Davis’s chief of staff, would not directly address the congressman’s payments to Lettieri but told the Free Beacon that Davis believes in giving people “second chances.”
Davis is no stranger to controversy. In 2005, he took a trip to Sri Lanka funded by the Tamil Tigers, an ethnic terrorist group from that country. He is a close ally of noted anti-Semite and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and once participated in a religious ceremony with Sun Myung Moon, the leader of the controversial Unification Church. Moon, who died in 2012, was a convicted felon who said Jews deserved the Holocaust.
The congressman also attended the 2012 dedication of the Church of Scientology’s Washington, D.C., lobbying office.
Davis, who faced a tough primary challenge this cycle, was boosted by an endorsement from Joe Biden. The longtime congressman won his primary by single digits and is now expected to coast to reelection in November.
Reached for comment, a Mario’s Butcher Shop employee said he would relay the Free Beacon‘s inquiry to the establishment’s owner.
Joe Biden’s administration on Aug. 15 urged a federal court to keep the affidavit that led to the approval of a search warrant on former President Donald Trump’s resort shielded from the public.
U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers said unsealing the affidavit would “irreparably harm the government’s ongoing criminal investigation.”
“Even when the public is already aware of the general nature of the investigation, revealing the specific contents of a search warrant affidavit could alter the investigation’s trajectory, reveal ongoing and future investigative efforts, and undermine agents’ ability to collect evidence or obtain truthful testimony,” they wrote in a 13-page filing to U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, who is overseeing the case.
“In addition to the implications for the investigation, the release of this type of investigative material could have ‘devastating consequences’ for the reputations and rights of individuals whose actions and statements are described,” they added, citing a previous decision in a different case.
A slew of parties, including Judicial Watch, media outlets, and the Florida Center for Governmental Accountability, have lodged motions after the Aug. 8 raid of Mar-a-Lago, arguing it is in the public interest to unseal the affidavit and other related documents.
The government and Trump’s lawyers agreed on some of the documents, and Reinhart unsealed the search warrant and several attachments on Aug. 12, revealing that the government believes Trump violated multiple laws.
‘Different Set of Considerations’
“The department filed the motion to make public the warrant and receipt in light of the former president’s public confirmation of the search, the surrounding circumstances, and the substantial public interest in this matter,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in prepared remarks three days after the raid.
Those documents were made public with few redactions.
“The affidavit supporting the search warrant presents a very different set of considerations. There remain compelling reasons, including to protect the integrity of an ongoing law enforcement investigation that implicates national security, that support keeping the affidavit sealed,” DOJ lawyers said in the new filing.
Affidavits are documents filed in court that outline why certain actions are needed. In this case, a law enforcement official filed an affidavit attempting to convince Reinhart to approve the warrant. The affidavit was successful.
The government has considered whether the affidavit could be released with redactions but “the redactions necessary to mitigate harms to the integrity of the investigation would be so extensive as to render the remaining unsealed text devoid of meaningful content, and the release of such a redacted version would not serve any public interest,” government lawyers said in a footnote in an Aug. 15 brief.
“Nevertheless, should the Court order partial unsealing of the affidavit, the government respectfully requests an opportunity to provide the Court with proposed redactions,” they said.
The filing was part of a flurry of activity in the case on Aug. 15, which included several other entries being sealed until further notice.
Epps admitted to trespassing, directing protesters to go into the Capitol. ‘I wish I could take that back,’ he told agents.
When James Ray Epps Sr. first called the FBI regarding his January 2021 activities in Washington D.C., he didn’t mention how he implored protesters in several locations to go inside the Capitol, but he later told an agent that he expected a bomb would detonate on a side street near the Capitol.
Those are just two of the revelations in a collection of Epps-related material obtained by The Epoch Times, including FBI interview summaries, FBI audio recordings, transcripts, videos, and photographs.
In two interviews with the FBI in 2021, Epps explained his actions on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6. He admitted he was guilty of trespassing on restricted Capitol grounds and confessed to urging protesters to go to—and into—the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Despite the admissions, the FBI never arrested Epps and he was not charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with any Jan. 6 crimes. The non-action has fueled a crop of theories that he might have been working for the FBI or another agency.
Epps, 61, has repeatedly denied those suggestions through his attorney.
Epps recently sold his house and land in Queen Creek, Arizona, because of threats and harassment and moved to Colorado, he told the New York Times in July. According to online records, the Arizona property sold for $2.2 million on April 28, 2022.
Epps at one time was No. 16 on the FBI’s Jan. 6 most-wanted page. His entry was later scrubbed from the list without explanation. He is among a handful of persons of interest to have their photos deleted from the FBI site.
‘Like a Terrorist Act’
In an interview with FBI agents on March 3, 2021, Epps said he brought a first-aid kit in his backpack to Washington because he expected a terror attack.
“Yeah, I thought there might be a problem. That’s why I was there,” Epps told an FBI agent and an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force officer in a meeting at the Phoenix office of Epps’s attorney, John Blischak.
Blischak told The Epoch Times he would comment after reviewing the FBI interview summary, but had not done so by press time.
“I was afraid they were going to set off an explosion on one of the side streets,” Epps said, according to a recording of the interview obtained by The Epoch Times. “So we tried to stay in the middle, tried to get there early, tried to stay away from the sides. And if something like that happened, I had a first-aid kit. I could help out.”
Epps told the agents the possibility of violence weighed heavily on his mind and he originally did not plan to travel to Washington. It was only when learning that his son, James Epps Jr., was going to the Trump rally that the senior Epps decided to go and keep an eye on his son, he said.
Ray Epps is shown at the lower left on an early FBI “wanted” poster. His photo has since been scrubbed from the FBI website. (FBI.gov/Wayback Machine)
“As time went on, I started getting a bad feeling like something’s gonna happen,” said Epps, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and former Oath Keepers leader in Arizona. “There’s a lot of wackies out there. I thought something would happen in D.C. I thought there might be, what do they call them, EOD, something like that?”
Epps might have been referring to an improvised explosive device (IED), which is a homemade bomb that was a favorite weapon of insurgents in Afghanistan during the United States’ long war there. In military parlance, an EOD refers to an explosive ordnance disposal specialist—someone who defuses and destroys explosives.
An agent asked for clarification: “Oh, you mean like a terrorist act?”
“Right, like a terrorist act,” Epps said.
The agents did not press Epps on what led him to believe there would be an explosion, nor did they ask about the two alleged pipe bombs found outside the Republican and Democrat party headquarters, each just blocks from the Capitol. The RNC pipe bomb was placed near the corner of the Capitol Hill Club facing a side street, similar to the description Epps offered.
The devices did not detonate and the FBI has not arrested anyone in those cases.
Epps told the FBI he regretted the things he said in downtown Washington the night of Jan. 5, 2021. He spoke to internet personality Baked Alaska and video podcaster Villain Report, both of whom recorded their exchanges.
“In fact tomorrow, I don’t even like to say it because I’ll be arrested. …I’ll say it. We need to go into the Capitol,” Epps told Baked Alaska, whose legal name is Anthime Gionet.
Epps shouted a similar theme to the crowd at large: “Tomorrow, we need to go into the Capitol. Into the Capitol. Peacefully,” he said. The crowd then started chanting, “Fed! Fed! Fed! Fed!”
The FBI agents told Epps that his statements on Jan. 5 were problematic. They said they found him often on video and in photographs from Jan. 5 and 6.
Epps replied: “I’m the tallest guy in the crowd, and I stick out, man. They followed me.” Then he joked, “I could never be a bank robber.”
“We said that the same way,” one of the agents said. “We said, ‘It’s a big guy and every photo we find, he’s in it.’ The night before, that video didn’t help.
“…And the video the night before, what you said basically predicted what happened,” the agent said.
“I wish I could take that back,” Epps replied. He called the statements “really stupid.”
On Jan. 6, Epps was filmed near the Washington Monument imploring the crowd, “We are going to the Capitol, where our problems are. It’s that direction. Please spread the word.”
When speaking to a young man in a red and black mackinaw jacket, Epps said, “When we go in, leave this here [pointing to something]. You don’t need to get shot,” according to a video of the exchange.
First Call to FBI on Jan. 8
Epps first called the FBI on Jan. 8, 2021, after his brother-in-law notified Epps’s wife that a photograph of Epps was on the FBI website. That call to the National Threat Operations Center (NTOC) lasted about 27 minutes, according to an audio file of the call obtained by The Epoch Times.
In describing his activities, Epps never mentioned that he urged the crowds on Jan. 5 to go into the Capitol the next day. He said he went down to Black Lives Matter plaza to try to calm things down after people he suspected were Antifa activists were harassing police.
“I tried to calm them down,” Epps told the FBI operator. “I tried to let them know that, you know, that this is not what we’re here for. We’re here because of the Constitution, not the police. Police are on our side.”
Nor did Epps mention getting on a bullhorn on Jan. 6 and encouraging people to go to the Capitol as soon as President Donald Trump was finished speaking. He would comment on those topics nearly two months later when interviewed by FBI agents.
On the January call, Epps insisted his presence on Capitol grounds was to de-escalate when things got violent.
“I am guilty of being there and probably trespassing,” he said. “But I had a reason. I was trying to calm ’em down. I wanted to be there, but I’m trying to calm ’em down. Anything I can do to help. There’s no call for that kind of behavior. I will be your witness.”
Ray Epps at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, shortly before pepper gas is shot into the crowd. “Been a long time,” he said. “Aah, I love it!” (Screen Capture/Rumble)
Epps told the agents he came to Washington to express his concerns about the 2020 presidential election. He said he received five ballots at his Queen Creek address: one each for him and his wife, and three with names he did not recognize.
“We’ve owned the property for 11 years now. I’ve never heard of those three people that came there. I didn’t recognize the names,” he said. “And then when the election went the way it did, I was a little concerned. I mean, how many apartments are there in Arizona, 3 million? And if they’re sending all these ballots to these different apartments. I mean, you know, that’s a concern.”
Epps said he also went to support Trump, although he did not stay at the Ellipse for all of Trump’s speech. He said he followed crowds that left the speech early and walked toward the Capitol.
“People started leaving early after President Trump started speaking. So they were running and it was the same people that was, ‘F Antifa,’ and this and that and the other,” Epps said.
“I believe, just my belief, they were Antifa, the ones that were saying that stuff,” he said. “And they were like running that way and I’m like, ‘Maybe I can calm this down.’ So I went with them.”
Epps said it was his original intention to stay for all of the speeches at the Ellipse.
“I planned on being and word was being passed around that right after he gets done speaking, we’re gonna go to the Capitol. And it was a given,” Epps said. “So spread the word spread the word. So I started spreading the word and I said that to a lot of people there: ‘We’re going to the Capitol right after the president speaks.’”
Perhaps the scene that drew the most attention and speculation about Epps on January 6 was when he appeared at the first breach point of police lines. Some 20 minutes before Trump finished speaking at the Ellipse, an aggressive crowd gathered at a lightly defended barrier on a sidewalk not far from the Peace Monument.
As rioters began yanking at the bicycle-rack barriers, Epps pulled Ryan Samsel back from the front line and spoke in his ear. Seconds after that exchange, Samsel and others knocked down the barrier, causing one officer to fall back and hit her head on the concrete.
“I walked up to him, and I put my arm on him and said, ‘Hey, that’s not why we’re here. Don’t be doing that,’ you know.
“I don’t know who he was. No clue,” Epps said. “I just tried to talk him out of doing what he was doing. And then all of a sudden, it blew up.”
When interviewed by an FBI special agent and a detective on Jan. 30, 2021, Samsel corroborated Epps’s description of their brief verbal exchange, according to a transcript of the session obtained by The Epoch Times. Samsel faces nearly a dozen January 6-related charges in U.S. District Court in Washington.
“Now that guy I talked to,” Samsel said, pointing to a photograph of Epps. “He came up to me and he says, ‘Dude,’ his exact words were, ‘Relax,’ he says, ‘The cops are doing their job.’ That’s exactly what he says to me right there in that picture.”
Inconsistencies in Interviews
Epps’s two interviews with the FBI included some inconsistencies and changed details, according to the recordings and FBI summary documents.
Epps told the FBI on Jan. 8 that his brother-in-law called him to notify him his picture was on the FBI’s January 6 website. During his March 3 interview with FBI agents, Epps said, “Someone contacted me and said, ‘Hey, your picture’s up.’”
When asked about his brother-in-law later in the interview, Epps said, “He didn’t call me, he called my sister.” Then his wife interjected, “That was me. And I can tell you exactly because he sent me a text, actually.”
When asked about who was with him on Jan. 5 and 6, Epps replied, “My son.” A short while later he said, “I think he had a friend there. He did have a friend there. I don’t know his name.”
One of the agents said he recalled that on the Jan. 8 phone call with the FBI, Epps said he went sightseeing on Jan. 7. “No, we did that the day before,” he told the agent. A few minutes later, however, this detail changed. “Oh, you know what? The next day we did, no, we got up that morning and we went to the Vietnam Memorial.”
In both contacts with the FBI, Epps asked if his photo could be removed from the FBI’s Jan. 6 page. In the Jan. 8 call, the FBI operator said she had nothing to do with FBI web content. In the March 3 interview, he was given a more discouraging take.
“That picture is probably still out there, will probably be there forever now,” one of the agents told him.
Epps said the notoriety of being publicly listed as a person of interest had caused problems.
“Well, we’ve felt the repercussions. I mean, we’ve had people come on our business site and try to destroy us,” he said. “I’m an insurrectionist, I’m a traitor. I’ve been called everything in the book, but it’s dying down now—I hope.”
The agents asked Epps if his views had changed since Jan. 6.
“I still have concerns about the election. I do. I mean, I think everybody does,” Epps said. “I think our politicians, some of them need to be in jail. I think you guys need to investigate them. I don’t know. How much of what we get is the truth? I don’t know. Not even worth watching the news anymore. Because they just make it up as they go.”
Epps met twice with the House of Representatives’ Jan. 6 Select Committee, including a transcribed interview in January 2022. Committee members seemed satisfied with what Epps told them. No transcript of the session has been released.
“Mr. Epps informed us that he was not employed by, working with, or acting at the direction of any law enforcement agency on January 5th or 6th or at any other time, and that he has never been an informant for the FBI or any other law enforcement agency,” a spokesman said in January.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) grilled top FBI officials about Epps in a January hearing, but received a repeated refrain: “I can’t answer that.”
Fourteen FBI whistleblowers have come forward to provide information to Republican congressional investigations, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said on Aug. 14, about a week after the FBI raided former President Donald Trump’s Florida home.
“Fourteen FBI agents have come to our office as whistleblowers, and they are good people,” Jordan told Fox News. “There are lots of good people in the FBI. It’s the top that is the problem.”
“Some of these good agents are coming to us, telling us … what’s going on—the political nature now of the Justice Department … talking about the school board issue, about a whole host of issues,” he added.
Two months ago, Jordan said that six FBI whistleblowers approached the committee. Two came forward about a memo related to alleged violence and intimidation at school board meetings and four in connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach. In the Senate, meanwhile, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in July that whistleblowers had come to his office to provide information, including disclosures relating to investigations into Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings.
“It’s becoming a well-worn trail of agents who say this has got to stop, and thank goodness for them and that American people recognize it, and I believe they’re going to make a big change on Nov. 8,” Jordan said, referring to the midterm elections.
In June, Jordan sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray warning that several former FBI officials were coming forward, while alleging the agency is “purging” employees who have conservative views.
“In one such example, the FBI targeted and suspended the security clearance of a retired war servicemember who had disclosed personal views that the FBI was not being entirely forthcoming about the events of January 6,” Jordan wrote in a statement. “The FBI questioned the whistleblower’s allegiance to the United States despite the fact that the whistleblower honorably served in the United States military for several years—including deployments in Kuwait and Iraq—valiantly earning multiple military commendation medals.”
It comes as Republicans stepped up calls on Aug. 14 for the release of an FBI affidavit showing the justification for its seizure of documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home.
A search warrant released on Aug. 12 after the unprecedented raid on Aug. 8 showed that Trump allegedly had 11 sets of classified documents at his home. The Justice Department also claimed to have had probable cause to conduct the search based on possible Espionage Act and obstruction of justice violations.
Republicans are calling for the disclosure of more detailed information that persuaded a federal judge to issue the search warrant, which may show sources of information and details about the nature of the documents and other classified information.
Former President Trump said Monday morning that he “will do whatever” he can “to help the country” following the FBI’s unprecedented search of his Mar-a-Lago property last week.
“The country is in a very dangerous position. There is tremendous anger, like I’ve never seen before, over all of the scams, and this new one—years of scams and witch hunts, and now this,” Trump told Fox News in an interview on Monday. “If there is anything we can do to help, I, and my people, would certainly be willing to do that,” the former president added.
Trump said that with the raid, “there has never been a time like this where law enforcement has been used to break into the house of a former president of the United States.”
“I think they would want the same thing—I’ve never seen anything like this,” Trump continued. “It is a very dangerous time for our country … I will do whatever I can to help the country.”
Last week, Trump announced on social media that the FBI raided his Florida property. It wasn’t until several days later, on Thursday, that Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a public statement about the search, confirming that he signed off on the Justice Department’s attempt to seek a warrant in the case.
On Friday, Aug. 12, a U.S. magistrate judge in the case unsealed the warrant and property receipt, showing that the FBI is targeting Trump for alleged Espionage Act violations and obstruction of justice while agents recovered allegedly classified or top secret documents from Mar-a-Lago. But Trump said that he declassified the documents as president and said he was cooperating with the federal government.
The affidavit in the case that would possibly show the federal government’s justification for its raid and seizure of documents at Mar-a-Lago has not been unsealed.
More Details
“First, I personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter,” Garland said during the press conference last week. “Second, the Department does not take such a decision lightly. Where possible, it is standard practice to seek less intrusive means as an alternative to a search, and to narrowly scope any search that is undertaken.”
On Sunday, the former president said that privileged materials were taken by FBI agents, including documents that could fall under attorney-client privilege.
“Oh great! It has just been learned that the FBI, in its now famous raid of Mar-a-Lago, took boxes of privileged ‘attorney-client’ material, and also ‘executive’ privileged material, which they knowingly should not have taken,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Attorney-client privilege is a legal privilege that allows communications between a client and their attorney confidential.
“By copy of this TRUTH (post), I respectfully request that these documents be immediately returned to the location from which they were taken. Thank you!” Trump also wrote Sunday morning.
Republicans say the raid suggests that the FBI and Department of Justice have been politicized and demanded oversight investigations.
However, Trump told Fox News on Monday that Americans are “so angry at what is taking place” and that “the temperature has to be brought down in the country.” Because, he added, “if it isn’t, terrible things are going to happen.”
Heritage Foundation Oversight Project Director Mike Howell is demanding copies of all communications between the White House, Department of Justice (DOJ), the FBI, and former President Donald Trump’s staff about the Aug. 8 FBI raid on the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla.
To that end, Howell—who is a veteran of major congressional oversight projects and a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—has filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which is the federal government’s central custodian of official documents, and each of the relevant agencies.
“The Biden Department of Justice has crossed the Rubicon. This raid showed that the administration is unafraid to weaponize the power of the deep state against its political enemies—even a former sitting president,” Howell said in a statement issued shortly after Attorney General Merrick Garland declined to answer any questions about the raid during a brief appearance in the DOJ media conference room on Aug. 11.
“We are filing this request because the American people deserve the answers Joe Biden and Merrick Garland will not give them. There is no reason NARA cannot fulfill our request for these documents, as they should have nothing to do with any ongoing investigation,” Howell continued.
Mike Howell, Senior Adviser for Government Relations at The Heritage Foundation. (Courtesy of Mike Howell)
“Ultimately, it looks like the Biden administration raided President Trump’s home over a document dispute—let’s see if they comply with our legal document demand, or if they’re complete hypocrites. Rest assured, we will fight to get the truth about this unprecedented act,” he added.
The Heritage Oversight Project requested that federal officials process the FOIAs on an expedited basis, which would allow 10 days before the agencies must either affirm or deny the requests, or face litigation.
The request to NARA was signed by Heritage’s Senior Investigative Counsel, Roman Jankowski, who is also a contributing writer for the conservative nonprofit’s Daily Signal.
“This raid, and what transpired before and after it, has affected American public confidence. As per the Trafalgar Group poll conducted after the Trump raid, 53.9 percent of likely general election voters believe Trump’s political enemies are behind the FBI raid on President Trump’s private home, and only 35.3 percent of likely general election voters believe it is due to an impartial justice system,” Jankowski said in the request.
Howell signed the lengthy, eight-page request to DOJ, which seeks all of the communications mentioning Trump since Jan. 20, 2021, between and among DOJ’s Office of the Attorney General, Office of the Deputy Attorney General, Office of the Associate Attorney General, Office of the Solicitor General, Office of Legal Counsel, Office of Legal Policy, Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and U.S. Marshals Service.
Heritage President Kevin Roberts issued a separate statement regarding the Mar-a-Lago raid in which he observed that it “represents yet another example of the federal government weaponizing law enforcement to punish political enemies, silence critics, and send a message to those whom it views as enemies. The Biden administration and the D.C. swamp are making it very clear that they will use all the power of the state to intimidate anyone who stands in their way.”
Roberts added that “the timing is suspect at best, given the upcoming elections and the Senate’s passage of a bill that would authorize the hiring of 87,000 new IRS agents, who will be unleashed to target working and middle-class Americans in order to fund the left’s radical agenda.”
Roberts’ comment may have been a product of the fact the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks were subjected to multiple time-consuming and costly IRS audits during the Clinton administration, none of which ever turned up any wrongdoing.
In a related development, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, similarly demanded in an Aug. 10 letter that NARA turn over all communications and documents concerning the raid. Comer was joined on the letter by the panel’s other 19 Republican members.
“Law enforcement raiding a former president’s residence is unprecedented. Committee Republicans are concerned that NARA would utilize the FBI to gather documents that the president, by the very nature of his constitutional role, could declassify himself, if this was indeed the case as media has reported. The Biden administration is continuing to weaponize the FBI against political rivals,” the Comer letter told NARA.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said he intends to investigate the FBI’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort if Republicans take back the Senate during the 2022 midterms.
In an interview on Saturday, Grassley said that with Trump, “the FBI over a long period of time has kind of a double standard. You know, you can go back to the Steele Dossier.”
“And it just seems to me like they there’s political bias in the FBI,” he told Breitbart News. “And then I have recently—you’ve heard me give evidence of political bias of starting a Trump investigation and then quitting a Hunter Biden investigation. So it’s legitimate to raise the question about the extent to which there’s still political bias and what we’re doing now.”
Grassley then took issue with Attorney General Merrick Garland’s comments on transparency, saying that “he should make sure that the affidavits follow up on the warrant.”
So far, the Department of Justice has not released the affidavit that would explain why the FBI needed to obtain a warrant to search Trump’s property. Garland and the FBI have remained mostly silent on the raid, with Garland issuing a brief statement during a news conference on Aug. 11.
On Aug. 12, a judge in the case unsealed part of the warrant the FBI used to search Trump’s property. A property receipt said the FBI seized classified documents, although it’s not clear what they were.
The search and seizure warrant shows FBI agents targeted “the ’45 Office,’ all storage rooms, and all other rooms or areas within the premises used or available to be used by FPOTUS (former president of the United States) and his staff and in which boxes or documents could be stored, including all structures or buildings on the estate.”
Agents were granted authority to seize “all physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed,” according to the warrant. That includes documents with classification markings and presidential records that were drafted between Jan. 20, 2017, and Jan. 20, 2021—the entire time Trump was in office.
On Truth Social, Trump argued that those documents were declassified and termed the FBI’s latest actions as a “witch hunt.” Trump on Sunday wrote that FBI agents obtained “boxes of privileged ‘attorney-client’ material, and also ‘executive’ privileged material” and demanded their return.
“By copy of this TRUTH (post), I respectfully request that these documents be immediately returned to the location from which they were taken. Thank you!” he wrote.
Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s campaign has raked in donations from billionaires and Hollywood celebrities despite the fundraising off her Trump-endorsed opponent’s ties to “special interests,” according to state records reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Michigan Democrat’s campaign has received over $1 million from billionaires and almost $48,000 from Hollywood celebrities since 2021, state campaign finance disclosures show. At the same time, the governor’s re-election campaign has criticized Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon for her ties to “special interests” and former Education Secretary and billionaire Betsy DeVos.
“Special interests are continuing to line up behind Tudor Dixon, including former Gov. John Engler and billionaire Betsy DeVos,” Whitmer’s campaign wrote in a July 8 email to voters. “Party insiders and special interests are going full steam ahead with Tudor Dixon, their newly handpicked candidate who has proposed a radical agenda that would take Michigan backwards.”
Billionaires who shelled out $250,000 for Whitmer’s campaign in 2021 include Democratic Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, oil company heiress Stacy H. Schusterman and siblings Patricia Stryker and Ronda Stryker — the grandchildren of inventor Homer Stryker. Some other billionaires who have donated to Whitmer’s campaign include former Enron executive John Arnold, who gave $7,150 in April 2022, and Open Society Foundations Founder George Soros, who gave $25,000 in 2021.
Jonathan Soros, the investment banker and son of George Soros, has donated $12,150 to Whitmer’s campaign since 2018. His wife Jennifer Allan Soros has donated $14,300 since 2018.
“Jaws” Director Stephen Spielberg donated $7,150 in March to Whitmer’s campaign, and “Princess Bride” Director Rob Reiner donated $2,500 that month. Actress Kate Capshaw, known for her role in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” donated $7,150 in March.
Tom Ford, the fashion designer and filmmaker, donated $7,500 to Whitmer’s campaign in February 2022. Tom Rothman, the CEO of entertainment conglomerate Sony Pictures, gave the governor’s campaign $5,000 back in 2021.
“I kind of think hypocrisy is a misdemeanor these days in politics,” Fred Wszolek, a Republican strategist in Michigan, told the DCNF. “This is the opening act of Whitmer for president. That’s what all this demagoguery is about. To build a fundraising list for president.”
Whitmer, who assumed office in 2019 and ran unopposed in 2022, has faced notable backlash from Republicans for her state’s strict COVID-19 restrictions, which she repeatedly failed to abide by. Dixon, who worked for Michigan steel companies and was a radio host, won the Republican primary in August after receiving former President Donald Trump’s endorsement.
“With over $15 million in attack ads out against us, we have to be ready to fight back against whatever Tudor Dixon and her special interest backers throw at us,” Whitmer’s campaign also wrote to voters in a Tuesday email. “That’s why we’re coming to you today.”
By “special interests,” Whitmer’s campaign is alluding to Dixon’s campaign contributions from DeVos and her family, Home Depot Co-Founder and billionaire Bernard Marcus, ULINE Corporation CEO and billionaire Richard Uihlein — as well as two pro-Dixon super PACs called Michigan Families United and Michigan Strong — according to a Republican operative familiar with the situation.
The DeVos family has donated $71,500 to Dixon’s campaign since May 2022. The DeVos family also gave $875,000 since June to Michigan Families United, which Uihlein gave $250,000 to in July. In May 2022, Marcus gave $100,000 to Michigan Strong, which along with Michigan Families United has spent $2.24 million supporting Dixon through ad buys, video production and media consulting, Bridge Michigan reported in July.
Whitmer has faced scrutiny from Republicans for her campaign taking individual contributions from wealthy left-wing donors allegedly above the $7,150 limit. Michigan Freedom Fund, a conservative nonprofit, filed a campaign finance complaint in September 2021 against ten of Whitmer’s campaign donors, including Pritzker, the Strykers and Schusterman.
Whitmer’s campaign sent $3.5 million to the Michigan Democratic Party in January after raising $2.5 million more than allowed under the legal limit, the Detroit News reported.
“Gretchen Whitmer literally took millions in illegal contributions over the campaign finance limits in Michigan and she is literally funded by anti-American, pro-communism Billionaires like George Soros,” Dixon told the DCNF. “Gretchen Whitmer a dishonest career politician who is always guilty of everything she accuses other people of.”
Michigan’s gubernatorial election will take place in November.
Whitmer’s campaign did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of the DCNF’s original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
Former New England Patriots tight end Benjamin Watson gave Democratic Georgia governor candidate Stacey Abrams a lesson on faith and abortion.
Watson played for New England at both the start and end of his NFL career, playing for the Cleveland Browns, New Orleans Saints and Baltimore Ravens as well.
Watson is also zealous about his faith and pushed back after an August tweet from Abrams that said support for abortion was a manifestation of her faith.
“In college, a friend who shared my faith challenged me to think and changed my perspective on abortion. Abortion care is health care. As a person of faith and as the next governor, it’s my responsibility to protect a woman’s right to choose,” Abrams tweeted.
“Respectfully if you identify as a Christian your authority is the Word of God not the opinion of a friend who shares your faith,” Watson tweeted in response.
Respectfully if you identify as a Christian your authority is the Word of God not the opinion of a friend who shares your faith. This ad conveys empathy but it also conveys baseless compromise. If your holy scripture sanctions abortion as it does love/justice/charity explain how https://t.co/B6kw1BjFh5
“This ad conveys empathy but it also conveys baseless compromise. If your holy scripture sanctions abortion as it does love/justice/charity explain how.”
Abrams has been at pains in her campaign to say that support for abortion is not a contradiction to her faith.
“While your faith tradition may tell you that you personally do not want to make that choice, it is not my right as a Christian to impose that value system on someone else,” she said, according to Yahoo.
“Because the value that should overhang everything is the right to make our own decisions, the free will that the God I believe in gave us,” she said.
Watson sees life differently.
Watson spoke about life in a 2021 interview with Baptist Press printed by Kentucky Today.
“We know that human life is different … and that it should be honored and respected. There is something very special about life, and it is a lie from Satan that we can discard our children without consequence,” he said.
“And not just the outward consequence. I’m talking about the inward, just dealing with that life,” he said.
Watson said abortion is not a political issue as much as one about faith.
“I look at this issue as one of justice, and the Bible speaks very clearly about justice and our righteousness over and over and over again throughout Scripture,” he said. “You see God’s heart for justice for the oppressed, for the fatherless, for the widow. And so justice is simply about protecting the vulnerable, giving people their just due.
“There are plenty of verses in Scripture that talk about speaking up for the vulnerable and acting justly. When I think about the preborn child in the womb, there is no other human being that is as vulnerable as a person is in the state. I’m advocating for the preborn child, but I’m also advocating for mothers that are bearing these children,” he said.
A former Democratic senator who made headlines in a 2017 sexual harassment scandal that forced his resignation has sparked ridicule after endorsing Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming in her upcoming Republican primary.
Wyoming Republicans go to the polls Tuesday to decide between Cheney, who has been an outspoken critic of former President Donald Trump, and challenger Harriet Hageman, who has Trump’s support.
Former U.S. Sen. Al Franken, who stepped down from the Senate in early 2018, tweeted his endorsement on Saturday.
“I’ve decided to endorse @RepLizCheney for the Republican nomination for the House seat In Wyoming it’s my first time endorsing in a GOP primary. But I think Al Franken’s support will carry a lot of weight with WY Republicans,” he wrote, with obvious sarcasm.
Sarcastic or not, in a Republican primary in a state as conservative as Wyoming, where Trump won almost 70 percent of the votes in 2020, the endorsement could be an anchor dragging Cheney even further down.
Twitter came alive with negative responses, with one noting the endorsement would be a “weight around Liz’s neck.”
Maybe she can hit the road with you on your comedy tour when she gets voted out, because she sure as hell isn’t getting re-elected.
Cheney was among the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol incursion and has continued to attack Trump as a member of the House select committee investigating the event.
Wyoming Republican Darin Smith said Cheney’s hatred of Trump is “a vendetta,” according to the U.K. Guardian.
Trump publicly criticizes the foreign policy of former President George W. Bush’s administration, in which Cheney’s father, Dick Cheney, served as vice president.
“She’s mad at Trump because Trump pointed out the truth of the Cheney foreign policy. Her dad is responsible for millions of deaths worldwide and trillions of dollars in spending from the US government,” said Smith, who was outside the Capitol on the day of the incursion, according to The Guardian.
“She’s pissed about it and she’s a narcissist and she saw her opportunity to go for Trump’s throat and she did,” he said.
“But it’s bigger than that. She wants to be the first woman president. We all know that. We’re not stupid. She’s going to ‘educate’ us in the Constitution and how ‘we’re wrong and she’s right.’ Well, she’s got news and she’s got something coming for her on Tuesday of next week. She’s gonna find out if she educated us or not,” he said.
Laura Harnish, 53, a Wyoming resident interviewed by The Guardian, was blunt: “I wouldn’t vote for Liz Cheney if she was the last person on the ballot.”
“The Jan. 6 committee was very badly done. She wasn’t representing Wyoming at that point. I vote for you. That’s who you represent: Wyoming. If you’re not going to do that then you don’t need to be in office. You need to find something else to do,” she said.
“I do think it’s debatable whether she should have gone out and blown herself up this way, because it’s obviously going to cost her her seat and her platform, but she chose a different path. And I think everybody’s got to make their own decisions in life,” said Scott Jennings, a GOP strategist and ex-special assistant to former President George W. Bush, said, according to The Hill.
The Hill article was headlined: “Cheney looks to cling on in Wyoming despite polls.”
John Fetterman is often the sole Pennsylvania Board of Pardons member to vote for freeing murderers
Wayne Covington was sentenced to life in prison after he shot and killed an 18-year-old for money to buy heroin. Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman wants him to walk free.
In June 2021, Fetterman was the only member of the state’s Board of Pardons—which he chairs as lieutenant governor—to vote to commute Covington’s sentence, according to records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. In 1970, Covington admitted to shooting 18-year-old George Rudnycky to death while high, as Covington and an accomplice were robbing Rudnycky for drug money. Covington pleaded guilty to first-degree murder to avoid the death penalty and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Fetterman cast his vote over the pleas of Rudnycky’s family members, who opposed Covington’s release at the killer’s commutation hearing.
One year after the controversial vote, Fetterman is placing his Board of Pardons record at the center of his campaign against Republican Mehmet Oz. His campaign site boasts that he “transformed” the lieutenant governor position “into a bully pulpit for criminal justice reform” and “led the fight to free the wrongfully convicted and give second chances to deserving longtime inmates.” Fetterman, who has said he ran for lieutenant governor solely to lead the Board of Pardons, has specifically called to end life sentences for second-degree murderers who participated in a killing but did not “pull the trigger.”
But in Covington’s case, Fetterman took no issue with voting to release a triggerman who admitted to shooting his young victim—a vote that Pennsylvania attorney general and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Josh Shapiro did not reciprocate. A review of Fetterman’s tenure on the board, meanwhile, shows that the Democrat has voted to release an array of violent criminals jailed for their roles in brutal murders, a far cry from the “innocent” people Fetterman often says he works to release. Those votes—as well as Fetterman’s unabashed support for George Soros-funded Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner—prompted a letter from 13 Pennsylvania sheriffs who said Fetterman’s crime policy positions “would add to already rising crime rates in Pennsylvania.” Their criticism of Fetterman could plague the Democrat’s campaign as Pennsylvanians deal with a record murder spike.
Fetterman’s campaign did not return a request for comment. The Board of Pardons denied the Free Beacon’s public records request for a video or transcript of the June 2021 hearing, saying that records of the public event are “confidential.” Fetterman’s office, which issued the denial, did not respond to a request for comment.
Beyond his support for Covington’s commutation, Fetterman has supported the release of violent criminals Denise Crump and Anthony Eberhardt, pardon board votes reviewed by the Free Beacon show. Crump received life in prison in the late 1980s after she and an accomplice killed a 46-year-old man to “steal his television set, which was then sold for $60 to buy cocaine,” according to the Philadelphia Daily News. Eberhardt also participated in a robbery-murder, which led to the shooting death of a beer distributor.
Pennsylvania’s Board of Pardons has faced high-profile recidivism issues in the past. In 1992, board members voted to commute the sentence of serial killer Reginald McFadden, who immediately went on a murdering spree, killing two and kidnapping and raping a third within three months of his release. After that ordeal, Pennsylvanians voted to raise the board’s approval standard from a majority vote to a unanimous one, a move that caused life-sentence commutations to plummet.
Fetterman has called McFadden’s actions “unthinkable.” But the infamous murderer’s post-release killing spree has not stopped the Democrat from backing an amendment to lower the board’s vote threshold to 4-1. Since 2019, Fetterman has cast the sole vote to pardon or commute a sentence at least 27 times, pardon board records reviewed by the Free Beacon show.
In January, Fetterman appointed his campaign political director, Celeste Trusty, as secretary of the Board of Pardons. Trusty supports many of the same criminal justice reform policies as Fetterman, and has called to “disarm the police.” She worked on Fetterman’s campaign through this January, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Former White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said in an interview with CNN on Aug. 11 that he never witnessed “intentional destruction of important papers” during his time in office.
Mulvaney, who served the Trump administration for 15 months and has been a critic of former President Donald Trump since, told CNN’s “New Day” host Brianna Keilar, “I never saw the intentional destruction of documents for the purpose of keeping anything from the National Archives or the public in the future.”
According to Mulvaney, all White House staff were well aware of how to comply with paper destruction regulations.
“We knew the rules, we taped them back together, and we made copies. As long as copies are preserved, you can pretty much do whatever you want to with the other documents,” he said.
Grilled by Keilar if he had ever seen Trump rip documents, Mulvaney said he had, but asserted that documents were all handled “in the ordinary course of business.”
“The flushing,” the host said, referring to claims made by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. “You never heard about him flushing documents?”
“Not a single time,” he said.
Denied Report
Mulvaney’s account contradicts Haberman’s report claiming, “White House staffers regularly found ripped-up printing paper in the toilet of the presidential residence during Trump’s term in office.”
The statement came with a pair of photos from an anonymous source purporting to show notes written by Trump in a toilet allegedly at the White House.
Trump swiftly denied her account, calling it “another fake story” when it first emerged back in February.
“Also, another fake story, that I flushed papers and documents down a White House toilet, is categorically untrue and simply made up by a reporter in order to get publicity for a mostly fictitious book,” Trump said in an emailed statement to the New York Post.
Haberman doubled down on her claim in an interview with CNN on Aug. 8, the same day that the FBI conducted a search at Trump Mar a Lago residence and just ahead of the October publication of her book on Trump, “Confidence Man.”
Her account this time was again dismissed by a spokesman for the former president.
“You have to be pretty desperate to sell books if pictures of paper in a toilet bowl is part of your promotional plan,” Taylor Budowich told Axios, referring to Haberman, adding that there are “enough people willing to fabricate stories like this in order to impress the media class—a media class who is willing to run with anything, as long as it’s anti-Trump.”
Top House Democrats asked intelligence officials to review alleged national security damage from former President Donald Trump’s mishandling of government documents, a day after the release of the search warrant used by the FBI on its Mar-a-Lago raid.
The federal agents executed a search warrant of Trump’s Florida estate last Monday, before an inventory accompanying the search warrant was made public on Aug. 12. A property receipt obtained by The Epoch Times shows the FBI removed approximately 20 boxes, including one set of materials labeled as “various classified/TS/SCI documents,” referencing top secret or sensitive compartmented information.
“Former President Trump’s conduct has potentially put our national security at grave risk. This issue demands a full review, in addition to the ongoing law enforcement inquiry,” House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) wrote on Aug. 13 to Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines.
Despite Trump declaring the documents taken by federal agents were “all declassified,” the three-page letter (pdf) seeks a classified briefing on the review “as soon as possible.” The two lawmakers specifically asked for the DNI’s office to initiate a damage assessment, in a bid to evaluate any damage to national security related to Trump’s handling of official records.
The latest action is the first major move by House committees following the Aug. 8 raid of Trump’s Florida resort.
The Saturday letter also cited previous reports by legacy media claiming that FBI agents were searching for highly classified documents on “nuclear weapons” at Mar-a-Lago, a claim that has been slammed by the former commander-in-chief, who called it a “hoax.”
The Democrat-led House Oversight Committee stepped up in February an investigation into Trump’s alleged violation of federal records laws by removing White House records—something Trump denied.
While federal law bars the removal of classified documents to unauthorized locations, Trump could argue that as president, he was the ultimate declassification authority.
Prior to Trump, his lawyers have said that the former president used his authority as president to declassify the material before he departed office in early 2021.
“They didn’t need to ‘seize’ anything,” the former president said in a statement on Friday afternoon. “They could have had [the documents] at anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago.”
Former President Donald Trump said Sunday that privileged material was taken during the FBI raid on his Mar-a-Lago property and demanded it back.
“Oh great! It has just been learned that the FBI, in its now famous raid of Mar-a-Lago, took boxes of privileged ‘attorney-client’ material, and also ‘executive’ privileged material, which they knowingly should not have taken,” the former president wrote on Truth Social, as he posted a Fox News article that cited anonymous sources for the claims.
Attorney-client privilege makes reference to a legal privilege that allows communications between a client and their attorney confidential.
“By copy of this TRUTH (post), I respectfully request that these documents be immediately returned to the location from which they were taken. Thank you!” Trump also wrote Sunday morning.
The FBI said it took classified records from Trump’s Florida residence during an unprecedented raid last week, which was announced by the former president himself. It’s not clear what the documents entailed.
According to a property receipt that was unsealed on Aug. 12 by a judge in the case, some of those documents were marked top secret, and a warrant in the case said Trump is being investigated for possibly violating provisions under the Espionage Act as well as obstruction of justice.
Since the raid was announced on Aug. 8, both the FBI and Department of Justice have remained mostly tight-lipped about what the FBI was searching for and why.
Tight-Lipped
It wasn’t until the afternoon of Aug. 11 that Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a terse statement during a news conference, saying he personally authorized the raid. He did not elaborate on the FBI’s investigation. The affidavit in the case has not been unsealed—only the warrant and property receipt.
“First, I personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter,” Garland said during the press conference. “Second, the Department does not take such a decision lightly. Where possible, it is standard practice to seek less intrusive means as an alternative to a search, and to narrowly scope any search that is undertaken.”
Former President Donald Trump’s residence in Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 9, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)
The warrant and receipt were unsealed on Aug. 12 by Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart after several news outlets and transparency watchdogs requested that it be released to the public.
“The locations to be searched include the ‘45 Office,’ all storage rooms, and all other rooms or areas within the premises used or available to be used by FPOTUS and his staff and in which boxes or documents could be stored, including all structures or buildings on the estate,” the warrant stated.
The warrant also provided agents the authority to take “all physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed” that violate the U.S. Code. That includes classified documents and materials with presidential seals created throughout the entirety of Trump’s presidency.
The FBI and Department of Justice have not returned requests for comment.
Former White House official Kash Patel on Sunday revealed former President Donald Trump has been involved in a battle with the federal government to declassify documents before last week’s FBI raid.
Patel, who was a top official in the Department of Defense, said Trump declassified numerous documents.
“President Trump made me his representative a month ago, and we’ve been in a bureaucratic battle,” he told Fox News on Sunday morning. “We found whole sets of documents we got out to the American public … about 60 percent.”
Patel, who hosts “Kash’s Corner” for Epoch TV, added that Trump “made it his mission to declassify and be transparent.”
“In October 2020, he issued a sweeping declassification order for every single Russiagate document and every single [former Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton document,” Patel said, adding that “whole sets of documents” were declassified under his watch.
“And this is a key fact … President Trump, as a sitting president, is a unilateral authority for declassification,” he continued. “He can literally stand over a set of documents and say ‘these are now declassified,’ and that is done with definitive action immediately.”
Patel further noted that due to the Department of Justice’s latest actions and the FBI’s ongoing investigation, Americans “will never be allowed to see the Russiagate docs or any other docs that President Trump lawfully declassified, and they will hide it from the public.”
Other Details
Late last week, a U.S. magistrate judge ordered the release of the FBI warrant and property record used to raid Trump’s Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. The documents showed the FBI seized alleged classified documents and said the former president may be under investigation for possibly violating the 1917 Espionage Act and obstruction of justice, although neither the Justice Department nor FBI have released the affidavit in the case.
In late 2020, Trump issued a declassification memo that referred to materials connected to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, which has been the subject of intense controversy and scrutiny. Republicans and Trump have long asserted the investigation used fabricated information and anonymous leaks to the press to denigrate the former president.
“I hereby declassify the remaining materials in the binder. This is my final determination under the declassification review and I have directed the Attorney General to implement the redactions proposed in the FBI’s January 17 submission and return to the White House an appropriately redacted copy,” then-President Trump wrote on Dec. 30, 2020, or just three weeks before Joe Biden was sworn in as president.
After the warrant and property receipt were unsealed, Trump posted to his Truth Social page that the materials the FBI allegedly took were “all declassified.”
“They didn’t need to ‘seize’ anything. They could have had it anytime they wanted without playing politics and breaking into Mar-a-Lago. It was in secured storage, with an additional lock put on as per their request,” he wrote on the website on Aug. 12.
On Sunday, the former president wrote that among other items that were taken by agents, attorney-client material and executive privileged material were removed from Mar-a-Lago.
“By copy of this TRUTH, I respectfully request that these documents be immediately returned to the location from which they were taken. Thank you!” Trump wrote.
Democrats have one priority, and it’s not the United States, Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) says. Instead, Democrats want to destroy former President Donald Trump, and they’ll do “everything they can” to accomplish that goal.
Nehls, along with the Republican Study Committee, spent three hours with Trump after the raid and said the former president not only firmly grasps the situation but also fully understands that Democrats are out to “get him.”
“They’ve been out to get him with one impeachment, two impeachments, the Russia hoax. … Democrats will do everything they can to keep him off the ballot in 2024,” Nehls told The Epoch Times and NTD as part of a special EpochTV report on the raid.
Nehls, who has a law enforcement background and was a sheriff for several years, said that to obtain a search warrant, you first have to obtain a “probable cause” affidavit. Once you have a signed affidavit, you can get a search warrant to look for specific items in a person’s home.
Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) speaks during a press conference at the Capitol Triangle in Washington, on July 21, 2022. (Nathan Howard/Getty Images)
Unfortunately, according to Nehls, probable cause affidavits can be “very, very weak,” but if you find a “friendly judge” to sign it, it doesn’t matter; you can search a person’s home for whatever is on the warrant.
Furthermore, Nehls said everyone in law enforcement knows a judge who will rubber stamp affidavits and search warrants and said that’s what happened to Trump and the “raid” on Mar-a-Lago.
“They found the friendly judge there, with Reinhardt in the Southern District. … These guys are big Obama supporters, … and they got the judge to sign the warrant.”
Garland Approves Unsealing of Warrant
Concerning Attorney General Merrick Garland stating he approves unsealing the warrant, Nehls said that’s only part of what needs to be released.
Specifically, Nehls said he wants to know if the person who tipped off the Department of Justice (DOJ) is an FBI informant.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s residence in Mar-A-Lago, Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 9, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)
“Who is the individual that said … the former president has a bunch of these documents inside … the basement of Mar-a-Lago and … they’re classified or not classified, and we need to do something?”
Nehls said seeing the affidavit and the warrant would let people know what the FBI was “really looking for.”
Indeed, Nehls is skeptical about the FBI’s stated reason for raiding Trump. Instead, he thinks it’s likely that the FBI is creating a false pretext to destroy Trump.
Nehls pointed out that Democrats, the DOJ, and the FBI have targeted Trump and his family for the past few years, claiming they colluded with Russia. In the end, however, the evidence exonerated the past president.
Now, the DOJ and Democrats are up to the same old tricks. But instead of “Russia Collusion,” it’s “Jan. 6.”
Nehls argued that the FBI has lowered its standards and is now going after political adversaries at the behest of former President Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Nehls concluded that he expects Biden and his lackeys to go after Trump “until they can find a way to destroy him.”
Roger Stone, a longtime ally of Donald Trump, said he found it “a little perplexing” that the former president’s grant of clemency for him topped the list of Mar-a-Lago materials FBI agents seized.
The clemency letter that Trump issued in December 2020 was among around 20 boxes of items the agents removed during a raid of Trump’s Florida residence on Aug. 8, along with documents marked as classified, top secret, and confidential, although Trump said that the documents were “all declassified.”
In an interview with The Epoch Times shortly after the FBI search warrant was unsealed, the political lobbyist wondered why the clemency letter became a focus of the federal agency’s attention.
“Why these documents are being struggled over between the president and the National Archives, I have no idea other than to say everything was done perfectly legally,” said Stone.
No ‘Corrupt Bargain’
Trump issued the pardon in December 2020 to Stone as his term as the 45th U.S. president was nearing the end, saying that the then-68-year-old had “numerous medical conditions” and had been “treated very unfairly” due to “prosecutorial misconduct.”
Stone, who served briefly as a Trump campaign adviser in 2015, was arrested in January 2019 in connection with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia in influencing the 2016 presidential election.
Mueller’s report in April 2019 stated there was no evidence Trump or his associates had knowingly conspired with Russia.
Stone acknowledged that he had made misstatements to Congress under oath but maintained that they were “all innocuous” and “immaterial.”
“One cannot lie to Congress about Russian collusion, if no Russian collusion took place, can they? So I was framed solely for the purpose of pressuring me into giving false testimony against the president,” Stone said during the interview.
According to Stone, in July that year, prosecutors told his attorneys that if he agreed to testify falsely against the president regarding some 26 phone conversations they had during the 2016 presidential campaign, they would argue for his leniency with the judge, an offer he said he refused. Trump commuted Stone’s sentence that same month, a day before he was due to begin serving a term of three years and four months over the Russian interference probe.
Roger Stone, former adviser to President Donald Trump, leaves the Federal Court after a sentencing hearing in Washington, on Feb. 20, 2020. (Samira Bouaou/Epoch Times)
He speculated that the FBI agents may be looking into the records indicating “a corrupt bargain or some impropriety,” which he insisted was “not true.”
“There was no communication whatsoever between me and the president, or my lawyers and the president’s lawyers, or myself and the president through any other third party from the time I was charged, till the time that he called me to tell me he was commuting [my] sentence. No communications whatsoever,” he said.
“So any insinuation that there’s something improper about the clemency in my case, that would be categorically false.”
‘It’s About Intimidation’
Stone had a taste of the FBI raid himself on the day of his arrest in 2019.
At six o’clock that morning, 29 FBI agents swarmed his residence in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with 17 armored vehicles, a government helicopter overhead, and two amphibious units. The agents were there for 13 hours, he recalled.
Like how the agents went through former First Lady Melania Trump’s wardrobe, Stone said they also searched all of the personal items and clothing of his wife.
He stressed that nothing from the raid on his home, office, and Manhattan apartment was used against him at trial.
“So it’s about intimidation,” he said. “The whole purpose of this is to intimidate the former president, which, having known him for 42 years, Donald Trump cannot be intimidated. If anything, they have galvanized his resolve to run again.”
He sees the raid as “the latest in a series to disqualify Trump” from running for president in 2024, following the two impeachment attempts while Trump was in office and the ongoing Jan. 6 Committee probe.
One federal code listed in the search warrant concerns the willful and unlawful concealment, removal, or mutilation of public records, which could cause the individual to “forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”
A member of the Secret Service in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 9, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)
But a hypothetical conviction under the statute is still not a legal basis barring the former president from seeking a second term, some legal experts have argued, as the statute cannot override or supersede qualifications for the presidency as set out in the Constitution—minimum age of 35, and being a natural-born citizen who has lived in the country for at least 14 years.
It’s a signal that Trump’s opponents are “desperate” for legal ways to thwart his presidential ambitions, suggested Stone.
“They must not feel that they have any kind of viable case against the president regarding Jan. 6, and therefore they’re using this new rubric as an excuse to try to eliminate him as a candidate in 2024.”
Stone said his time going through the political prosecution has revealed to him a “two-tiered justice system,” contrasting what he saw as a differential treatment between those on the Democrat camp, such as Hunter Biden, the second son of Joe Biden who had engaged in foreign ventures while his father was holding a public office, and the handling of those on the Republican side.
“If you’re a liberal Democrat, you have nothing to fear from the FBI or the justice system. If you’re a supporter of Donald Trump, if you’re a Republican, well then you’re a target.”
The FBI declined to comment. The Epoch Times has contacted the Department of Justice over Stone’s statements.
Unions guarantee work for those who don’t want to… They are another example of how absolute power corrupts absolutely, which is a perfect fit for the democrats. [US Patriot]
ROCK SPRINGS, Wyo.—There’s no secret cabal of Democrats working with Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-Wyo.) campaign to reelect the most ardent Republican critic of former President Donald Trump.
Many Wyoming Democrats will tell you openly that they’re switching parties on Aug. 16 to cast their ballots for Cheney in her GOP U.S. House primary against Fort Laramie land use-water rights attorney Harriet Hageman.
But few think it will matter.
Hageman, who has been endorsed by Trump, leads Cheney by nearly 30 percentage points—57 percent to 28 percent—with 41 percent saying that they’re voting more against Cheney than for Hageman, according to a University of Wyoming survey released on Aug. 11. The poll of 562 likely primary voters was taken July 25 to Aug. 6.
Unless Cheney has a stealth reservoir of support—“quiet Republicans,” she called them recently—within the GOP, there aren’t enough Democrats or, for that matter, enough non-Republicans, to have much efficacy in the state.
Math confirms the veracity of polls that show a very narrow path to a third term for Cheney, who enraged many Wyoming Republicans for voting to impeach Trump, serving as co-chair of the House’s Jan. 6 House committee, and being among Trump’s most severe, unrelenting critics.
Of 284,557 registered voters on Aug. 1, 207,674 were enrolled as Republicans, according to the Wyoming Secretary of State’s Office. There were 39,753 registered Democrats and 33,769 registered as unaffiliated, with about 4,000 registered with third parties.
In January, the Secretary of State’s Office documented that there were 280,741 registered voters with 196,179 signed on to the Republican Party, 45,822 registered as Democrats, and 35,344 registered as unaffiliated.
Earlier polls indicate about 70 percent of the state’s Republicans support Hageman over Cheney. According to some estimates, the embattled incumbent would need at least 40,000 votes from non-Republicans to make up that interparty difference.
“We see some movement from registered Democrat to registered Republican,” Wyoming Democratic Party communications director David Martin told The Epoch Times regarding the past few months. “But we don’t believe it will influence the GOP (primary) as much as people think it will.”
At a weekly gathering of about a dozen Sweetwater County Democratic Party committee members at Los Cabos restaurant in Rock Springs on Aug. 12, there was no cabal or orchestrated plan to vote for Cheney—just people who say they want their vote to count in a state that’s overwhelmingly dominated by the Republican Party.
Carolyn Molson says that instead of asking for a Democratic ballot on primary day, she’ll request a Republican one “because we have no voice as Democrats and no power” in the state.
Wyoming is one of six states where primaries are “partially open,” meaning that voters in one party can vote in another party’s primary if they register with the party before casting a ballot.
Therefore, under Wyoming law, voters can change parties on primary day by registering with the party they want a ballot for. If the state’s GOP-dominated legislature wanted to change that law, it would. But it shot down a proposal to close the primaries during its 2022 session so, obviously, a majority of lawmakers see “crossover” voting as a benefit to them.
“There are a lot of people trending in this direction,” Molson said. “I’m not going to be [a Republican] in the general election.”
Sweetwater County Democratic Party member Tom Gagnon, whose columns and editorials are published in many Wyoming newspapers and digital sites, has already voted in Wyoming’s Aug. 16 primary. “I voted for Liz,” he said. (John Haughey/The Epoch Times)
Tom Gagnon, a writer whose opinion columns are published locally and across the state, has already done the deed by voting early.
“I voted for Liz,” he said. “This is the first time in my life that I’ve voted as a Republican. Unless things change, I’m going to stay a Republican” because, in Wyoming now, the state’s battles are being fought within the Republican Party.
Leesa Kuhlmann is running for the state senate as a Democrat. But on Aug. 16, she’s registering as a Republican and getting a Republican ballot.
“The people of Wyoming should be proud [of Cheney],” Kuhlmann said. “I don’t agree with her politically but at least I have respect for her. She has a conscience. You have to be proud of her.”
Why Crossover Voting?
But they were the outliers in the group. Most were sticking with Democratic candidates, regardless of their chances to win in a general election.
“Crossover? Hell no,” said Norma Prevedel, who, along with her husband Frank Prevedel, who served as a Democratic state senator representing Sweetwater County for 14 years, has already voted.
Barbara Smith and Mark Kot are also sticking with the Democratic Party when they vote on Aug. 16. As nominated Democratic precinct committee members, they can’t register outside the party.
Smith, a career educator and poet, said Wyoming crossover voting has gained a lot of national attention, but it’s the only way for Democrats to appeal to Republicans during elections.
“It’s not just about Cheney,” she said. “All these people in Sweetwater County” who are Democrats want Republicans to recognize they exist.
“If you want your vote to count,” crossover voting is a wedge that can help make that happen, according to Kot, a retired Sweetwater County planner who serves as the chair of the Wyoming Water Development Commission, despite being a Democrat.
Martin said as Republicans rip into each other in primary battles between Trump-endorsed or Trump-supporting candidates and “RINOs”—Republicans in Name Only who seek to shift the party’s core values to accommodate more of the left—the Democratic Party will remain “a big tent” that, in Wyoming, has a lot of available seats.
Disappearing Democrats
Democrats in Wyoming have traditionally been associated with unions, stemming from the Union Pacific railroad and coal mining industries in Sweetwater and Campbell counties.
Now, the only places in the state where Democrats are competitive are Teton County, with its resort town of Jackson, and Albany County, which includes the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Martin said.
Wyoming’s Democrats still represent “the blue-collar values” of the state’s workers and are as conservative on many issues as Republicans, he said.
“You got to go to Laramie to find the ‘woke,’” Martin said.
And that’s another evolution in the disappearing Democrats of Wyoming.
Before the turn of the 21st century, there were two Democratic bastions in Wyoming—Rock Springs and Green River in Sweetwater County, and Gillette in Campbell County, where unionized railroad workers and miners were aligned with the Democratic Party.
Wyoming lawmakers adopted a “Right To Work” law in 1963. But a series of 1990s amendments by the Republican-controlled legislature turned the state into one of the most hostile in the nation to organized labor.
“The unions are gone,” Frank Prevedel said. “The ‘Right To Work State’ killed the Democrats in Wyoming.”
Even with unions no longer being a factor, Sweetwater County remained a Democratic stronghold until about a decade ago, Prevedel said. He noted that 10 years ago, there were about 7,500 registered Democrats and about 4,500 registered Republicans in the county.
Now, the county is home to about 8,000 registered Republicans and 4,500 registered Democrats, he said.
The already outmatched party began losing members not in response to issues within the state, but because of the Democrats’ national platforms that grew too liberal for many in Wyoming, according to Prevedel.
“I think two issues have converged to really hurt Democrats in Wyoming—gun control and the fight about coal,” he said, noting that he knows many who left over the gun issue, which was never the view of Wyoming Democrats—many being gun-owners themselves in a state of gun-owners.
But shifts come and go over time, and if the Democratic Party swung too far to the left for many Democrats, then the Republican Party appears to now be swinging far to the right, Kuhlmann said.
And many Republicans she knows are growing uncomfortable with the party. She said she believes that Democrats will become a force in Wyoming and in other red states
“I’m very optimistic,” she said. “I think there is lots of room here for the Democratic Party. Right now, it’s not jelling.”
A former director of national intelligence said Aug. 12 that it is “virtually impossible” to prosecute people for mishandling classified documents, and asserted that former President Donald Trump has the “ultimately declassification authority” in terms of such documents.
“The president does have ultimate declassification authority. He can literally declassify—and President Trump had that authority, and could declassify anything you want while he was president,” John Ratcliffe, a Republican congressman before Trump appointed him to be director of national intelligence, said on Fox News.
According to documents unsealed earlier Friday, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home was raided by FBI agents on Aug. 8 because of potential violations of several laws, including the Espionage Act, which some legal experts say relates to possessing classified defense information.
An inventory showed that agents seized what they listed as classified, secret, and top secret documents.
Ratcliffe said on Fox that before the search warrant materials were made public, he didn’t believe the raid was about classified materials.
“It has to be more than that because the Department of Justice and the FBI have already set a standard that makes it virtually impossible to prosecute a case like that,” he said, pointing to how former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s possession of classified documents was handled by the FBI, including then-Director James Comey.
“As people talk about Espionage Act and classified documents and all of that, the standard was set in 2016. Remember the Department of Justice and the FBI took the official position that Hillary Clinton, who was in possession of classified documents … that [being] in possession of that, that wasn’t enough, and that being grossly negligent and being careless, Jim Comey told us, that’s not enough under the Espionage Act. You have to know you’re violating the law,” Ratcliffe said.
“Even if you assume the worst case scenario for President Trump, that there were classified documents in his possession at Mar-a-Lago, that only puts him where Hillary Clinton was. And what the FBI and the Department of Justice would have to show is that he knew the documents were there and he didn’t think they were declassified,” he added.
Trump wrote on Truth Social that all the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago were declassified.
“He had a standing order that documents removed from the Oval Office and taken into the residence were deemed to be declassified,” a Trump spokesperson told Just the News. “The power to classify and declassify documents rests solely with the President of the United States. The idea that some paper-pushing bureaucrat, with classification authority delegated BY THE PRESIDENT, needs to approve of declassification is absurd.”
Others weren’t sure.
“He can’t just wave a wand and say it’s declassified,” Immerman said. “There has to be a formal process. That’s the only way the system can work,” Richard Immerman, an assistant deputy director of national intelligence during the Obama administration, told NBC News. “I’ve seen thousands of declassified documents. They’re all marked ‘declassified’ with the date they were declassified.”
Retired Major General Paul Vallely reacted to the recent FBI raid on former president Donald Trump’s residence, claiming that there is a socialist-communist coalition involved with the act.
He believes that there is a “socialist coalition” that aspires to “overthrow” the U.S. constitutional republic and transform it into a totalitarian communist state.
“The American Republic founded in 1776 is under attack by a Socialist-Communist Coalition and an out-of-control Federal Government,” Vallely said in a statement he sent to The Epoch Times.
The retired major general thinks the raid violates the Fourth Amendment, a right given to the U.S. citizenry granting protection from “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
“This cabal has illegitimately exercised their power in attacking the private residence of President Donald J. Trump and his personal residence in Mar a Lago, Florida,” Vallely said.
Secret Service personnel are seen in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. on Aug. 8, 2022. The FBI raided the home reportedly to retrieve classified White House documents. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images)
On Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland vocalized the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) first public statement about the FBI raid that targeted Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence earlier this week.
“I personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter … the Department does not take such a decision lightly,” Garland said.
Garland further said that his agency filed a motion to unseal the court-approved search warrant.
“The weaponization of government power has become clear,” Vallely noted. “The abuse of such powers to interfere with future elections cannot be ruled out as this action suggests there are no limits to their abuse of authority to retain power.”
U.S. Army Major General Paul E. Vallely (Ret.) (Courtesy of Paul E. Vallely)
On Wednesday, Trump suggested that the FBI could have planted evidence during the raid at his residence since members of his team were blocked from watching the agents’ actions.
“History is repeating itself as we see the tactics of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) used by a few dystopian tyrants who have methodically and comprehensively infiltrated and assumed leadership of the Democratic Party,” Vallely said.
In addition, Vallely, who has been calling out “wokeism” in the military academies, thinks that Trump’s political rivals are trying to take him out with “selective enforcement of provisions that are normally overseen in a civil, not criminal manner.”
“Where have we seen that before? None of this is a coincidence, and none of it is justified. Even if Trump was in possession of some documents that needed to be archived, that is the kind of thing that has historically been dealt with in court, not with an FBI raid, and the former president was fully cooperating to this point,” Vallely stated.
Upon request for comment, the FBI referred to The Epoch Times to the following statement by the bureau’s director Christopher Wray: “Unfounded attacks on the integrity of the FBI erode respect for the rule of law and are a grave disservice to the men and women who sacrifice so much to protect others. Violence and threats against law enforcement, including the FBI, are dangerous and should be deeply concerning to all Americans. Every day I see the men and women of the FBI doing their jobs professionally and with rigor, objectivity, and a fierce commitment to our mission of protecting the American people and upholding the Constitution. I am proud to serve alongside them.”
Trump lawyer refutes claims of an informant, says ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’
Former White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said that someone close to President Donald Trump may have tipped off the FBI before its raid Monday.
When asked by a CNN reporter Thursday about whether a person in “Trump’s orbit” tipped off the FBI and knew where documents at Mar-a-Lago were, Mulvaney said that person would have been “really close” to the former president.
“I didn’t even know there was a safe at Mar-a-Lago, and I was the chief of staff for 15 months. This would be someone who was handling things on day to day, who knew where documents were, so it would be somebody very close to the president,” he claimed.
“My guess is there is probably six or eight people who had that kind of information. I don’t know the people on the inside circle these days, so I can’t give any names of folks who come to mind, but your instinct, I think, is a good one. If you know where the safe is, and you know the documents are in 10 boxes in the basement, you’re pretty close to the president.”
No Confirmation of Informant
The Epoch Times has contacted several Trump spokespeople for comment. Neither Trump, his lawyers, nor members of his family have publicly commented on whether they believe an FBI informant tipped off the raid.
A lawyer for Trump, Christina Bobb, told Fox News on Thursday that left-wing legacy media outlets are trying to “sow division” with the former president’s camp about an informant. Bobb said that regarding an informant, “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
After serving as Trump’s chief of staff, Mulvaney was appointed to a position as special envoy to Northern Ireland after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach. Mulvaney resigned from that position on Jan. 6 and has often criticized Trump.
In early 2022, Mulvaney was hired by CBS News as a political pundit and has been increasingly critical of the former president. Mulvaney in late June told the outlet to “count me among one of the Republicans who hopes [Trump is] not the nominee at this point.”
The former president confirmed the FBI Mar-a-Lago raid on Monday evening, accusing the Biden administration and Department of Justice of being politically motivated.
Since then, the FBI and Justice Department have issued no public comments on the search until Attorney General Merrick Garland’s press conference on Thursday afternoon. The attorney general confirmed that he “personally approved” the FBI raid and said his agency is filing a motion to unseal a warrant that was used to search the former president’s property.
“I personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter … the Department does not take such a decision lightly,” Garland said.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said the FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home was “unbelievable” and “unprecedented,” while demanding that Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray face Congress so they can be grilled about the raid.
“This makes absolutely no sense,” Jordan said of the raid in Friday remarks to Fox News, while calling on Garland and Wray to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, on which Jordan serves as ranking member.
“Why not come talk to us and answer the questions that the American people have about this unprecedented event that took place on Monday night?” the Republican lawmaker said.
Jordan made a similar demand during an earlier appearance on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle, where he called on the pair to testify before the Judiciary Committee “so we can ask them the questions that the American people deserve answers to.”
“This is unbelievable,” Jordan said. “We deserve answers now.”
With his demand for Garland’s and Wray’s testimony, Jordan joins other Republicans who have expressed outrage at what they say is score-settling by Trump’s political foes.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) speaks at a news conference in Washington, on July 21, 2021. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
‘Assault’ and ‘Surprise Attack’?
The Justice Department and FBI have remained mostly quiet about the aim and probable cause behind the Mar-a-Lago raid and have declined to publicly comment to The Epoch Times and other news outlets.
Garland did tell reporters on Aug. 11, however, that he “personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter” and that the Justice Department “does not take such a decision lightly.”
Wray said a day earlier that he wouldn’t discuss any details of the FBI search of Trump’s property, saying it’s “not something I can talk about, and I’d refer you to the department.”
It was Trump who on Aug. 8 revealed the FBI had executed a search warrant at his Palm Beach home, with the former president portraying the raid as an act of political retribution.
“Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries. Sadly, America has now become one of those Countries, corrupt at a level not seen before,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
In a later statement, Trump called the search a “surprise attack, POLITICS, and all the while our Country is going to HELL!”
Former President Donald Trump prepares to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference held at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas on Aug. 6, 2022. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
‘Illegally Possessed’ Documents and Records?
The raid appears to have been part of a probe into whether Trump unlawfully removed White House records as he left office, some of which investigators suspect were classified, according to the FBI search warrant made public on Aug. 12.
The warrant was issued in relation to a possible violation of federal laws, including the Espionage Act, with the warrant authorizing the seizure of documents and records at Mar-a-Lago that may have been “illegally possessed in violation of 18 U.S.C. § § 793, 2071, and 1519.”
One of the statutes, 18 U.S.C. § 793, is part of the Espionage Act of 1917, which prohibits a series of actions regarding sensitive government records, including gathering, transmitting, or losing information related to national defense.
Another, 18 U.S.C. § 2071, prohibits concealing, removing, mutilating, obliterating, or destroying government records.
Finally, 18 U.S.C. § 1519 prohibits altering or destroying records with the intent to obstruct or influence federal investigations.
The most serious of these carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, though the listing of the statutes in the warrant is not equivalent to a formal charge.
Trump has not been accused of any crimes in connection with the raid.
Local law enforcement officers in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 9, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)
‘Obvious Damage Control’
An inventory list attached to the unsealed warrant says FBI agents seized around 20 boxes from Trump’s residence, including materials marked classified, secret, and top secret.
Lawyers representing Trump have argued that he used his presidential authority to declassify the materials before he left office in 2021.
“The Biden administration is in obvious damage control after their botched raid where they seized the President’s picture books, a ‘hand-written note,’ and declassified documents,” Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich told Fox News on Friday.
“This raid of President Trump’s home was not just unprecedented, but unnecessary—and they are leaking lies and innuendos to try to explain away the weaponization of government against their dominant political opponent. This is outrageous,” Budowich added.
Trump on Friday said the documents the FBI seized were “all declassified” and denounced as a “hoax” anonymously sourced reporting from The Washington Post claiming some of the documents related to nuclear weapons.
Jack Phillips and Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.
Elizabeth Warren slams disgusting misogyny of Democratic voters
I could mine the finest minerals, Conferrin’ with my generals, A closet bolshevik; The rubes would all respect me In four years they’d reelect me If I only had a dick.
I’d be more than just a token Of misogyny unspoken, The carrot and the stick; I would dance and be merry I’d be scrappy, I’d be scary, If I only had a dick.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) would probably have won the 2020 Democratic primary—and presumably the general election as well—if Democratic voters weren’t a bunch of disgusting misogynists, the failed candidate told an NBC News correspondent following her third-place finish in the Iowa caucus.
“Everyone comes up to me and says, ‘I would vote for you, if you had a penis,'” Warren vented to Ali Vitali, who recounts the previously unreported conversation in her forthcoming book, Electable: Why America Hasn’t Put a Woman in the White House … Yet.
That is a rather stunning attack on the integrity of Democratic primary voters, but it’s not the first time a candidate has blamed sexist Democrats for their failure to win an election. Hillary Clinton argued that “misogyny and sexism” were “contributing factors” in her humiliating defeat to Donald Trump. She has also claimed (without evidence) that Russian hackers rigged the 2016 election.
Yet even Hillary, widely viewed as one of the most corrupt and dishonest politicians of her generation, would never claim that “everyone” wanted to vote for her but couldn’t because she was a woman. Warren also has a long history of distorting the truth for political gain. Most notably, she lied about being Native American. (That’s why many people still refer to her as “Pocahontas.”) Warren also claimed she was fired as a public school teacher for being pregnant, a story contradicted by county records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The excerpt from Vitali’s book, published by POLITICO, also included a quote that perfectly illustrated the mindset of Warren supporters. Vitali recounts a pre-caucus event in Cedar Rapids where “a white man with graying hair” walked up to the microphone and asked the following question: “How do you convince white men—who aren’t as smart as me—how do you convince those white men over 50 that Elizabeth Warren’s the candidate?”
As it turns out, the Democrats who voted for Warren were overwhelmingly white and members of the overeducated professional class who tend to view themselves as morally and intellectually superior compared with the unwashed masses. They loved Warren because she reminded them of themselves and were “somewhat baffled” that most Democrats did not share their affection for the former Harvard professor. She won just 5 percent of black voters in the South Carolina primary, where she performed best among “very liberal” voters aged 30-44 who never attend religious services.
Penis or not, Elizabeth Warren will never be president.
More than a third of Americans have drawn on their savings accounts to handle rising prices, taking out hundreds of dollars on average, according to a recent survey by New York Life Insurance Company.
Since January, 36 percent of Americans have drawn an average of $617 from their savings to pay their bills, the company found. Nearly 90 percent of those surveyed expressed anxiety that a recession is approaching, and roughly a third reported being “uncertain” or “anxious” about their personal finances. Respondents cited monthly bills, health care costs, grocery prices, and gas prices as their areas of greatest financial concern.
Voters overwhelmingly blame Joe Biden for the state of the economy. Sixty-four percent of Americans, including 53 percent of Democrats, believe the president’s policy decisions are to blame for soaring costs. While White House officials boasted this week about slowing inflation, prices are still up 8.5 percent from last year, with that number even higher in several key swing states.
Americans are not replenishing their savings accounts as they drain them. The personal savings rate, or the proportion of income people don’t spend or lose to taxes, more than halved between July 2021 and June 2022, falling from 10.5 percent to 5.1 percent.
To make up for tightening purse strings, Americans are increasingly turning to debt. Americans’ collective credit card debt jumped to $890 billion last quarter, marking the largest yearly increase in two decades. The number of credit cards also hit an all-time high in the second quarter, with more than 500 million in circulation.
Pennsylvania lieutenant governor John Fetterman’s (D.) campaign for Senate is tapping a far-left activist who has called allowing children to undergo surgical gender transitions a matter of “human rights.”
The Fetterman campaign launched Real Doctors Against Oz Wednesday, an initiative meant to discredit Mehmet Oz, the Republican nominee for Senate. Val Arkoosh is among the activists taking shots at Oz. Arkoosh, a failed Senate candidate, has a history of pushing gender theory. When she was still a candidate for Senate, Arkoosh sent out an email calling a parent’s right to refuse “gender affirming care” for their children a “gross violation of both human rights and the relationship between a patient and their doctor.” She also falsely claims that it’s legal to discriminate against transgender individuals in employment.
Sixty percent of Americans believe that a person cannot change their gender and a plurality of Americans oppose giving hormone blockers to children. Democratic opposition to parental rights has not worked out well for the party in past elections. Many pundits attribute Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin’s (R.) upset victory in November 2021 to his focus on expanding parental rights.
Real Doctors Against Oz are criticizing Oz for having ties to the pharmaceutical industry, being pro-life, and promoting supplements during his time as a television host. Oz, meanwhile, is attacking Fetterman for avoiding Pennsylvania voters by running a “John Fetterman Basement Tracker” cataloging the amount of time since his last public event.
Despite the implication of the name of Fetterman’s group, Oz is a real doctor. He graduated from an Ivy League medical school and was later a professor of surgery at Columbia University, where he won a research award.
WARNING: Disturbing content. Viewer discretion is advised.
The Oxford English dictionary defines meme as “a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by internet users.” Depending on how rotten your brain is from prolonged exposure to social media, you may or may not be aware that we are in the midst of a “meme war” that will ultimately determine the fate of American democracy.
One of the most significant new developments in this raging conflict is the emergence of the “Dark Brandon” meme, which portrays Joe Biden as a laser-eyed Machiavellian overlord skilled in the art of four-dimensional political chess. It also seeks to expropriate the “Brandon” moniker from Biden’s critics, who embraced the phrase “Let’s Go, Brandon!” in 2021 after a filthy NASCAR journalist falsely claimed that fans at Talladega were chanting in support of winning driver Brandon Brown. (Fact Check: They were chanting, “F— Joe Biden!”)
In any event, the Washington Free Beacon has exclusively obtained a number of avant-garde “Dark Brandon” memes created with the help of cutting edge artificial intelligence technology. Bear in mind: The mainstream media does not want you, the American people, to see these humorous images. Enjoy!
Former President Donald Trump on Friday said that the allegedly classified materials the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sought in the agency’s raid of his Mar-a-Lago resort were “all declassified.”
“Number one, it was all declassified,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday, shortly before the court unsealed the search warrant the FBI used for its Aug. 8 raid of his Florida resort.
Trump’s comments directly contradict legacy media news reports following the raid that the documents were top-secret, with The Washington Post citing anonymous sources who claimed that the documents contained information about nuclear weapons. Trump panned the claim, calling it a “Hoax.”
“Nuclear weapons issue is a Hoax, just like Russia, Russia, Russia was a Hoax, two Impeachments were a Hoax, the Mueller investigation was a Hoax, and much more,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday morning.
The nature of the document is important, for it determines whether the FBI’s raid is justified by a cause heavy enough to outweigh the political ramifications of such an action conducted in the home of a former U.S. president.
The Search Warrant
Trump’s comments came shortly before Bruce Reinhard, the magistrate judge who approved the search warrant, unsealed the search warrant following requests from both the Department of Justice and Trump.
While the warrant did not pinpoint what probable cause the FBI established to conduct the raid, it showed the items that federal agents took from the former president’s resort, which included “Various classified/TS/SCI documents,” binders of photos, a “Grant of Clemency” to Roger Stone, a “Confidential Document,” “Miscellaneous Secret Documents,” and “Miscellaneous Top Secret Documents.”
The question becomes whether Trump, by simply possessing any of these documents, would have violated any federal codes listed in the search warrant, which the federal agents pursued:
18 USC 2071: Concealment, removal, or mutilation (of public records)
18 USC 793: Gathering, transmitting, or losing defense information
18 USC 1519: Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy
Presidential Declassification Powers
According to Mike Davis, President of the Article III Project and a former law clerk under Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, the president of the United States can declassify records by simply leaving the White House with them.
“The President of the United States has both the constitutional (and statutory) power to declassify anything he wants,” Davis wrote on Twitter on Aug. 11. “If President Trump left the White House with classified records, they are declassified by his actions.”
“As discussed, the Office of Former President Trump—like every other former president’s federal office—is equipped and secure enough to handle these declassified records,” Davis added. “This is a routine dispute with bureaucrats at the National Archives whether these are presidential records.”
Davis cited Department of Navy v. Egan (ruling), a 1988 Supreme Court decision that Davis says shows the president possesses the constitutional power to “classify and declassify” records “regardless of any statute passed by Congress.”
“The President, after all, is the ‘Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States,’” The Supreme Court ruled at the time. “His authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security and to determine whether an individual is sufficiently trustworthy to occupy a position in the Executive Branch that will give that person access to such information flows primarily from this constitutional investment of power in the President and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant.”
“When President Trump had the records sent to Mar-a-Lago, they were declassified,” Davis explained. “Former presidents don’t have this power. But Trump did this as the president.”
Trump: It’s a Political ‘Witch Hunt’
Trump and his allies have characterized the raid as a “witch hunt” driven by political motives, especially considering no former presidents had been prosecuted for the reason that the FBI allegedly told sources close to Trump that motivated the raid; namely, Trump was nominally required by the Presidential Records Act to return the materials to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) upon the conclusion of his term, but allegedly didn’t.
“NARA’s singling out of President Trump’s handling of official records stands starkly in contrast to the way NARA has treated far clearer violations committed by politicians and officials who are not Republicans,” 20 Republicans, including numerous Committee ranking members, wrote in an Aug. 10 letter addressed to U.S. Acting Archivist Debra Wall, first published by Politico. The lawmakers cited reports that point to recent U.S. administrations’ violations of the Presidential Records Act, listing Bill Clinton as an example.
“The seeming weaponization of the federal government against [Joe] Biden’s political rivals cannot go unchecked, and if NARA is working to further these efforts, it will be only the latest agency to lose its credibility in the eyes of the American people under the Biden Administration,” the Republican lawmakers wrote.
Meanwhile, Trump revealed earlier this week that the FBI had recently been given a tour of where the records were stored, with the FBI only suggesting that Trump further secure the storage space.
“In early June, the DOJ and FBI asked my legal representatives to put an extra lock on the door leading to the place where boxes were stored in Mar-a-Lago – We agreed,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Aug. 10.
“They were shown the secured area, and the boxes themselves,” Trump added. “Then on Monday, without notification or warning, an army of agents broke into Mar-a-Lago, went to the same storage area, and ripped open the lock that they had asked to be installed. A surprise attack, POLITICS, and all the while our Country is going to HELL!”
Christina Bobb, an attorney for former President Donald Trump, dismissed a Washington Post report alleging that the FBI was looking for records including classified documents related to nuclear weapons during its raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property on Aug. 8.
Bobb alleged the report, which cited unnamed people familiar with the FBI investigation, was an attempt by the Democrats to cause fear.
“This is what the Democrats do. They don’t have any good reason for doing what they did. The pathetic presser that Merrick Garland held for three minutes was insufficient, so they had to create fear,” Bobb told Fox News on Aug. 11.
“Normally, they should come out with exactly what happened, and why, and explain themselves and if it was a good reason, they would have solid ground,” Bobb continued. “They are not on solid ground.”
“So they had to come up with something that would potentially terrify the American public into freely giving up their constitutional freedoms,” Bobb added.
Attorney General Merrick Garland delivers a statement at the Department of Justice in Washington on Aug. 11, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
On Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland told reporters in a brief statement how he “personally approved” the FBI raid against Trump’s resort in Florida.
“I personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant in this matter,” Garland said. “The Department does not take such a decision lightly.”
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee also took notice of the close timing between Garland’s press appearance and the Washington Post’s publication of the report.
“So hours after Merrick Garland says that DOJ [Department of Justice] only speaks through its filings in court, they go out and leak this story to the Washington Post,” House GOPs on the Judiciary Committee wrote on Twitter.
Bobb said it would be a different scenario if the United States were on the brink of war.
“If we are on the verge of nuclear war, giving up the nuclear codes, maybe it’s acceptable that they violated the president’s constitutional rights,” she said. “It was not acceptable, and they’re trying to come up with reasons to make it sound appropriate and make it sound OK, because they don’t actually have a good reason for doing what they did.
Garland also told reporters on Thursday that the DOJ has asked a federal court to unseal the search warrant the FBI obtained and executed on Trump’s property. The warrant was signed off by U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, a judge at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
Secret Service personnel are seen in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla. on Aug. 8, 2022. The FBI raided the home reportedly to retrieve classified White House documents. (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images)
Many Republican lawmakers have since criticized Garland for failing to tell the public more information on the FBI raid.
“AG Garland spent four minutes reading an empty and inconsequential statement, and then refused to take questions,” Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) wrote on Twitter. “We STILL don’t know the reason for the raid, the nature and extent of probable cause, and why the DOJ felt it necessary to take such extreme and intrusive measures.”
“AG Merrick Garland gave a useless statement on the Mar-a-Lago raid that included zero useful information, then refused to take questions,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) wrote on Twitter. “The House will be back in Washington tomorrow, he should come over and answer some real questions. And bring FBI Director Wray with him.”
House lawmakers are scheduled to reconvene briefly on Aug. 12 from summer recess.
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee took exception to one of Garland’s comments, when he said the Justice Department applies the law “evenly without fear or favor.”
“Think Merrick Garland will apply the same standards to Hunter Biden?” the Republicans wrote. “Nope.”
Judicial Watch is suing the U.S. Department of Justice in federal court to release records ordered declassified and released by President Trump the day before he left office.
Despite Trump’s order, Justice Department officials are not releasing the records.
The ordered-declassified records relate to “Crossfire Hurricane,” a Justice Department operation against President Trump, his 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates that falsely accused the Trump campaign of “colluding” with Russian government agents to influence the results of the 2016 presidential election. (RELATED: Leading Republicans Reveal What Durham’s Up Against)
“The Obama-Biden Administration and Deep State spying on Trump and his associates is the worst government corruption scandal in American history,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “And to make matters worse, the Biden DOJ simply refuses to release smoking gun documents about this corruption that the American people have an absolute right to see!”
JW notes a “Just the News report details that the documents include ‘transcripts of intercepts made by the FBI of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the final FISA warrant approved by an intelligence court, and the tasking orders and debriefings of the two main confidential human sources, Christopher Steele and Stefan Halper, the bureau used to investigate whether Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.’”
The lawsuit was filed after the DOJ failed to respond to a February 17, 2022, FOIA request for:
All records regarding the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation that were provided to the White House by the Department of Justice on or about December 30, 2020. For purposes of clarification, the records sought are those described in a January 19, 2021 Presidential Memorandum (see https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/memorandum-declassification-certain-materials-related-fbis-crossfire-hurricane-investigation/ ).
All records of communication between any official or employee of the Department of Justice and any official or employee of any other branch, department, agency, or office of the federal government regarding the declassification and release of the records described in part one of this request.
Trump’s memo authorized the declassification and release of the records:
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I hereby direct the following:
Section 1. Declassification and Release. At my request, on December 30, 2020, the Department of Justice provided the White House with a binder of materials related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Portions of the documents in the binder have remained classified and have not been released to the Congress or the public. I requested the documents so that a declassification review could be performed and so I could determine to what extent materials in the binder should be released in unclassified form.
I determined that the materials in that binder should be declassified to the maximum extent possible. In response, and as part of the iterative process of the declassification review, under a cover letter dated January 17, 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation noted its continuing objection to any further declassification of the materials in the binder and also, on the basis of a review that included Intelligence Community equities, identified the passages that it believed it was most crucial to keep from public disclosure. I have determined to accept the redactions proposed for continued classification by the FBI in that January 17 submission.
I hereby declassify the remaining materials in the binder. This is my final determination under the declassification review and I have directed the Attorney General to implement the redactions proposed in the FBI’s January 17 submission and return to the White House an appropriately redacted copy.
My decision to declassify materials within the binder is subject to the limits identified above and does not extend to materials that must be protected from disclosure pursuant to orders of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and does not require the disclosure of certain personally identifiable information or any other materials that must be protected from disclosure under applicable law. Accordingly, at my direction, the Attorney General has conducted an appropriate review to ensure that materials provided in the binder may be disclosed by the White House in accordance with applicable law.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
Law professors warned that proposal would encourage illegal race discrimination
The American Bar Association on Monday axed a proposal to require law schools to “diversify” their student bodies after more than a year of warnings from law professors that the plan would force schools to violate federal law.
The proposal, first released in May 2021, would have required law schools to submit annual progress reports on minority enrollment to the American Bar Association. Law schools that failed to boost the enrollment of “underrepresented groups” would have been at risk of losing their accreditation.
The proposal underwent three rounds of revisions before finally being withdrawn by the association’s house of delegates, which did not rule out revisiting the proposal at a later date. An early draft had warned that U.S. anti-discrimination laws were “not a justification” for “non-compliance” with the diversity standard, a line that drew criticism from many in the legal community, including from elite universities.
Ten Yale Law School professors said in a public comment filed in June 2021 that the proposal “instructs schools to risk violating state or federal law in order to retain certification.” As late as February 2022, law professors were raising “legal concerns” about the “use of racial balancing or quotas,” according to a memo from the bar association summarizing the feedback it received.
The decision to withdraw the proposal comes as the Supreme Court is gearing up for oral arguments in a landmark affirmative action case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, that could outlaw racial preferences throughout higher education. It also comes as something of a surprise given the association’s relentless focus on diversity.
The association, which accredits almost every law school in the United States, has made noise about eliminating the LSAT, a test some say disadvantages minority applicants. And in February, it voted to require law schools to educate students “on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism,” over the objections from law professors who said the requirement would threaten academic freedom.
The curricular mandate was nonetheless popular among law school administrators, with 150 deans calling on the American Bar Association to implement it. There has been much less administrative agitation for rules about minority enrollment, which law schools have long struggled to boost.
There has also been little consensus on what sort of diversity the American Bar Association should prioritize. Some comments on the now-scrapped proposal said it gave “priority to racial and ethnic diversity at the expense of LGBTQ+ and disability diversity,” according to the February memo, creating a “two-tiered DEI system.” Others attacked “the phrase ‘underrepresented groups,’” which “may exclude individuals of groups that have been limited by a history of discrimination.”
The American Bar Association did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
John Grande says Connecticut union retaliated against him for refusing to join labor group
A Connecticut gym teacher says his school threatened to fire him after he criticized its mandatory diversity training on “exploring privilege.” But when he filed a grievance against the school, the local teachers’ union dismissed the complaint without explanation.
John Grande filed the grievance against Hartford Public Schools for what he called targeted discipline—including threats of termination and further “Sensitivity Awareness” training—but the American Federation of Teachers Local 1018, which has jurisdiction over this arbitration process for teachers, rejected his plea, his attorney told the Washington Free Beacon. Grande, who has been a gym teacher for 30 years, said the union retaliated against him for refusing to join the labor group.
“Our employee handbook explicitly states that no employee of the Hartford public school system will be disciplined for exercising their right to free speech,” Grande told the Free Beacon. “When asked for my reaction to the training, I expressed my disagreement and was punished for doing so.”
Neither AFT Local 1018 nor the Hartford Board of Education responded to requests for comment.
Grande’s complaint comes as national teachers’ unions embrace race-based lesson plans and training. AFT president Randi Weingarten said last year that K-12 schools do not teach critical race theory but also said her union supports teachers who face backlash for race-based lessons. The National Education Association, meanwhile, pledged its support for schools that teach critical race theory but later removed the statement from its website following backlash.
The school district’s mandatory presentation on privilege, obtained by the Free Beacon, states that “it is critical for everyone to reflect on privilege in this way in order to use our individual and collective privilege(s) for equity and social justice.” The training included an activity for teachers to split into groups and discuss their privilege in eight categories: class, ability, race, gender/sex, sexuality, nationality/citizenship, religion, and “other.”
“If a police car pulls me over, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race,” one example of privilege read.
“I do not fear increased mortality from COVID-19 or standard medical procedures such as giving birth,” another stated.
Grande said he expressed criticism about the training when the school district asked for feedback. Two of Grande’s coworkers reported the gym teacher to the school district after he stated his frustrations about the training seminar.
Frank Ricci, a labor fellow at the Yankee Institute and a former union president of the New Haven Fire Department, said it appears the teachers’ union and school district coordinated to target Grande for his beliefs.
“The Hartford School System, aided and abetted by the teachers’ union, has failed our kids,” Ricci told the Free Beacon. “Instead of focusing on their dismal test scores or bridging the achievement gap, they are focusing on ‘privilege,’ which is nothing more than a distraction for their failed education policies.”
Grande in July filed a complaint at the Connecticut State Board of Labor Relations against AFT Local 1018 over its refusal to take up his grievance against the school. The union has complete control over arbitration of grievances and can reject specific cases. The Fairness Center, a nonprofit law firm that represents Grande at the state labor board, argued the union must represent all teachers equally.
“Officials are refusing to represent him simply because he isn’t a member,” Nathan McGrath, president of the Fairness Center, told the Free Beacon. “John is just asking the union to do its job so he can continue doing his.”
AFT and its PAC have spent a combined$13 million on the 2022 midterm election—all of which went to liberal causes and Democratic candidates.
Students can assume different pronouns, have access to other bathrooms, and change their name without parental involvement
Public schools nationwide are telling students they can assume different pronouns, have access to another sex’s bathroom, and change their name without letting their parents know, a violation of federal law legal experts tell the Washington Free Beacon.
Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia bar teachers from “outing” transgender students to parents, as do Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. These increasingly common policies are meant to guard students against parents who, according to Fairfax County schools, “may not yet be supportive of their child’s transition.” But according to Vernadette Broyles, they also violate parents’ right to privacy as codified in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) of 1974.
“Privacy rights are held by the parents for the child, not by the child against their parents,” Broyles, president and founder of the Child and Parental Rights Campaign, told the Free Beacon. Broyles says Fairfax and Montgomery school officials are “attempting to usurp parental authority,” which is protected by the 14th Amendment. She called the schools’ policies “intentional obfuscation, driving a wedge between children and parents at a time when children need their parents most.” Three other attorneys involved in similar cases cited the same violations of the Constitution and federal law in support of parents’ rights.
The news comes as parents nationwide are filing lawsuits against school districts over the issue. Parents Defending Education, a conservative grassroots group, announced last week it was suing an Iowa school district for refusing to disclose a child’s transgender status without their permission. The district keeps “temporary” files for students’ gender support plans, allowing them to skirt official records requests from parents. Similarly, the Maryland and Virginia school districts instruct their employees to refrain from mentioning a child’s chosen gender identity on school forms or in emails where it could become public.
These policies are designed to conceal when a student begins to identify as a different gender without necessarily changing their physical appearance. To support “social transitions,” teachers are instructed to use a student’s chosen gender pronouns and treat them like their assumed gender, and in some cases giving students access to bathrooms “that correspond with their gender identity.”
Parents Defending Education president Nicole Neily told the Free Beacon the Iowa policy “intentionally evades federal law by placing students’ gender information in a temporary file—information that, if it were included in a child’s permanent file, would be accessible to parents through FERPA.”
The Montgomery County Board of Education is already embroiled in a lawsuit filed in 2019 over the policy. Attorneys for the plaintiffs argued in federal court last year that the policy is unconstitutional and violates FERPA, as well as state law. But the policy’s defenders claim that the same federal law protects a student’s right to privacy, even if the student is a minor.
LeRoy Rooker, a former director for the Education Department’s Family Policy Compliance Office, toldBethesda Magazine in 2021 that claim is false.
“There’s absolutely nothing in FERPA that would say they would violate FERPA by disclosing that to parents,” Rooker said. “The violation would be in not disclosing it if the parents request it.”
Some states have laws that ostensibly guard against such policies. A Virginia bill passed in 2013 protects parents’ rights to raise and educate their children. Fourteen other states have passed legislation along the same lines. In April, two Massachusetts parents sued their school district for violating federal and state law by hiding their children’s gender identity at school.
Parents say those laws haven’t been enough to protect children. Jeff Hoffman, a father of three Fairfax students and chairman of the Fairfax Parents First Coalition, wants the Virginia law to be written into school board policies statewide. Barring that, he called for parents to “put the entire transgender policy” on a ballot referendum for November.
“Fairfax County in Virginia is an example and proof of politically driven transgender policy that is systemically indoctrinated across our American schools,” Hoffman said.
The Free Beacon first reported in July that a Fairfax County faculty training module had directed teachers to forgo parental consent when students as young as kindergarten-age adopt a different gender at school.
Rep. Chris Pappas appears in auto repair shop with Alan Raff, chairman of Manchester Democrats
The blue-collar mechanic in a New Hampshire Democrat’s latest campaign ad is actually a lawyer and local Democratic Party chairman.
The ad, which Rep. Chris Pappas’s (D., N.H.) campaign released Tuesday, shows the Democrat talking to a mechanic at a repair shop—but the “mechanic,” according to the New Hampshire Journal, is an attorney at a Concord law office and the chairman of the Manchester Democrats. The attorney, Alan Raff, has also served as president of the Manchester Young Democrats and worked as a Democratic staffer in the state Senate and for U.S. senator Jeanne Shaheen (D., N.H.).
“Running a small business is hard work,” narrates Pappas, whose family founded the popular Puritan Backroom restaurant in Manchester in 1917, over a clip of Raff lifting a garage door at an auto repair shop. “There are early mornings and late nights.”
New Hampshire GOP spokesman Andrew Mahaleris said Pappas, whose net worth is $5 million, is out of touch with the working class.
“Born in the lap of luxury to wealthy parents, Chris Pappas has never worked a day in his life and doesn’t understand the struggle of working-class Granite Staters,” Mahaleris told the Washington Free Beacon. “His new ad is just another ploy by an out-of-touch Democrat elitist trying to fool voters.”
Pappas’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The congressman is just the latest Democrat to face accusations of inauthenticity while attempting to appeal to working-class voters. Sen. Michael Bennet (D., Colo.) obtained a one-day fishing license so that the multimillionaire could appear as a fly fisherman in his latest campaign ad, Axios reported last week.
Pappas says in his ad that he is “standing up to [his] own party” on the issue of stock trading for elected officials. The New Hampshire Democrat, however, has voted with Joe Biden 100 percent of the time. Only one-fifth of New Hampshire voters want Biden to run for reelection in 2024, according to a University of New Hampshire poll released last month.
Elected to Congress in 2018, Pappas won his 2020 reelection bid by 5 points. His seat is labeled a tossup this year by the Cook Political Report.
Chris Deluzio didn’t pay his property taxes. He backs a proposal that would increase IRS scrutiny on Americans.
Pennsylvania Democrat Chris Deluzio, who is running in a competitive House race, was hit with penalties for delinquent property taxes last year, according to real estate records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
Deluzio, a voting rights attorney, neglected to pay $2,976 in property taxes in 2021, for the historic Georgian colonial in Pittsburgh that he purchased two years ago. He was fined a little over $100 in penalties and interest, which he paid in March 2022, according to county records.
News of Deluzio’s late tax could become a campaign issue, and comes as he and Democratic Party leaders are advocating for the Inflation Reduction Act, which would steer billions of dollars into increased tax enforcement by the Internal Revenue Service. It also comes as other Democrats, including Rep. Matthew Cartwright and Wisconsin Senate candidate Mandela Barnes, have faced scrutiny for their history of late property tax payments. Cartwright also endorsed the Inflation Reduction Act.
Deluzio, who is worth between $1.9 million and $5.5 million, according to his financial disclosure report, endorsed the Biden administration-backed Inflation Reduction Act earlier this month. The bill, which raises corporate taxes, would allocate $80 billion to the IRS, including $46.6 billion for tax enforcement and audit activities.
“There are a lot great policies for #PA17 in The Inflation Reduction Act. It’s a bill that would ramp up clean energy and lower the cost of medicine, save people $ and help tackle inflation – all paid for by the ultra-rich and corporations,” said Deluzio in an Aug. 3 post on Twitter.
Deluzio’s campaign responded to a request for comment after publication. His spokesman, Matt Koos, said the late payment was a banking error.
“Chris’s bank made a mistake and did not pay the reassessed property taxes on time from escrow,” said Koos. “When Chris realized this, he made the payment.”
Republicans and some independent economic analysts say the bill will end up raising taxes for low-income and middle-class earners. According to an analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan congressional committee, the proposal would function as a tax increase for Americans across all income brackets over the next decade.
The Senate passed the bill on a party-line vote last week, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote for Democrats. The House will vote on the package on Friday.
Deluzio is facing off against Republican and Pennsylvania businessman Jeremy Shaffer in the race, which is considered a tossup, according to the Cook Political Report. The candidates are vying to replace Democratic Rep. Conor Lamb, who ran for U.S. Senate instead of seeking reelection and lost in the primary.
Update 11:27 a.m.: This piece has been updated to include comment from the Deluzio campaign.
Former colleagues say ‘it’s not true’ that John Fetterman was an effective mayor
Senate hopeful John Fetterman (D., Pa.), a former mayor who is casting himself as the man who “worked to rebuild” the town of Braddock, Pa., missed more than a third of the borough’s monthly meetings during his time in office, according to public records.
Fetterman skipped at least 53 meetings during his tenure as mayor of the Pittsburgh suburb from 2006 to 2018, according to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The progressive Democrat missed just 4 meetings in his first three years in office, but peaked at 11 no-shows in 2011 and 9 in 2015. The tally may be higher, but records for the year 2016, when Fetterman first ran for Senate, are illegible.
Fetterman has been dogged for years by criticism of his spotty work history. Jesse Brown, a former Braddock borough council president, said in 2015 that Fetterman “should have been at all council meetings,” but stopped showing up after several confrontations over his duties as mayor.
“He first come in thinking he was in charge of everything,” said Brown, who also criticized Fetterman for taking credit for Braddock’s economic revitalization. “Everything that’s happened in this community, he’s gotten credit for it. The people believe that all this has come about through John Fetterman, but it’s not true.”
Chardaé Jones, who succeeded Fetterman as mayor, said Fetterman’s failure to show up to city council meetings eroded his relationships with councilmembers. “When you’re not present at council meetings, there’s not much of a relationship there,” she toldPolitico.
Fetterman has faced similar complaints as lieutenant governor. State Sen. Tony Williams, the Democratic whip, told Politico that Fetterman often failed to show up to preside over Senate sessions, hampering his ability to forge ties with policymakers.
One area where Fetterman has shown up to work as lieutenant governor could hurt him come November. As lieutenant governor, Fetterman’s only official duty is to oversee the Board of Pardons. Fetterman has embraced the role, voting to free multiple murderers from prison, a record that has drawn criticism from a group of Pennsylvania sheriffs.
Fetterman’s Republican opponent Mehmet Oz seized on Fetterman’s work ethic with the release of a campaign website this month that portrays Fetterman as a slovenly layabout who works from his basement. The Oz campaign launched the site following a report that Fetterman lived off his wealthy father until his late 40s, when he was elected lieutenant governor in 2019.
Fetterman’s truancy has drawn notice on the campaign trail, even before he suffered a near-fatal stroke that has kept him out of public view since May. Black clergy members criticized Fetterman for missing a candidate forum in February, with some speculating he skipped the event to avoid questions about a 2013 incident in which he pulled a shotgun on an unarmed black jogger.
“If there is already suspicion on the part of the community that race may be an issue and he may not be in touch with the community the way he thinks he is, then this only reinforces that by not showing up,” Rev. Mark Tyler, who leads South Philadelphia’s Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, told the Philadelphia Tribune.
Fetterman, who cast only one vote during his stint as mayor, has defended his record in Braddock, claiming borough council members were “absolute obstructionists” who were “committed to my failure.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci this week urged people to vote out members of Congress who are spreading “total lies” about COVID-19, but made a false claim himself about COVID-19 vaccines.
Fauci, speaking at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle on Aug. 9, was asked how the scientific community can deal with congressional leaders “who promulgate unscientific ideas yet control funding for public institutions.”
“Vote,” Fauci responded, drawing applause from the room.
In commencement speeches he’s given this year, Fauci urged graduates, “Don’t accept the normalization of untruths.”
“Because there’s so much preposterous lying that goes on, and including, unfortunately it’s true … that members in our own Congress, in our own Senate, who just get up and say things that are total lies,” added Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). “‘Vaccines kill people, that kind of thing.’ It’s so much untruths that people who have a lot of other things in their lives that they have to worry about, they kind of start accepting it and all of a sudden, lying becomes normal.”
Vaccines do kill people, according to U.S. health authorities.
Nine deaths from a combination of blood clotting and low blood platelet levels, for instance, have been determined to be “causally associated” with Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Causally associated means the vaccine caused or was related to the deaths.
Severe allergic reactions are also triggered on occasion by the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, as are cases of heart inflammation. People who have experienced the conditions have died.
NIAID didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Dr. Larry Corey, a Fred Hutch employee who asked Fauci the question, identified Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) by name but didn’t offer any evidence for Paul promulgating unscientific ideas.
Paul and Fauci have clashed during Senate hearings over Fauci’s agency funding the Wuhan, China, laboratory located near where COVID-19 cases were first detected, and Republicans have vowed to investigate Fauci if they gain control of Congress in the upcoming midterm elections. Paul’s office didn’t respond to an inquiry.
Fauci wasn’t questioned on his own prior statements, including his admission that he misled the U.S. public on the effectiveness of masks in order to prevent a shortage of masks for health care workers.
The cancer center awarded Fauci with the 2022 honorary Hutch Award, which he received during a baseball game at T-Mobile Park. The discussion took place hours before the game.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to Joe Biden, throws a pitch before the game between the Seattle Mariners and the New York Yankees at T-Mobile Park in Seattle, Wash., on Aug. 9, 2022. (Alika Jenner/Getty Images)
Gain of Function
At one point during the discussion, Corey started talking about how an early strain of the virus that causes COVID-19 was detected in Washington state, and Fauci joked, “I developed the ancestral modern strain.”
“I created it. I was in my kitchen,” Fauci said, drawing laughter.
“Gain of function, here we come,” Corey said, before moving on to another subject.
Gain of function is a term that describes research to make pathogens more transmissible or pathogenic.
“Families of the more than 1 million Americans who have perished from COVID-19 aren’t laughing,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), one of Fauci’s fiercest critics in Congress, wrote on Twitter in response to a clip of the new exchange.
A person close to the Trump family suggested the FBI may have planted “listening devices” during a raid targeting former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence earlier this week.
Lawyers for the former president previously said that FBI agents would not allow Trump’s team to observe or supervise their search of Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. One lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, told Fox News on Thursday that agents are believed to have searched Trump’s bedroom, office, and a storage room.
Because the FBI allegedly “didn’t allow anybody to supervise what they were doing, and they specifically requested to turn off the security cameras,” Kimbery Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée and an advisor to the former president’s 2020 campaign, told Newsmax. “Why? Because they didn’t want to be caught with what they were doing. How do you know there weren’t listening devices planted or evidence planted there?
“It’s something that has to be investigated and checked out, and we want to see the affidavit and what was their probable cause to be able to go in there and break into the president’s home,” she added. For her claim, Guilfoyle did not provide evidence.
Trump’s son Eric Trump told the Daily Mail on Wednesday that security cameras remained on when the agents carried out their search, accusing the agents of refusing to hand over a warrant and kicking lawyers off the premises. Agents, he said, told Trump’s team to turn off the cameras but they remained on, and those agents went to places “they shouldn’t have been.”
No Response
The FBI and Department of Justice have not responded to requests for comment. The judge who approved the FBI warrant, Bruce Reinhart, ordered the Justice Department on Wednesday to respond to requests to unseal the warrant in the case.
The White House said Joe Biden was not aware of the FBI search before it was announced earlier this week. Top Republicans have called on the Department of Justice to release documents pertaining to the raid or to have Attorney General Merrick Garland speak about the matter.
Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray have remained silent on the Mar-a-Lago search. But on Wednesday, Wray complained to reporters in a press conference about alleged violent threats levied against federal law enforcement agents in the wake of the raid.
The former president on Wednesday took to his Truth Social app and speculated on whether the FBI planted evidence. Members of Trump’s team said he wasn’t there while the raid occurred.
“The FBI and others from the Federal Government would not let anyone, including my lawyers, be anywhere near the areas that were rummaged and otherwise looked at during the raid on Mar-a-Lago,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Everyone was asked to leave the premises, they wanted to be left alone, without any witnesses to see what they were doing, taking or, hopefully not, ‘planting.’”
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind.—An Indiana congresswoman who grew up under communism said the raid on former President Donald Trump’s home was similar to “KGB-style tactics.”
Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) who grew up in Ukraine in the former Soviet Union, was one of about a dozen House Republicans who met with Trump on the evening of Aug. 9. She said the raid outraged her.
“As a US Congresswoman who grew up in the USSR, the FBI raid of President Trump’s home is alarming. It is reminiscent of KGB-style tactics,” Spartz said in an email to the Epoch Times.
Spartz called for equal treatment under the law, “not spectacles to destroy potential political opponents.”
“I don’t remember Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden’s homes being raided in this embarrassing way,” Spartz said.
Spartz joined Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and members of the House Republican Study Committee in a three-hour meeting with the former president. Banks told Fox News that Trump was “upbeat” and has made his decision about whether to run for president in 2024.
Ukrainian-American U.S. Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) speaks at a news conference on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the U.S. Capitol on March 2, 2022 in Washington. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Spartz counseled facts before feelings in the wake of the raid on Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, home.
“Regardless of people’s feelings about President Trump, this should not be acceptable in a democratic society,” Spartz said.
“If the federal government can raid the home of a former president, all Americans should ask: what can 87,000 new IRS agents do to me?” the lawmaker added, referring to a provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that gives the Internal Revenue Service $45.6 billion in funding for tax enforcement activities, which is enough to hire up to 87,000 new agents. The bill was passed by the Senate and is expected to be approved by the House on Aug. 12.
Trump was in New York City while his Florida home was raided. Unconfirmed reports citing anonymous sources have said that the raid was related to a Department of Justice probe into whether Trump held on to records when he left the White House. Both the FBI and Justice Department have declined to comment on the raid.
All presidential correspondence and documentation have to be handed over to the National Archives when a president leaves office, according to a 1978 law.
The justification for the FBI search remains under seal. Trump’s legal team plans on asking the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida to unseal the search warrant affidavit, which would outline why authorities asked for the warrant.
“It breaks my heart to see what is happening in our country and around the world, but I have full faith in the American people to defeat the rise of socialism and communism once again with the right leaders,” Spartz said.
Banks said the lawmakers’ conversation with Trump involved Republicans winning back the congressional majority, and what they might do with that majority.
“I was honored to spend time with President Trump this week with my Republican colleagues and show our support,” Spartz said. “We need to have more people like President Trump who aren’t afraid to challenge the DC machine.”
Oversight GOP figures are requesting the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) provide information on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) raid of former president Donald Trump’s resort in Mar-a-Lago.
“NARA’s singling out of President Trump’s handling of official records stands starkly in contrast to the way NARA has treated far clearer violations committed by politicians and officials who are not Republicans,” 20 Republicans, including numerous Committee ranking members, wrote in an Aug. 10 letter addressed to U.S. Acting Archivist Debra Wall, first published by Politico.
“To better understand the circumstances and NARA’s role, if any, in the FBI raid, Oversight Republicans request an immediate briefing on this matter,” the lawmakers wrote.
The lawmakers’ move marks the first of the GOP’s promised effort in investigating the FBI’s Aug. 8 raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property for any underlying political motivation.
It follows shortly after the GOP in unison cast doubt over the nature of the raid—House Republicans first, and Senate ones followed—with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) promising to “leave no stone unturned” in an investigation of the Department of Justice that he says has “reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization.”
The Republican lawmakers who wrote the letter allege that “political motivation” underlies the actions of the FBI and the National Archives, as the agencies’ treatment of Trump was “so contrary” to that of other former government officials—such as former president Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—whom the Republicans say also had “some Presidential Records Act violations.”
What Republicans Are Requesting
The GOP members of Congress are requesting that the NARA provide a “Member-level briefing” on the following no later than Aug. 17:
Any evidence of coordination between NARA and the FBI, or between NARA and the DOJ, on raiding the former president’s property
Any documents NARA produced and submitted to a U.S. federal court
Any documents that show NARA’s process in collecting presidential records after a presidential transition
In addition, the Republicans ask in their letter that NARA preserves records related to the warrant executed by the FBI at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort (which has, for now, yet to be unsealed), as well as any other NARA records related to Trump’s papers following Trump’s presidential term.
“The seeming weaponization of the federal government against Biden’s political rivals cannot go unchecked, and if NARA is working to further these efforts, it will be only the latest agency to lose its credibility in the eyes of the American people under the Biden Administration,” the Republican lawmakers say in their letter.
Trump’s Presidential Records
While the FBI’s search warrant for the raid remains under seal, multiple sources close to Trump have stated that the raid was conducted, at least in name, to look for presidential records that someone is alleging Trump himself has decided to keep in Mar-a-Lago after leaving office.
Trump’s lawyer, Christina Bobb, told The Epoch Times on Tuesday that FBI agents were looking for “what they deemed to be presidential records” and seized documents from Trump’s property.
“We had been very cooperative with them before. And it’s unclear to me why they went to such drastic measures to do this. But they did. And as far as the probable cause goes, they wouldn’t give that to us,” she added.
Bobb’s comments are consistent with what NARA said in statements earlier this year about how Trump’s representatives have been cooperating in transferring presidential records, including handing over 15 boxes containing presidential records. On Tuesday, the magistrate judge who reportedly approved the search warrant ordered the Department of Justice to file a response to a motion asking for the DOJ to unseal the warrant no later than Aug. 15.
Glasser portrays Milley as a dedicated military officer with a strong set of values who loathed his unstable and temperamental boss. But despite his commander in chief’s “fits of rage, late-night Twitter storms” and “abrupt dismissals,” Milley was determined not to resign for the good of his country. So altruistic.
There was that one time, however, when Milley was so utterly humiliated by Trump that he spent days in his Pentagon office, writing and rewriting a letter of resignation.
The occasion came during the June 2020 George Floyd riots. Members of Black Lives Matter had tried, but fortunately failed, to burn down St. John’s Church in Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Square. Trump, accompanied by several advisers and Cabinet members, famously walked to the church and was photographed as he held up a Bible. Milley was among that group.
The legacy media claimed that a crowd of BLM protesters had been “violently” cleared from Lafayette Square by the U.S. Park Police for the sole purpose of this photo-op. One year later, the inspector general of the Interior Department released a report stating that the USPP had cleared the park to allow fencing to be installed “in response to destruction of property and injury to officers.”
In her new book, of course, Glasser tells readers, “Most of the demonstrations had been peaceful, but there were also eruptions of looting, street violence, and arson, including a small fire in St. John’s Church, across from the White House.”
Anyway, because members of the military are expected to remain apolitical and he had participated in a “political event,” Milley was filled with remorse.
During a pre-recorded commencement address to the graduating class of the National Defense University, Milley apologized. He said, “I should never have been there.”
“As senior leaders, everything you do will be closely watched, and I am not immune, as many of you saw the result of that photograph of me at Lafayette Square last week,” he told the graduates.
“I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics. As a commissioned, uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I have learned from and I sincerely hope we all can learn from it.”
Upon additional reflection, Milley penned his letter of resignation, which is included in Glasser’s excerpt.
It is a boastful, four-paragraph letter written by a disgruntled subordinate with little sense of self-awareness. He tells the president he’s done some “deep soul-searching” and “can no longer faithfully support and execute your orders.”
“It is my belief that you were doing great and irreparable harm to my country,” he begins. “I believe that you have made a concerted effort over time to politicize the United States military. I thought that I could change that. I’ve come to the realization that I cannot, and I need to step aside and let someone else try to do that.”
Milley continues, “You are using the military to create fear in the minds of the people — and we are trying to protect the American people. I cannot stand idly by and participate in that attack, verbally or otherwise, on the American people.
“The American people trust their military and they trust us to protect them against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and our military will do just that. We will not turn our back on the American people.”
“I swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States and embodied within that Constitution is the idea that says that all men and women are created equal,” Milley writes. He expands upon his own acceptance of all people no matter their race, religion or sexual orientation, then moves on to his patriotism. The implication is, of course, that Trump is racist, bigoted and doesn’t love America.
“Lastly it is my deeply held belief that you’re ruining the international order, and causing significant damage to our country overseas, that was fought for so hard by the Greatest Generation that they instituted in 1945. Between 1914 and 1945, 150 million people were slaughtered in the conduct of war. They were slaughtered because of tyrannies and dictatorships.
“That generation, like every generation, has fought against that, has fought against fascism, has fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism. It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order.
“You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that. It is with deep regret that I hereby submit my letter of resignation.”
Is he calling Trump a fascist? A Nazi? Sounds like it. If Milley thinks Trump damaged America’s reputation, we have to wonder how he feels about Biden’s blunders.
Unfortunately, he never submitted the letter to Trump.
Glasser writes, “Milley had finally come to a decision. He would not quit. ‘F*** that s***,’ he told his staff. ‘I’ll just fight him.’ The challenge, as he saw it, was to stop Trump from doing any more damage.”
Trump would have been better off if this coward had resigned. Among other allegations, Milley reportedly told his Chinese counterpart he would alert him if Trump were to plan any surprise attacks.
“Gen. Milley needs to be called in TODAY and asked under polygraph what he said to China.”
I would remind Milley of a certain oath he took a long time ago. He solemnly swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same.
The BLM riots in the summer of 2020 were not peaceful. They were responsible for over $1 billion in property damage. They caused injury and even deaths. It’s one thing to oppose racism and quite another to excuse crime in our cities.
Either you’re for the rule of law and against terrorism, or you’re not.
Standing up for the rule of law and against terrorism isn’t politics, Gen. Milley. It’s your job.
George Gascón recall up in the air after campaign reveals outdated signature-verification process
Los Angeles County officials are rejecting more than one out of every five petition signatures in the campaign to recall radical prosecutor George Gascón (D.), according to a random sample of signatures provided to the anti-Gascón campaign, which says the “shockingly” high rate is because officials are using outdated signature standards.
In July, the Los Angeles County registrar notified the Recall DA George Gascón campaign that a random sampling of signatures revealed a 22 percent rejection rate, 60 times more than the rejection rate for mail-in-ballots during the 2020 presidential election. In response, the recall campaign pushed the registrar to explain what they believed was a “shockingly large rejection rate.”
The campaign obtained public records that show the registrar’s office was training staff to review votes using outdated signature standards, which allow the disqualification of any signature for minor variations compared with the one provided on a person’s voter registration form. In a letter to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, lawyers for the campaign expressed concerns that these outdated standards were leading to an improperly high rejection rate.
Registrar Dean Logan on Monday said concerns over the signature rejections were “selective outrage” and “a fictitious narrative to misinform and cast doubt.” But Marian Thompson, the attorney who wrote the letter, told the Washington Free Beacon the county clerk has not been forthcoming about the reasons for the rejection rate and refuses to share the precise number of invalid signatures.
“If they didn’t follow the law and apply the same legal standards used for signature verification for vote-by-mail ballots, then we have a legal team assembled to resolve this matter in a court of law,” Thompson said.
Gascón has been mired in controversy since taking office in November 2020. Like many progressive prosecutors backed by the left-wing billionaire George Soros, Gascón moved immediately to end cash bail, lighten sentencing guidelines, and reduce incarceration. His deputy district attorneys sued him weeks later for the drastic changes, saying his prosecutorial approach would violate their oath of office. Soros’s Justice and Public Safety PAC contributed $4.7 million to Gascón’s campaign.
The movement to recall Gascón began gathering steam as crime spiked in the city. In Los Angeles last year, auto thefts, robberies, and homicides were all up, with the city’s murder rate nearing a 15-year high. In December, former Los Angeles prosecutors began circulating a petition to recall Gascón and gathered more than 715,000 signatures by July. If around 579,000 of those signatures are from registered voters in Los Angeles County, a recall election will be held in November. The signature count is due next week.
In March, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) codified pandemic-era changes to the state’s voting regulations, which reduced mail-in rejection rates by more than 80 percent in the 2020 presidential election. The current standards presume that a signature appearing on a ballot is legitimate. Prior to that change, votes could be rejected if signatures differed even slightly from a voter’s registration.
Los Angeles County is in the process of verifying signatures after a random sampling in July determined there were not enough valid signatures to trigger a recall. The Washington Examinerreported the county has denied the Gascón recall campaign observation rights for the election’s signature count, further obfuscating the verification process. A spokesman for the county registrar said the recall campaign is entitled to review the count when it is over, and that their office’s “focus is on completing the verification within the legal timelines with integrity and appropriate quality review.”
Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, told the Free Beacon the registrar’s handling of the count “fuels skepticism.”
“Public officials should embrace transparency,” Snead said. “When they don’t it fuels doubt in the integrity of our electoral system.”
New DCCC ad pans to menu that lists prices in euros as narrator touts support for local entrepreneurs
A new Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee ad aimed at wooing Latinos says Democrats “strengthened Arizona by investing in small businesses.” The business to which the ad subsequently cuts is almost certainly not in Arizona, or even America—its prices are listed in euros.
The DCCC released the ad Monday as part of a “six-figure digital advertising campaign to reach Latino voters,” the group said in a press release. During the spot, a narrator says Democrats supported Arizona entrepreneurs by investing in local businesses. But the restaurant to which the ad cuts is by no means local—its menu lists an array of overpriced options in euros. A goat cheese platter, for example, will set customers back 11 euros, while an avocado option costs 10.50 euros. Should an Arizonan want to visit the eatery, however, the cost would be much higher. The cheapest flight from Phoenix to the European Union is $750, according to online travel agency Kayak.
The DCCC’s intercontinental Arizona ad—which the group said would appeal to Latinos as they are uniquely concerned about “protecting small businesses” and “creating good-paying jobs”—marks Democrats’ latest botched attempt to appeal to Hispanics.
Just weeks ago, in July, first lady Jill Biden compared the Latino community to breakfast tacos. Days later, the DCCC released a radio ad targeting Texas Hispanics, which argued that even though Democrats “seem so out of touch,” they aren’t as bad as “these Republican extremists.” The ad was routinely mocked by liberal Latinos in the Lone Star State—Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha called it “the worst ad I’ve ever heard,” while a Texas Young Democrats member said the spot was “so cringe.”
The DCCC did not return a request for comment. Its ad comes as Democrats hemorrhage Hispanic voters, particularly in South Texas. In June, Republicans flipped a Rio Grande Valley House seat for the first time in more than a century, a result that made Mayra Flores the first Mexican-born woman elected to Congress. Flores even defeated her Democratic opponent in deep-blue Cameron County, which is 90 percent Hispanic and less than two years ago backed Joe Biden by double digits.
Democratic lawmakers and liberal media outlets alike have responded to the Republican Party’s gains with Latino voters by attacking Hispanic Republicans. Flores’s opponent in November, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D., Texas), argued in June that he is more qualified than Flores because he “wasn’t born in Mexico.” Weeks later, Arizona representative Rubén Gallego (D.) said a female Hispanic Republican running for Congress in the state was not sufficiently Latina because she took her husband’s last name.
The New York Times, meanwhile, said Flores’s win marked the “Rise of the Far-Right Latina,” citing the Republican’s support for religiosity, strong borders, and traditional values. A Texas political blog that has received campaign funds from Gonzalez also attacked Flores last month, referring to the congresswoman as “Miss Frijoles,” “Miss Enchiladas,” and a “cotton pickin’ liar.”
“Who does this Mayra Flores think she is? Somebody said she was crowned Miss Frijoles 2022 in San Benito,” Texas political blogger Jerry McHale, who has received $1,200 from Gonzalez’s campaign, wrote on July 2. “She isn’t in congressman Vicente Gonzalez’s league. She isn’t even in the bush leagues unless she doesn’t shave her p**sy.”
The DCCC is no stranger to bungled political ads. In addition to the European menu included in its Arizona spot, the group’s latest ad in New Mexico shows a person taking pills from a bottle labeled “FOR ANIMAL USE ONLY.” It’s unclear if the person in the ad is taking an animal version of the drug Ivermectin, which CNN labeled a “livestock drug” and a “horse dewormer” after popular podcaster Joe Rogan said he took it to treat COVID-19. Rogan was prescribed a human version of the drug.
Matt Cartwright, who has a history of tax delinquency, endorses bill that more than doubles agency’s size
Congressman Matt Cartwright has a history of tax delinquency. That isn’t stopping the Pennsylvania Democrat from backing a plan that would sic an army of nearly 90,000 new IRS agents on the American people.
Cartwright last year owed $436.63 in penalties and interest that stemmed from late property tax payments on his Washington, D.C., condo, the Washington Free Beaconreported last week. The incident was not his first tax-related mishap—from 2013 to 2018, the Democrat racked up thousands of dollars in penalties and interest related to his tax delinquencies. Still, Cartwright on Monday announced his support for the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats’ $430 billion spending bill that does little to fight inflation and gives the IRS $80 billion to hire up to 87,000 additional employees.
Cartwright’s history of tax delinquency and subsequent support for the bill could haunt the congressman as he faces a difficult reelection bid against GOP challenger Jim Bognet. Cartwright trails the Republican by 1 point with 9 percent of voters undecided, internal polling obtained by the Free Beacon shows.
Cartwright will also have to overcome Joe Biden’s historic unpopularity, which has even extended to the president’s hometown of Scranton. In Cartwright’s eighth district, which includes Scranton, just 38 percent of voters approve of Biden, compared with 60 percent who disapprove, the Free Beaconrevealed Wednesday. Despite Biden’s hometown woes, Cartwright is standing by the president—unlike some of his House Democratic colleagues, the congressman has publicly backed Biden to run for reelection in 2024. Cartwright was also a staunch Biden supporter during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, having said in 2019 that he was “honored” to endorse his “friend, northeastern PA hometown boy, Joe Biden for president.”
Cartwright did not return a request for comment. His Monday statement voicing support for Democrats’ latest spending bill did not include a comment on its IRS-related provisions. Should that bill pass the House, the IRS will receive $80 billion to hire as many as 87,000 additional employees. The hiring spree would more than double the size of the agency’s workforce, making the IRS larger than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined, the Free Beaconreported. Bognet has railed against the proposal, arguing that the Inflation Reduction Act should instead be called the “Audit America Act.”
“With that many new IRS agents, every small business can expect to be audited,” Bognet said Monday. “We must stop this spending spree, and we must stop this auditing spree.”
Beyond the Cartwright-backed bill’s proposed IRS expansion, even liberal economists don’t believe the $430 billion Inflation Reduction Act will reduce inflation. Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi, whom Biden himself routinely cites, said in a new report that the legislation will cause no change in inflation until the third quarter of 2023, when Americans can expect to enjoy a .01 percent decrease.
Cartwright is nevertheless touting the bill as a win for Democrats. In his Monday statement, he called the bill “landmark legislation” that “the American people have been waiting for.”
Cartwright’s race against Bognet is not his first. The Democrat narrowly defeated Bognet by roughly 3 points in 2020, a result that marked the tightest reelection bid of his career. Bognet has thus far raised $1.2 million to Cartwright’s $3.5 million.
A city van for voting visited majority-Democrat vicinities of Racine, Wisconsin, more often than it visited Republican ones, a complaint by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) said.
This violation of voting laws must not be vindicated, wrote WILL deputy counsel, Anthony LoCoco.
“Racine’s use of mobile voting sites violates clear directives in state law on the collection of absentee ballots at alternative sites.
“WEC [Wisconsin Elections Commission] must make clear that Racine is violating the law and ensure that clerks across the state understand what is and is not permitted in Wisconsin law,” he said.
As of now, the city plans to use the voting van again in November’s midterm election.
Voting Violations
The voting van violated a variety of statutes, WILL’s analysis wrote.
Under Wisconsin law, absentee voters must send votes to the office of the municipal clerk, or an alternative site near to the clerk’s office.
But Racine used a voting van to collect absentee primary votes from 21 locations across the city, WILL said.
Moreover, the areas of Racine where the voting van ventured advantaged Democrats, it said.
A study by WILL alleged that Democratic districts got more voting van locations than Republican ones.
“The city of Racine assigned more potential mobile voting locations to wards that vote at the highest percentage for Democrats,” the study stated.
Under Wisconsin law, absentee voting locations that give one party an advantage are illegal, regardless of why they occur, the complaint noted.
“Many of the 21 alternate sites advantage the Democratic Party and some advantage the Republican Party. Collectively, however, the sites used by … [Racine’s city clerk Tara] McMenamin afforded an advantage to the Democratic Party,” WILL’s complaint said.
The voting van also left votes vulnerable, the complaint alleged.
WILL said the city kept ballots in the vehicle during the night, a practice inconsistent with normal Wisconsin ballot security measures.
“That is equivalent to having someone driving completed absentee ballots around the city in the trunk of their car for 14 days prior to the election and leaving the vehicle parked in various locations throughout the days and nights.”
The complaint asked for courts to order McMenamin to obey the law by ending the use of the voting van.
SO WHEN ARE REPUBLICANS GOING TO GET OFF THEIR BUTTS AND CODIFY THIS TREND?
A majority of American voters support states requiring audits “immediately after elections” to protect election integrity, according to a new poll by Rasmussen Reports sponsored by The National Pulse.
Asked, “Should every state require that ballots be available immediately after elections for bipartisan voter reviews to enhance election confidence and transparency?” 56 percent of likely voters supported the idea while just 23 percent of likely voters opposed it.
The Rasmussen data showed that 68 percent of Republicans – considerably more than just 45 percent of their Democrat-voting counterparts – supported the push for election integrity. 57 percent of Independents were also in support.
When divided into the three ideologies of “Conservative,” “Moderate,” and “Liberal,” the data showed a similar trend: 73 percent of Conservatives responded “yes,” 52 percent of Moderates responded “yes,” and just 34 percent of Liberals responded “yes.”
The news follows Democrats attempting to universalize vote-by-mail in America’s forthcoming elections while Republican officials have sought to halt these efforts with election integrity measures. It also comes as the 2020 election results continue to be subject to scrutiny due to the nefarious influence of private foundations funding ballot harvesting efforts and unmanned ballot “drop boxes.”
The Rasmussen poll also inquires with voters “How important will the issue of election integrity be in this year’s congressional elections?”.
80 percent of likely voters felt the issue would be important, with 59 percent of individuals polled believing election integrity would be “very important.”
The feelings appeared to be nonpartisan, as 87 percent of Republicans, 78 percent of Democrats, and 76 percent of Independents believed election integrity would be important in the upcoming midterms.
The poll comes amidst ongoing investigations into several late-night ballot dumps during the 2020 election, all of which supported Joe Biden, and far-left activist groups linked to George Soros and Mark Zuckerberg using hundreds of millions of dollars to boost voter turnout rates for the Democratic Party.
Mainstream media outlets, social media platforms, and Democratic officials have set out to censor individuals discussing voter fraud, despite pushing similar claims about Russian election influence throughout 2016 and the entirety of Donald Trump’s presidency. Under Biden, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has also targeted officials and activists fighting for election integrity by threatening criminal prosecution.
The Justice Department has to respond to motions to unseal a warrant that triggered the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, according to a magistrate judge who reportedly approved the search.
“On or before 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on August 15, 2022, the Government shall file a Response to the Motion to Unseal,” wrote U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart on Wednesday afternoon, referring to the Department of Justice.
“The response may be filed ex parte and under seal as necessary to avoid disclosing matters already under seal. In that event, the Government shall file a redacted Response in the public record. If it chooses, the Government may file a consolidated Response to all Motions to Seal,” he wrote.
Neither the FBI nor Justice Department has issued public comments about the raid, which was first confirmed by Trump on Monday evening.
The FBI declined to comment when contacted by The Epoch Times, and the Justice Department has not responded to several requests for comment.
As for the White House, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said President Joe Biden was not aware of the raid before Trump’s announcement. Her claim was refuted by Trump on his social media platform, Truth Social.
“What I can tell you definitively and for sure, he was not aware of this,” Jean-Pierre said of Biden. “Nobody at the White House was. Nobody was given a heads up and we did not know about what happened yesterday.”
Requests
On Wednesday, the Times Union’s managing editor, Brendan J. Lyons, wrote to Reinhart to ask for the warrant to be unsealed.
“Given that the search warrant(s) have been executed, and the target of that search has full knowledge of what occurred, there is no impediment to any ongoing investigation from the disclosure of the search warrant order or the returns. As such, these records should be unsealed,” the letter to the Florida judge reads.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s residence in Mar-A-Lago, Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 9, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)
Judicial Watch asked for the warrant as part of an investigation into “the potential politicization of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice and whether the FBI and the Justice Department are abusing their law enforcement powers to harass a likely future political opponent of President [Joe] Biden.”
“If the Court were to unseal the materials, Judicial Watch would obtain the materials, analyze them, and make them available to the public,” the letter said. “Unsealing the records therefore would further Judicial Watch’s mission of educating the public.”
It comes as Eric Trump, a son of the former president, told the Daily Mail that a Trump attorney at Mar-a-Lago, Christina Bobb, asked FBI agents Monday about seeing a warrant.
“They would not give her the search warrant,” he told the outlet, referring to Bobb. “So they showed it to her from about 10 feet away. They would not give her a copy of the search warrant.”
Top Republicans, meanwhile, demanded an investigation into the raid and argued that it was politically motivated to wound the GOP ahead of the 2022 midterms. Some have said the Justice Department immediately needs to release documents pertaining to the raid.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said there needs be a “thorough and immediate explanation” of how the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago was approved. Legal historians have said that such a raid against a former president is unprecedented.
“Attorney General Garland and the Department of Justice should already have provided answers to the American people and must do so immediately,” McConnel added.
Trump on Monday said that federal agents entered Mar-a-Lago despite him having cooperated with federal officials for months to return documents that he allegedly took from the White House after leaving office last year.
Reinhart came under fire Tuesday amid reports from several news outlets that found he had a connection to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Reinhart left his job as an assistant United States in early 2008 before he began representing some of Epstein’s workers.
According to a 2018 Miami Herald report, two of Epstein’s accusers alleged Reinhart left his prosecutor job to give Epstein inside information. Reinhart denied those allegations.
As his connection to the Epstein case went viral on Tuesday, it appeared the U.S. Southern District of Florida removed the judge’s page from its website, according to archived versions of the website.
“Access denied,” Reinhart’s page reads. “You are not authorized to access this page.”
Blindly forgiving criminals has proven to be a bad idea already over and over. Investing in criminal societies just makes them more powerful. It does not change their culture. If they would just cease from being criminals the problems would go away. What am I missing? [US Patriot]
Former New York City prosecutor Jim Quinn, a vocal critic of New York’s 2019 bail law since day one, still hopes state lawmakers face reality and repeal the damaging law.
In his latest report, published under the Manhattan Institute, Quinn shows how earlier ideologically-driven movements aided the birth of the law, how the law drove up re-offending rates and crime, and how the two fixes didn’t solve the law’s root problem.
Quinn is a former executive assistant district attorney at the Queens District Attorney’s Office, one of five district attorney offices in New York’s five boroughs. He worked as a Queens prosecutor for 42 years.
His report came as the debate over criminal justice laws heats up in New York.
Recently, two high-profile Democrats—New York mayor Eric Adams and Albany County district attorney David Soares—joined Republican forces to plead for a special legislative session to fix bail reform and raise the age law, respectively.
So far, Gov. Kathy Hochul and state senate majority leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins showed no appetite for it.
Jim Quinn (Courtesy of Manhattan Institute)
“Through this report, I’m trying to get the debate onto something logical and reality. If my numbers are wrong, show me that my numbers are wrong,” Quinn told The Epoch Times.
In April 2019, five months after Democrats regained control of both legislative chambers and the governorship in New York, they crammed major criminal justice laws into the annual state budget.
The new laws are often called bail reform because it eliminates cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies.
For those offenses, defendants are to be released after arrest without paying any money.
Advocates pushing the changes say that cash bail punishes poverty and needs to be done away with.
Before the new law took effect, Quinn, a Queens prosecutor at the time, did some data digging to find out how many Queens defendants were locked up in New York jails solely because they couldn’t afford bail.
The number was 398 in June 2019. Among them, 41 percent were held for violent A and B felonies, 33 percent for nonviolent D and E felonies, and 7 percent for misdemeanors, according to the report.
Those held for nonviolent felonies and misdemeanors typically had long arrest records, averaging 14 and 12, respectively, based on the data in the report.
Those numbers confirmed a long-time observation of Quinn’s: New York judges had used their discretion under the old bail law to set bail on low-level offenders who had long arrest records, indirectly protecting the community from more crime.
Most other low-level offenders were released from jails.
“There is no way you could look at this rationally and think that you could release career criminals and expect no impact on crime,” Quinn said.
Early implementation of the new law started in Oct. 2019. In Jan. 2020, New York City jails held 5,809 inmates, a reduction of about 2,000 compared to the month when the law was passed.
Affected offenses include robbery, burglary, grand larceny, drug sale, and car theft.
“If I woke up one morning and found that 2,000 people had escaped from Rikers Island, I would be terrified. I cannot think of anything like that has happened in my 42 years in office,” Quinn said.
This file photo shows a barbed wire fence outside inmate housing on New York’s Rikers Island correctional facility in New York. (Bebeto Matthews/AP Photo)
By Mar. 2020, in New York City, robbery went up by 33.9 percent, burglary by 26.5 percent, grand larceny by 15.8 percent, and car theft by 68 percent, compared to a year ago, according to the report.
The year before that, between Mar. 2018 and Mar. 2019, those offenses had been decreasing.
Quinn didn’t include the months following the pandemic in the comparisons to stay clear of aberrational factors.
New York governors and lawmakers had attempted to fix the bail law twice by allowing judges to set bail on more offenses under particular conditions. The latest fix occurred in April.
However, in the real world, those extra conditions still make it hard for judges to set bail on repeat offenders, Quinn said. Plus, a large pool of offenses remains non-bailable, he said.
Since the pandemic, crime in New York has been on an upward spiral.
For the first week of August, robbery went up by 39.8 percent, burglary by 32.3 percent, grand larceny by 48.3 percent, and car theft by 42 percent, compared to the same time last year, according to data by New York Police Department.
New York lawmakers supporting the bail law often relied on a two percent figure: between Jan. 2020 and June 30, 2021, only two percent of defendants got rearrested for a new violent felony while their cases were pending.
But Quinn questions the logic behind the calculation. He said to accurately measure the impact of the bail law, the focus should be on those who would have bail set under the old law but not under the new law, not the entire defendant population, which dramatically dilutes the results.
Quinn felt his views were often ignored by state lawmakers on the bail law debate, just like city lawmakers ignored his views on closing the Rikers jail years earlier, he said.
Demonstrators call for the closing of the Rikers Island prison as they protest outside City Hall in New York, on Sept. 22, 2021. (Photo by Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images)
“The city wanted to close Rikers Island, and it became such a political issue that it really didn’t look at the actual effects. Anybody who opposed the closing of Rikers was called a racist, and that shut a lot of people up. The debate just became poisoned,” Quinn said.
“Another problem is that we lost the PR war because they have this far-fetched notion that district attorneys are these evil people who are only interested in locking people up,” Quinn added.
He said the 2019 bail law grew out of the momentum to close the Rikers jail and ramp up supervised releases in New York City, all driven by advocates under the slogan of “ending mass incarceration.”
“They created a narrative, and the narrative became true.
“The fact is that the Rikers population had been going down for years before these movements. We had a lot of services and programs that we used to keep people from going to jail,” he said.
“But there does come a point where some of these people will never help themselves unless there is a threat of them being sentenced to jail or put in jail on bail.”
“I just think it is important for people to look at this logically, and that is all I am asking for,” Quinn said.
Former President Donald Trump’s son Eric Trump revealed that FBI agents wouldn’t hand over the search warrant during their Aug. 8 raid on Mar-a-Lago and removed an attorney from the property.
“There’s 30 agents there,” he told the Daily Mail on Aug. 10 of the FBI raid. ‘They told our lawyer … you have to leave the property right now. Turn off all security cameras.
“They would not give her the search warrant. So they showed it to her from about 10 feet away. They would not give her a copy of the search warrant.”
Attorney Christina Bobb was confused as to why the FBI couldn’t present the search warrant, according to Eric Trump.
“It’s all a coordinated attack with the FBI,” he said. “Do you think that the FBI director is going to raid the former president’s house, especially a house as you know, kind of world-renowned as Mar-a-Lago … without getting the approval of President [Biden]?”
The younger Trump said security cameras weren’t turned off. FBI agents accessed areas of the property where they “shouldn’t have been,” he claimed.
The former president confirmed the FBI raid on his property on the evening of Aug. 8. Both the FBI and Department of Justice haven’t issued public comments about the matter; The Epoch Times has contacted both agencies for comment.
Unconfirmed reports and anonymous sources say the raid pertained to a Department of Justice probe into whether Donald Trump held onto government documents after he left the White House last year.
All presidential correspondence and documentation have to be handed over to the National Archives when a president leaves office, according to a 1978 law.
(L-R) Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner arrive for the funeral services of Ivana Trump in New York on July 20, 2022. (Yuki Iwamura/AFP via Getty Images)
“[The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)] had ongoing communications with the representatives of former President Trump throughout 2021, which resulted in the transfer of 15 boxes to NARA in January 2022,” David Ferriero, who served as NARA director from November 2009 until April 2022, wrote to House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) in February.
Ferriero said NARA requested that Trump representatives “continue to search for any additional Presidential records that have not been transferred to NARA, as required by the Presidential Records Act.”
But Bobb told Real America’s Voice that the raid over the documents is a “completely unnecessary power flex” and a “weird flex.”
“It’s quite honestly sad to see what they have done to our country,” she said.
Top Republicans demanded an investigation into the raid and argued that it was politically motivated to wound the Republican Party ahead of the 2022 midterms.
“The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in an Aug. 10 statement. “When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of their department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned.”
Over two years of pandemic oversight, Johnson said he’s witnessed money being put before public health
From the early days of the pandemic, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has been trying to hold U.S. public health agencies accountable on many issues, including why the agencies censored early treatment options for COVID-19, pushed vaccine mandates, and demonstrated a lack of integrity and transparency involving the vaccine data and reporting.
After conducting two years of oversight, Johnson said that the U.S. medical system has been compromised by money from Big Pharma.
“We have a corrupt medical system in this country,” Johnson said in a recent interview for NTD’s “Capitol Report” program. “From the pharmaceutical companies down to the federal health agencies through to the research centers and medical journals. It should concern every American.”
Play Video
Agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration have not freely provided the public with accurate data about the vaccine’s origin, efficacy, and adverse effects, said Johnson, and he and others conducting oversight have had to rely heavily on other countries’ data.
“We’ve had to look to either Israel or Public Health England, Public Health Scotland. Now they’re shutting down their information streams as well,” he said. “One of my biggest concerns is our federal health agencies have not been honest. They’ve not been transparent.”
He called what the CDC is doing “willful ignorance.”
Public Health Agencies Contradicting Themselves
Johnson sent a letter to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky in late July, demanding answers as to why there have been conflicting statements about the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
The Epoch Times reported that Dr. John Su, who heads the CDC’s Immunization and Safety Office, claimed that the CDC has been performing Proportional Reporting Ratio analyses on data from VAERS since February 2021. The CDC, however, told the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense that it not only did not conduct the analyses but that the method was outside of the agency’s purview.
“CDC’s assertion and Dr. Su’s statement cannot both be true,” Johnson said in the letter.
“The American people deserve the truth and you have not been providing it. That is why I, together with millions of Americans, have completely lost faith in the CDC and other federal health agencies. It is time to start regaining their confidence and your agency’s integrity by coming clean, being transparent, and telling the truth,” the letter states (pdf).
“It’s all BS,” Johnson said in the interview. “As soon as the safety signals started screaming at them through the VAER system, what do they do? They denigrated the VAER system.”
The CDC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
During the NTD interview, Johnson said he believes the health agencies don’t want to provide truthful information.
“I think, among many disappointments, one of the biggest disappointments in terms of the federal health agencies is they’re just not giving us the information, and I don’t think they really want to,” he said.
From the get-go, the vaccine mandates were “pointless, completely idiotic, and totally destructive,” Johnson said, adding that the agencies’ own data has long confirmed that vaccines do not prevent transmission or reoccurring infection.
Johnson implied that Big Pharma has had a role in pushing the vaccine mandates out of its own self-interest.
“I’ve always been supportive of the pharmaceutical industry,” because the drug companies need billions of dollars to develop new drugs that are important for improving lives, said Johnson. “But now I’ve just witnessed the capture of U.S. regulatory agencies by Big Pharma.”
Former President Donald Trump released a dramatic political video, hours after the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, in which he laments the “declining” state of America and says it’s “time to start talking about greatness for our country again.”
“We are a nation in decline … We are a nation that in many ways has become a joke,” says Trump over the ominous sounds of thunder and rain in the nearly four-minute video in which he lists the apparent failures of the Biden administration, before promising, “Soon we will have greatness again.”
Trump, who is expected to announce that he will run again for president in 2024, released the video on his Truth Social platform late Tuesday.
In the video, he says that America has the “highest inflation in over 40 years” and “highest energy cost in its history.” He adds that in the two years since Joe Biden took office, America has lost its energy independence and dominance.
“We are a nation that is begging Venezuela and Saudi Arabia for oil,” Trump says. “We are a nation that surrendered in Afghanistan, leaving behind dead soldiers and American citizens and $85 billion worth of the finest military equipment in the world.”
Trump accuses the Biden administration of allowing “Russia to devastate a country, Ukraine, killing hundreds of thousands,” and suggests that “it will only get worse.”
‘Weaponization of the Justice System’
“We are a nation that has weaponized its law enforcement against the opposing political party like never before. We’ve never seen anything like this,” Trump says in his video.
Late on Monday, Trump announced that the FBI was raiding his Palm Beach estate, Mar-a-Lago, calling it evidence of “prosecutorial misconduct” and a “weaponization of the Justice System.”
A member of the Secret Service in front of the home of former President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., on Aug. 9, 2022. (Giorgio Viera/AFP via Getty Images)
The former president said the raid wasn’t announced and that it was motivated because Democrats do not want him to run again for president in 2024.
“They detest Donald Trump, not just on the Democrat side but the general establishment, because he’s not one of them. Because he doesn’t play their game,” his daughter-in-law Lara Trump told Fox News on Tuesday.
“They are terrified he’s going to announce any day that he’s running for president in 2024. And this is a very convenient way to just throw a little more mud on Donald Trump.”
America ‘No Longer Respected’
In his video, Trump also cites the legacy media as contributing to what he says is a nation in decline, saying America “no longer has a free and fair press. Fake news is about all you get.”
Traditionally, the media acts as a guardian of the public interest and a watchdog on government activities. But Trump has in the past accused legacy outlets of being partisan and colluding with “radical left Democrats … to hide the real facts.”
“We are a nation that is allowing Iran to build a massive nuclear weapon and China to use the trillions and trillions of dollars it’s taken from the United States to build a military to rival our own,” Trump says in the video.
U.S. Air Force loadmasters and pilots assigned to the 816th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron, load people being evacuated from Afghanistan onto a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Aug. 24, 2021. (Master Sgt. Donald R. Allen/U.S. Air Force via AP)
“We are a nation that over the past years is no longer respected or listened to all around the world. We are a nation that is hostile to liberty and freedom and faith.
“We are a nation whose economy is floundering, whose stores are not stocked, whose deliveries are not coming, and whose educational system is ranked at the bottom of every list,” he says.
“We are a nation that in many ways has become a joke,” says Trump. “But soon we will have greatness again.”
‘Soon We Will Have Greatness Again’
Trump’s political video starts in black and white with only the sounds of rain and thunder underscoring it. This sequence features video representative of the Biden administration’s apparent failures, including oil fields, the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
However, the last third of the video becomes colorized and the musical score uplifting as Trump shifts to speak about his promise of America having “greatness again.”
“It was hard-working patriots like you who built this country. And it is hard-working patriots like you who are going to save our country,” Trumps says in his video.
“There is no mountain we cannot climb. There is no summit we cannot reach. There is no challenge we cannot meet. There is no victory we cannot have.
“We will not bend. We will not break. We will not yield ever, ever, ever. We will never give in, we will never give up, and we will never ever back down. We will never let you down.
“As long as we are confident and united the tyrants we’re fighting do not stand even a little chance. Because we are Americans and Americans kneel to God and God alone. And it is time to start talking about greatness for our country again,” he says.
The video ends on a black screen with the words, “The best is yet to come.”
On Tuesday, only one day after the FBI’s controversial raid of Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump’s Florida resort, federal agents seized the cellphone of Republican Congressman Scott Perry of Pennsylvania.
Perry revealed as much via a statement Tuesday.
The congressman had been traveling with his family at the time. Then, federal agents approached him, issued a warrant and requested he turn over his phone.
“This morning, while traveling with my family, three FBI agents visited me and seized my cellphone. They made no attempt to contact my lawyer, who would have made arrangements for them to have my phone if that was their wish,” Perry said via his statement, according to Fox News.
“I’m outraged — though not surprised — that the FBI under the direction of Merrick Garland’s DOJ, would seize the phone of a sitting Member of Congress.”
“My phone contains info about my legislative and political activities, and personal/private discussions with my wife, family, constituents and friends. None of this is the government’s business.”
Perry went on to connect his encounter with the FBI to Trump’s on Monday.
“As with President Trump last night, DOJ chose this unnecessary and aggressive action instead of simply contacting my attorneys. These kinds of banana republic tactics should concern every Citizen — especially considering the decision before Congress this week to hire 87,000 new IRS agents to further persecute law-abiding Citizens,” Perry said.
Although it remains unclear if the seizure is at all connected to the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago, Fox News noted that both Trump and Perry have both been targetted by the Democrat-led Jan. 6 House select committee.
The Department of Justice has yet to release a statement regarding either the seizure of Perry’s phone or the raid of Mar-a-Lago.
Regarding the raid, it is believed that FBI agents were looking for classified documents that Trump had taken with him after leaving the White House.
After news of the raid broke, conservatives and Republicans took to social media to voice their outrage.
Some supporters even went to Mar-a-Lago to support the former president.
Trump released a statement on Monday responding to the raid.
“These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump wrote in a statement on Monday.
“Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before. After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate.”
“It is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024, especially based on recent polls, and who will likewise do anything to stop Republicans and Conservatives in the upcoming Midterm Elections.”
Former Trump White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany laid out a common pattern the Justice Department has followed in dealing with those associated with former President Donald Trump.
The Fox News host argued on Tuesday’s “Outnumbered” that the DOJ now appears to be employing the same tactic against Trump himself in light of the FBI’s raid on his Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida, the previous day.
“This is very personal for somebody the FBI was, you could argue, looking at for six years,” McEnany said.
“We know about the [Steele] dossier. We know the way it was peddled. We know that there was an insurance policy, if you read Peter Strzok’s texts. So all the things President Trump was saying, this just pours fuel on that fire,” she recounted.
In August 2016, then FBI agent Strzok texted his lover then-FBI attorney Lisa Page that the bureau needed to have an “insurance policy” in case Trump got elected.
“I will say I think you can’t look at this in isolation,” McEnany said of the raid on Trump’s home, reportedly to obtain classified documents he allegedly has not turned over to the National Archives.
“I think you have to look at this in light of other Trump-related prosecutions. What I mean by that is in this case it’s the Presidential Records Act,” she argued.
McEnany cited George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley to point out the Presidential Records Act of 1978 has rarely been used for criminal prosecution.
GWU Law Professor Jonathan Turley: Biden FBI’s raid was “heavy-handed” and “unprecedented” pic.twitter.com/44eBN2xUpI
“You look at Paul Manafort who was the [2016] campaign manager for Donald Trump. It was a [Foreign Agents Registration Act] violation they pursued. FARA has been used seven times in 50 years, but it’s brought out against Paul Manafort, this despite there being rampant FARA violations: 62 percent of people admitting they report late,” McEnany, a Harvard Law School graduate, said.
The DOJ Office of Inspector General released a report in September 2016 finding that “62 percent of initial registrations were untimely.”
“And then the Logan Act, used against Michael Flynn,” McEnany said. “This is a 1799 statute that has never in the history of this country been used to successfully prosecute anyone, but it’s used as a pretext to go in and look at Michael Flynn.”
“Why are never before used statutes or rarely used statutes in those contexts being used in this manner?” she asked.
Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz argued in a Tuesday opinion piece in The Hill that if the DOJ wanted documents from Trump, prosecutors should have made the case to a grand jury to obtain a subpoena specifying the materials to be seized.
“Instead, the FBI apparently seized everything in view and will sort the documents and other material without a court’s deciding which ones are appropriately subject to Justice Department seizure,” Dershowitz wrote.
.@alandersh: “I don’t think you use search warrants and prosecutions to go after political enemies”
“Defenders of the raid argue that the search warrant was issued by a judge,” he added. “Yet every criminal defense lawyer knows that search warrants are issued routinely and less critically than candy is distributed on Halloween; judges rarely exercise real discretion or real supervision. It may be different when a president’s home is the object of the search, but only time will tell whether that was the case here.”
Dershowitz pointed out no such raids were conducted on Hillary Clinton’s or former Clinton administration national security adviser Sandy Berger’s homes, when they were accused of mishandling classified documents.
“It is true that a president or former president is not above the law — but neither should he or she be below the law. Precedents established in relation to Democrats must be equally applied to Republicans. On the face of it, this standard has not been met here,” he wrote.
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton told Fox News Tuesday, “In my view, this is a raid that will go down in infamy. The Biden administration has crossed the Rubicon in terms of attacking President Trump and their political opponents by misusing law enforcement.”
“I tell you the FBI and the Justice Department can’t be trusted and should be thoroughly reformed, and frankly, as far as I’m concerned, I don’t think they’re redeemable at this point.”
House members will be able to vote by proxy until the end of September, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) announced today, citing the COVID-19 pandemic even as cases, hospitalizations, and deaths continue to trend downward.
Proxy voting, which means that one member of the House can cast a vote on behalf on an absent member, started in May 2020, and Pelosi has extended it multiple times, citing “the public health emergency due to the novel coronavirus.” The proxy-voting period would have ended Aug. 12 had Pelosi not extended it to Sept. 26.
The pandemic did not stop Democratic users of the proxy-voting system from racking up travel expenses for their reelection campaigns. Pelosi’s fellow California Democrat, Rep. Eric Swalwell, last year voted by proxy 141 times while spending $45,000 at luxury hotels. Hawaii Democratic representative Kai Kahele voted in-person only 5 times between January and April, proxy-voting 120 times. Kansas Democratic representative Sharice Davids cited “the ongoing public health emergency” to justify skipping in-person voting as she stayed in $1,000-per-night hotels for fundraisers.
The Senate has required in-person voting throughout the pandemic. Senate Democrats last week threw out COVID safety protocols to ensure the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) has promised to end proxy voting if Republicans win control of the House in November. McCarthy said in a statement last year that proxy voting is unconstitutional.
“Although the Constitution allows Congress to write its own rules, those rules cannot violate the Constitution itself, including the requirement to actually assemble in person,” McCarthy said.
Mandela Barnes’s record to be tested as Republicans home in on anti-police rhetoric, personal issues
Mandela Barnes, a far-left Wisconsin Senate candidate bankrolled by anti-police groups, easily clinched the state’s Democratic nomination on Tuesday, after a friendly primary that effectively ended two weeks ago when his main competitor dropped out and endorsed him.
But the smooth sailing is about to end as he enters the general election against incumbent Republican senator Ron Johnson, and the Republican Party homes in on Barnes’s history as a progressive firebrand.
During the primary, Barnes’s opponents avoided attacks on his political record, including his criticism of law enforcement, far-left economic policies, and personal issues such as his tax delinquency. He also attempted to distance himself from some of the more radical policies on the left, telling the Washington Free Beacon that he doesn’t support the “defund the police” movement—even as he raked in his largest donations from Lead the Way 2022, the Working Families Party, and other anti-law-enforcement organizations.
But Johnson will almost certainly highlight Barnes’s controversial policy positions during the general election, according to Republican strategists.
“There weren’t many elbows thrown in that primary,” said Mark Graul, a Wisconsin Republican strategist. “[These issues are] going to come out over the next few months.”
Keith Gilkes, a Wisconsin Republican political consultant, predicted that Barnes will have a “very difficult time appealing statewide coming from that Democratic progressive liberal viewpoint with the voters around the state of Wisconsin outside of Dane and Milwaukee county,” the bluest areas in the state.
Barnes, who was born in Milwaukee in 1986, worked as a community organizer for Milwaukee Inner-City Congregations Allied for Hope before entering politics in 2012. He spearheaded a campaign that railed against “mass incarceration” in Wisconsin, and sought to reduce the state’s prison population by half through early release and treatment programs.
Later that year, Barnes was elected to the state assembly in a deep-blue district in Milwaukee, after ousting Democratic incumbent Jason Fields in the primary. Barnes, with backing from the state teachers’ union, argued that Fields was too conservative and campaigned against the incumbent’s support for school vouchers.
As a state legislator, Barnes backed criminal justice reform policies and sponsored a 2016 bill to abolish cash bail in the state, a position his campaign says he still supports. The bill would require Wisconsin judges to “release a defendant before trial” rather than setting monetary bail, unless the court found clear evidence that the individual would “cause serious bodily harm to a member of the community.” Prosecutors would also be prohibited from using “the nature, number, and gravity” of the charges to argue against release.
Bail reform has been a contentious issue in Wisconsin, where six people were killed and dozens injured last year at a Christmas parade in Waukesha by a repeat felon who had been released on low bail shortly before the attack.
Barnes has also taken far-left stances on economic and environmental issues. As lieutenant governor, he led a commission on climate change that proposed divesting state pension funds from fossil fuels, instituting a carbon tax, and requiring schools to teach a racially focused climate justice curriculum.
“He’s much further left than most Wisconsinites are … and I think people are going to learn that over the course of the next three months,” said Graul.
Barnes’s personal record could also be an obstacle. He has been delinquent on property taxes, and blew up at a reporter who asked about the late payments in 2019, claiming that the “check is in the mail.” He was barred from registering his car due to outstanding parking tickets in 2018, and relied on state police to chauffeur him around.
He also misrepresented his college background, claiming he received a journalism degree from Alabama A&M University in 2008. After journalists questioned this claim in 2019, he admitted that he did not graduate due to “a small technical thing” involving his failure to turn in completed coursework.
Republicans are likely to highlight Barnes’s history of controversial statements as well. He once described the U.S. founding as “awful,” citing the legacy of slavery, and was photographed holding a t-shirt reading “Abolish ICE”—a reference to the radical movement to defund Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Barnes’s viability as a general election candidate is also largely untested. His only competitive race has been a 2016 Democratic primary bid for state senate against incumbent Democrat Lena Taylor. Barnes ran to Taylor’s left, and she ended up winning the race in a blowout.
Barnes’s election as lieutenant governor was on a joint ticket with Democratic governor Tony Evers, where statewide general election voters generally pay less attention to the running mate, according to political operatives. Evers beat incumbent Republican Scott Walker in the race by one point.
“The bottom line is [Barnes has] never stood for statewide general election,” said Gilkes. “He ran in a Democratic statewide primary [for lieutenant governor in 2018], but ultimately he was under Tony Evers, which is what everybody was voting for.”
There’s reason to suspect that the FBI search of the Florida residence of former President Donald Trump was improperly intrusive, according to several lawyers. The raid prompted a rebuke from Trump and Republicans more broadly and further escalated political tensions in the nation.
About two dozen FBI agents entered Trump’s Palm Beach resort of Mar-a-Lago at about 9 a.m. on Aug. 8 and left about 10 hours later with “a handful of boxes of documents,” one of Trump’s attorneys on the scene, Christina Bobb, told Insight.
“I didn’t actually get to oversee the search, they wouldn’t let anybody see what they were doing,” she said.
It isn’t clear what legal basis the FBI had for the raid. The agents had a search warrant signed by a judge. However, the affidavit explaining the basis—its probable cause—was filed under seal, and Trump’s lawyers weren’t allowed to examine it, Bobb said.
In general, the agents were looking for “what they deemed to be presidential records,” she said.
“I don’t think there was anything of substance.”
Trump’s legal team will take steps to obtain the affidavit, according to Bobb.
There has been a dispute between the National Archives and Trump about whether he has documents that should be stored at the archives under the U.S. Presidential Records Act.
Trump has been cooperative on that front and had previously invited the FBI to Mar-a-Lago to examine the White House records he had in storage at the time, Bobb said.
“Nothing had been hidden, and nothing had been kept secret from them, which makes this all the more ridiculous,” she said.
Potentially Illegal
“I’m stunned and dismayed,” Marc Ruskin, a 27-year FBI veteran and former federal prosecutor, told Insight. “The disregard for traditional norms and apparent lack of concern with the appearance of impropriety is indicative of an abandonment of even a veneer of independence and objectivity.”
Former federal prosecutor Mike Davis went even further, saying the raid may have been illegally invasive.
“Under the case law, you can’t do a home raid if you can secure the documents through less intrusive means,” he told “Bannon’s War Room” on Aug. 9.
The FBI had to first determine that requests for the documents or even subpoenas wouldn’t be sufficient, said Davis, who formerly advised Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on judicial nominations and now heads The Article III Project.
“There’s zero evidence” that Trump wouldn’t have cooperated, he said.
“There was no allegation or evidence that he [Trump] was destroying any of this evidence or putting it into the wrong hands. This is banana republic-level tactics from the Biden Justice Department.”
Even if Trump took classified documents, he took possession of them when he was still chief executive and had the authority to declassify them, according to Davis.
Bobb suggested that the invocation of classified documents was a disingenuous attempt of “shrouding this in a national security blanket.”
“They don’t want to disclose what they’re doing, because what they’re doing is wrong. And so they want to hide it behind the premise of ‘Oh, it’s a matter of national security and classified documents, so we can’t disclose to you what we’re doing or why we’re doing it. But just trust us. We’re not lying to you,’” she said. “Well, no, the American people aren’t going to stand for that anymore.”
Even if the DOJ tried to charge Trump with withholding documents, it wouldn’t hold up because the statute in question requires a “willful” violation, and Trump would have had to have “some malicious intent” to take specific documents, according to Bobb.
“They would have to lay the foundation that Donald Trump actually packed up his own office” or ordered somebody what specifically to take, she said.
History of Missing Documents
If Trump had documents that should go to the archives, it would add him to a lineup of former government officials.
Former FBI Director James Comey took his handwritten notes when he was fired by Trump in 2017. His home wasn’t raided. He handed the notes to FBI agents who came to interview him.
The Obama administration didn’t just fail to hand over documents, tens of thousands of its documents went missing or were destroyed. No homes were raided.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton failed to hand over tens of thousands of emails and documents from her server, claiming that they were of a personal nature. The FBI was able to retrieve some of the documents, revealing that many were work-related. Moreover, the documents were under congressional subpoena at the time when a Clinton aide deleted them.
Immediate Skepticism
The raid prompted an immediate wave of skepticism, particularly because the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have a history of breaking protocol, misrepresentations, and even forging evidence in their case against Trump and members of his campaign.
“After six years of unfounded, absurd investigations of President Trump, the presumption is that any investigation of President Trump is politically motivated, and the burden of proof is on FBI/DOJ to prove otherwise,” Will Chamberlain, senior counsel at the Internet Accountability Project, wrote in an Aug. 9 Twitter post.
In 2017, the FBI and DOJ obtained two extensions of a spying warrant on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page even though the warrant was based on false or unsubstantiated allegations. The FBI later acknowledged that spying based on the extensions was illegal.
The FBI also has a history of harsh treatment of people associated with Trump. His aides have been arrested at gunpoint, handcuffed, and “perp-walked,” and their homes and offices have been raided in pursuit of trivial or nonviolent offenses, even when the targets were cooperating with the government.
Shoe on the Other Foot
The Trump raid increased the already polarized political playing field, as Republicans can now argue that home raids of former presidents are acceptable.
“They’re setting a very dangerous precedent where you can do a home raid of a former president of the United States,” Davis said, noting that such a thing has never happened “in our 250 years as a republic.”
Already, Republican lawmakers are promising to subject the DOJ and the FBI to intense scrutiny, with the expectation of reclaiming the majority in the House after the November midterms.
“When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in an Aug. 8 statement. “Attorney General Garland: preserve your documents and clear your calendar.”
Judge’s Epstein Connection
The search warrant was issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart in the Southern District of Florida. Reinhart was a senior prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida when the office reached a nonprosecution agreement with Jeffrey Epstein, who was later indicted for sex trafficking children and died by apparent suicide in a New York jail.
Upon leaving office, Reinhart went into private practice and represented multiple Epstein associates and employees in civil cases against Epstein by his alleged victims.
Reinhart was appointed a magistrate judge in 2018 by the district judges in the Southern District of Florida.
The warrant was issued on Aug. 5, the day after FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee and was questioned about multiple whistleblower reports alleging the politicization of the bureau. Wray cut the questioning short because he said he had to urgently travel. Flight records indicate he flew in the FBI private jet to his vacation retreat in the Adirondacks, according to New York Post columnist Miranda Devine.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the time around which the search of Donald Trump’s residence started. The raid started at about 9 a.m. Insight regrets the error.
Update: The article has been updated with a comment from Marc Ruskin.
Judge Bruce Reinhart – who is reportedly the most likely judge behind the warrant authorizing a raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar A Lago estate – is a former attorney who represented employees of convicted sex offender and notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, The National Pulse can reveal.
The National Pulse can also reveal that Judge Reinhart has donated to the campaigns of former President Barack Obama and to the establishment opponents of Donald J. Trump during the 2016 election, including Jeb Bush.
Politico – the news outlet closest linked to the establishment in Washington, D.C. – named Reinhart in their morning playbook e-mail on Tuesday, 9th August 2022:
POLITICO FINGERS REINHART
As reported by the Miami Herald, Judge Reinhart began representing Epstein’s employees on January 2nd, 2008, just one day after departing the U.S. Attorney’s Office where he served as an assistant U.S. attorney closely involved on the convicted pedophile’s case.
Accused of leveraging “inside information about Epstein’s investigation to curry favor with Epstein,” in 2011, he was named as a prosecutor who allegedly violated the rights of an underage girl whom Epstein solicited sex from in the Crime Victims’ Rights Act lawsuit.
Reinhart appears to have exploited his role in the U.S. Attorney’s Office to launch a private criminal defense practice, according to the Miami Herald:
“On Oct 23, 2007, as federal prosecutors in South Florida were in the midst of tense negotiations to finalize a plea deal with accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, a senior prosecutor in their office was quietly laying out plans to leave the U.S. attorney’s office after 11 years. “On that date, as emails were flying between Epstein’s lawyers and federal prosecutors, Bruce E. Reinhart, now a federal magistrate, opened a limited liability company in Florida that established what would become his new criminal defense practice.”
Reinhart insisted that he never represented Epstein himself — “only Epstein’s pilots; his scheduler, Sarah Kellen; and Nadia Marcinkova, described by some victims as Epstein’s sex slave.”
Reinhart has also participated in Newsmax interviews, appearing to defend Epstein by downplaying allegations of the financier and his associates soliciting underage prostitutes.
Reinhart donated twice to Obama’s campaign in 2008 totaling $2,000. Reinhart, who was appointed U.S. magistrate in March 2018, also donated to the campaign of Trump rival Jeb Bush in 2015.
FEC RECORDS.
The unearthed links come as Reinhart is believed to have signed off on a warrant responsible for the raid on Trump’s Palm Beach estate. A “source said FBI agents obtained a search warrant from a federal magistrate judge in West Palm Beach,” reports the Miami Herald.
Politico explained that of the three magistrate judges in that office, two recent warrant applications, both of which were assigned to Reinhart, were entered into the system on Monday. The subject of the warrants, however, remains sealed.
It would be difficult to find mainland U.S. Congressional districts much further away from each other than Washington’s 3rd District, in the far Southwest Corner of the state and Florida’s 7th District, which hugs Florida’s East Central Coast. But the swamp reaches everywhere in America, and these two districts are now inextricably linked by the shady tactics of the GOP establishment, working to defeat conservative candidates on behalf of Kevin McCarthy, alongside pro-impeachment forces and a compliant herd of RINOs they control.
McCarthy – a failed leader and an expert at talking out of both sides of his mouth – claims to be outraged about the deep state’s war against Trump and the conservative grassroots while he simultaneously works in the shadows to direct millions of dollars to anti-Trump, establishment candidates like those opposing Green Beret Joe Kent and Florida State Representative Anthony Sabatini.
Grassroots favorite Kent – Gold Star husband and recipient of six bronze stars who was endorsed by Trump in Washington’s 3rd Congressional district – thrilled grassroots Republicans by narrowly toppling pro-impeachment Republican incumbent Jamie Herrera Beutler in a huge comeback, after trailing badly on election night.
Kent triumphed despite millions of dollars of establishment money being spent to defeat him. The night he took the lead for good in the GOP primary, Kent appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show, renewing his call for a fundamental reining in of the deep state and intelligence agencies that had just conspired to raid Mar a Lago, the curbing of which he had made a centerpiece of his congressional campaign.
Even as the vote was still being counted, Kent sounded the alarm on Twitter about the same cast of characters that spent more than $4 million in dark money attempting to defeat him now targeting Sabatini, another grassroots conservative favorite who is currently leading the race in Florida’s open seat 7th Congressional district (August 23rd primary).
“The left uses dark money to seize the levers of power,” he tweeted in response to the news that a mysterious dark money firm, with the same financial backers and structure that had targeted him, was going after his friend and political ally. “Look at Soros Zuck etc. The right uses dark money against candidates who want to fight back against the left. Send @anthonysabatini whatever support you can. They are coming for him because he’s fighting for us.”
The left uses dark money to seize levers of power, look at Soros, Zuck etc, the right uses dark money against candidates who want to fight back against the left.
Kent’s victory was indeed remarkable. David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, widely considered the nation’s leading guru on redistricting and elections, described Herrera-Beutler early in the campaign as a lock to make it to the general election. Thanks to Trump and a grassroots push, she failed.
But the swamp plays for keeps , and nothing enrages them like a loss. They thought they had won in Washington State on election night, where Herrera Beutler had a large lead against Kent, only to watch it wither away over the following days as Pro-Trump election day votes were counted. The establishment had spent more than $4 million in late, dirty, DC money to attempt rescue Herrera Beutler, one third of which went directly to boost her, one third of which went to attack Kent and one third of which went to split the grassroots vote by boosting a fake alternative to Herrera Beutler who reneged on a pledge to exit the race.
Sabatini, the latest target of the establishment’s ire, is a strongly pro-Trump and pro-DeSantis America First candidate and military veteran who, like Kent, has crusaded against the nation-building wars that the GOP establishment and Democrats combine on to fleece American taxpayers. He’s been the strongest and most outspoken voice in the Florida legislature on everything from critical race theory (CRT) to immigration and has been described as the most pro-Trump member of the Florida legislature.
Sabatini has led in the public polling in the race, and the money (more than $600,000 so far, with doubtless more to come) has been timed, as it was with Kent, so that the donors do not need to disclose their names until after the primary election. Sabatini is hoping that the grassroots energy that has powered his campaign will provide him with sufficient funding to hold on against the onslaught.
In a brief interview, Sabatini encouraged patriotic conservatives to “raise the volume” of their protests against the establishment, claiming that “sunlight is the best disinfectant” and to make sure they let their friends in Florida’s 7th district know the national importance of the race.
“The war within the Republican party now determines what the GOP will do in the future, and the establishment is hiding in the shadows and playing every dirty trick in the book. The real fight is in the primary.”
Sabatini is cautiously optimistic for a late Trump endorsement (it helps that he leads in the polls and counts Trump stalwarts like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz in his corner). Florida political operatives are confident this would put him over the top—but Trump’s attention has to this point been focused on going after explicitly pro-impeachment representatives and other major Trump critics, while Sabatini’s top opponents are ciphers with no record to stand on.
“The Republican establishment wants 22 to be a referendum against America 1st. They want controlled, weak Republicans who vote as they are told.” said Joe Kent in a tweet thread late in the primary campaign.
The Republican establishment wants 22’ to be a referendum against America 1st, they want controlled weak republicans who vote as they are told.
In the last week 2.5 million has been spent against me b/c I’m leading in the polls & Beutler might not make the top 2.
Russ Vought, President Donald Trump’s former Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director, had a plan, but too little time left in 2020 to restore the bureaucracy as a neutral tool for ensuring that federal officials do what American voters want done by their government.
But Vought will be ready from the get-go when, he hopes, the next Republican Chief Executive enters the Oval Office in January 2025. If he succeeds, Vought will accomplish something that has eluded presidents of both parties since before World War I, when Woodrow Wilson turned federal civil servants from neutral implementers into unaccountable policy-making “experts.”
Wilson upended the neutral federal workforce concept established by the Templeton Act of 1888, which replaced the former “to-the-winner-goes-the-spoils” system that had been in force for a century.
Wilson wanted policy experts in the bureaucracy in whom would be vested immense independent powers to regulate American society as they thought proper. That led to an explosion of regulations, including many intended to protect the newly muscular bureaucracy from electoral accountability.
Two of Wilson’s Democratic successors—Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society—expanded the federal bureaucracy into such an unwieldy, cumbersome, and costly regulatory monster that another Democrat, President Jimmy Carter, made it one of his administration’s chief goals to gain passage of the landmark Civil Service Reform Act (CSRA) of 1978.
It fell to Carter’s successor, Republican Ronald Reagan, however, to implement the CSRA, which included multiple provisions designed to make bureaucrats more accountable for their individual performance and easier to replace poor performers.
“It worked for a few years but was fought throughout by OMB, which moderated CSRA during its legislative journey through Congress and then, afterwards, helped agency experts and allies in Congress to modify CSRA’s reforms,” Donald Devine, the former Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), who managed the CSRA implementation for Reagan, wrote recently.
“Today, we are basically back to the system Carter was elected to change—but worse, as aspects of his reforms are now forbidden by both law and regulation,” Devine continued.
That was the situation when Vought became Acting OMB Director under Trump in 2019. Having served on Capitol Hill in various Republican policy positions for two decades, Vought was already familiar with entrenched bureaucrats repeatedly undermining common sense, conservative policy directives. When the Senate confirmed him in the position the next year, Vought began taking concrete steps to address the problem.
What became known as “Schedule F” was a presidential Executive Order (EO) designed to extend application of CSRA’s basic principle of policy and performance accountability deeper into the bureaucracy by giving the president’s appointees throughout the departments and agencies more flexibility to replace recalcitrant bureaucrats in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating” positions.
But there were so many fires to put out during the Trump era, that Vought was only able to implement his plan starting 13 days before the 2020 election, and then only within OMB where he reclassified an estimated 90 percent of the agency’s employees.
“We had been working on it for about two years and we were really trying to think through when we do it,” Vought told The Epoch Times in an interview. James Sherk, a Trump domestic policy adviser and former Heritage Foundation analyst, is credited with the original concept for Schedule F.
“A lot of my effort was to help get it across the finish line and then to show that an agency head was willing to use it, and then set down a marker that we would indeed do it in a second [Trump] term,” Vought said.
One of Joe Biden’s first acts in office after defeating Trump in the still-contested 2020 presidential election was to repeal the Schedule F EO. Since then, Vought founded the Center for Renewing America, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt think tank discretely devoted to researching the case for and laying out policy frameworks for the continuation of the “America First” reforms first advanced by Trump.
That continuation could be carried out either by a resurgent Trump or by another of the GOP’s potential alternative presidential candidates such as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, or former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.
But a July 22 Axios story—”A Radical Plan for Trump’s Second Term” by Jonathan Swan—renewed worries throughout the Washington establishment that Schedule F will be among the top items on the policy agenda of any GOP president seeking to make significant headway toward reforming the Washington swamp.
One detail that gained particular notice was Swan quoting an unnamed source who estimated that full-scale implementation of Schedule F could affect as many as 50,000 civil service positions.
There are approximately 2.1 million civilian federal employees, but only about 9,000—or 0.43 percent of the total—of those positions are at-will, political appointees of a president. Assuming Swan’s 50,000 figure is accurate, it would still mean only 2.4 percent of the total workforce would be subject to Schedule F.
“I think any time you are setting policy within an agency, think about your entire regulatory departments, think of all those general counsels, and it’s not just the general counsels but those massive legal departments,” Vought said when asked to describe the kinds of positions that would be subject to Schedule F.
“I think it would be pretty sizable, given how many people you have working on policy these days in the agencies,” Vought added.
Under the Trump EO, the ultimate decision on whether to reclassify a career position to Schedule F status would be made by the OPM Director, a fact that would substantially elevate the importance of that presently obscure agency.
Vought has no illusions about the difficulties a future president will face if he or she attempts another run at Schedule F implementation.
Democrats in Congress who receive the overwhelming majority federal employee union political donations are already rallying against the possibility of a Schedule F renewal. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest such labor group, gave more than 94 percent of its contributions to Democrats in 2020, continuing a trend that has held for decades.
In the House of Representatives, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) whose district is made up almost exclusively of government employees and contractors, authored a provision adopted by the lower chamber to prevent implementation of Schedule F.
In the upper chamber of Congress, Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner of Virginia, and Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, plus Senators Diane Feinstein and Alex Padilla of California, are co-sponsoring the Connolly provision.
The mainstream news media inaccurately portrayed Trump’s Schedule F effort as an attempt to return to the old “Spoils System” that was abolished in 1888. Typical was an Oct. 23, 2020, Washington Post story headlined “Trump’s Historic Assault on the Civil Service Was Four Years in the Making.” In fact, Schedule F is based on the CSRA that was conceived and signed into law by a Democratic president, then implemented by a Republican chief executive.
Vought is confident as long as a GOP presidential aspirant makes reforming the federal bureaucracy a national issue, the Schedule F plan will go forward.
“How would they not? The only reason it wouldn’t be used is because no one would have wanted to take on the [opposition] forces, but in some respects that balloon has already been punctured,” he said.
“When you nationalize the issue heading into a presidential election, it makes it so this is part of the base of policy expectations in a way that it is not when someone just has a good policy idea and you’re trying to figure is this a good idea and will it sustain itself,” he added.
“They’re looking for presidential records, what they deemed to be presidential records, and anything that could potentially be classified,” Christina Bobb, the lawyer, told The Epoch Times on Aug. 9.
“We had been very cooperative with them before. And it’s unclear to me why they went to such drastic measures to do this. But they did. And as far as the probable cause goes, they wouldn’t give that to us,” she added.
In mid-January, the National Archives and Records Administration arranged for the transport from Mar-a-Lago to the National Archives 15 boxes that the archives said contained presidential records. Under the Presidential Records Act, the records should have been transferred in January 2021 as Trump left office, and some of the boxes contained classified information, the institution said in a statement at the time. The administration did not return an inquiry on Tuesday.
Approximately two dozen FBI agents arrived around 9 a.m. on Monday morning and remained at Mar-a-Lago, which is in West Palm Beach, for about 10 hours.
Agents initially resisted showing Bobb the warrant but ultimately did. But the agents would not allow any representatives of the former president to oversee the search, Bobb said. The justification for the search also remains under seal. Trump’s legal team plans on asking the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida to unseal the search warrant affidavit, which would outline why authorities asked for the warrant.
“We don’t know what the probable cause is. I don’t think there is a good cause to do such a drastic thing. But they did,” Bobb said.
The FBI has declined to comment. The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have not returned requests for comment. The White House has said the DOJ is independent and that Joe Biden and others in the White House were not notified of the raid ahead of time.
‘Peaceful’
Agents kept Mar-a-Lago neat while they were searching for documents, with one even picking up trash, according to Bobb. The agents “took a handful of boxes of documents,” she said.
“I don’t think that there was anything incriminating. I don’t think there was anything of substance. So I’m sure that they will say otherwise. But we’ll have to wait and see what they come up with, but it was all paper. I hear the conspiracy theories and the rumors that there were other artifacts or something taken—it was all paper,” she said.
Agents previously visited the resort in June, and were given access to a storage facility there, according to Bobb. “Nothing had been hidden and nothing had been kept secret from them, which makes this all more all the more ridiculous,” she said.
“Donald Trump didn’t commit a crime,” Bobb said, adding that prosecutors would not be able to show that Donald Trump knew about the boxes the FBI took.
“They would have to lay the foundation that Donald Trump actually packed up his own office, and Donald Trump was actually the custodian of these records, and that he actually moved them,” she said.
If the DOJ decides to press charges against Trump, then the effort would not get very far, she predicted.
“I just don’t see it making a bit of difference. I think President Trump is going to most likely run for reelection,” she said. “I can’t wait until he does. And he will be the next President of the United States.”
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other GOP leaders have responded to an FBI search of the 45th President’s Florida Mar-a-Lago home after former president Donald Trump said it was “currently under siege, raided, and occupied” on Aug. 8.
Decrying the alleged raid in a post on his social media app, Truth Social, Trump said, “these are dark times for our Nation.”
“After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate,” he said.
Taking to Twitter following Trump’s post, Republican leaders condemned the alleged raid, with several warning that such a move could set a dangerous precedent, while others accused the Biden administration of weaponizing the Justice Department for political purposes.
Pompeo, the former secretary of state under Trump, said that executing a warrant against a former president of the United States was a “dangerous” precedent to set.
“The apparent political weaponization of DOJ/FBI is shameful. AG must explain why 250 yrs of practice was upended with this raid,” Pompeo wrote. “I served on Benghazi Com where we proved Hilliary (sic) possessed classified info. We didn’t raid her home.”
A car passes in front of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., on Feb. 11, 2022. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
The raid is mostly likely connected to an investigation regarding Trump’s handling of official papers. His lawyer, Christina Bobb, confirmed with CNN on Monday night that the FBI had seized documents during their search at his Mar-a-Lago home.
The FBI is directed by Christopher Wray who was appointed by Trump.
‘Banana Republic’
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the raid of Trump’s home represents “another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents,” while noting that people like Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden “get treated with kid gloves.”
Hunter Biden is currently under federal investigation for alleged tax fraud, lobbying crimes, and money laundering in a probe dating back to as early as 2018.
“Now the Regime is getting another 87k IRS agents to wield against its adversaries? Banana Republic,” DeSantis said.
Elsewhere, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) noted on Twitter that the midterm elections aren’t far off. Trump has hinted that he will run for president again in 2024, and teased last week that he could make an official announcement soon, either before or after the November elections.
“Time will tell regarding this most recent investigation. However, launching such an investigation of a former President this close to an election is beyond problematic,” Graham wrote.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) questioned why the FBI had declined to raid the homes of previous administrations, including the Clintons and Obama.
“Bill and Hillary Clinton took $28,000 worth of furnishings from the White House. Obama violated the Presidential Records Act. Why did the FBI not raid their houses? This is a political witch hunt to take down President Trump,” the GOP lawmaker said.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump address guests at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Jan. 20, 2021. (ALEX EDELMAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Kevin McCarthy, the Republican minority leader in the House, said in a statement that the justice department had reached “an intolerable state of weaponized politicization” and vowed that, when Republicans take back the House, they will “conduct immediate oversight of the department, follow the facts and leave no stone unturned.”
“Attorney General Garland: preserve your documents and clear your calendar,” he added.
‘Start With Hunter Biden’s Laptop’
Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) also said on Twitter that the FBI raid on Trump’s home was “unprecedented and highly concerning,” and that “if the FBI is looking for classified info or incriminating evidence, they should start with Hunter Biden’s laptop.” He added the hashtag “#Demdoublestandard.”
Meanwhile, Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, said: “Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Countless times we have examples of Democrats flouting the law and abusing power with no recourse.”
“Democrats continually weaponize the bureaucracy against Republicans. This raid is outrageous. This abuse of power must stop and the only way to do that is to elect Republicans in November,” McDaniel added.
The FBI has declined to comment to The Epoch Times on the alleged raid.
While GOP lawmakers condemned the move, the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump PAC, alleged in a statement that the raid is a “positive sign that Donald Trump may be brought to justice for the myriad of criminal offenses committed by him and his family while President.”
“Never before has a former President’s home been raided in a criminal probe. While this search warrant is seemingly for the mishandling of classified material, it is a serious crime that must be fully investigated,” the group said, adding that the raid is the “first step for law enforcement, or Congress, of holding Donald Trump accountable for the orchestration of a conspiracy to remain in power that resulted in the January 6th attack on our nation’s capital.”
Trump expressed anger at the move, alleging in his Monday statement that it was part of the “political persecution” that has been targeting him now for years “with the now fully debunked Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment Hoax #2, and so much more, it just never ends. It is political targeting at the highest level!” he wrote.
“Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries,” Trump added. “Sadly, America has now become one of those countries, corrupt at a level not seen before.”
Dem donor Lauri Strauss is behind debate that will allow Dem candidate to debate empty podium
A Joe Biden donor is the organizer behind a U.S. Senate debate in Georgia that will allow Democratic senator Raphael Warnock to symbolically debate an empty podium after Republican challenger Herschel Walker turned down the invitation.
Atlanta Press Club director Lauri Strauss, who is organizing the debate, and at least three other members of the group’s board have donated thousands to Democrats, including Biden, Georgia Democratic senator Jon Ossoff—and Warnock himself.
Strauss in 2020 donated $173 to Biden and $35 to Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), according to campaign finance records. Strauss is the organizer of the press club debate and personally extended the group’s invitation to Walker, according to an email obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
“Mr. Walker’s opponent has confirmed his participation in our debate, and we hope to have your confirmation as well,” wrote Strauss in a June 21 email to Walker’s campaign. “I look forward to hearing back from you.”
News of the donations comes after Walker declined to attend the debate, citing political bias at the Atlanta Press Club. The contributions could fuel criticism of the organization, which has said it will allow Warnock at the Oct. 16 event to debate with an empty podium symbolizing Walker’s absence. If one candidate does not show up, having the other candidate debate an empty podium is a long-standing policy for the APC.
Walker’s campaign has agreed to participate in a different debate hosted by Nexstar Media Group on Oct. 14, which Warnock declined.
“We’re not going to be bullied by their thinly veiled threat of an empty podium—because it’s not a podium, it’s a campaign prop. So we’re leaving the elite media behind and rejecting the partisan Press Club debate,” said Scott Paradise, Walker’s campaign manager, in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon.
Other members of the Atlanta Press Club’s board also appear to be Democratic donors, according to campaign finance records. Keith Pepper in 2020 donated over $2,500 to Warnock and over $500 to Ossoff. Rene Alegria donated $500 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, $250 to Biden, and $60 to Ossoff. Deisha Barnett donated $500 to Warnock.
The Atlanta Press Club did not respond to a request for comment.
Strauss told the Free Beacon that she “made donations to Joe Biden and Mark Kelly in 2020, both of whom are longtime family friends.” But she said she has not contributed to any Georgia candidates and added that the other board members “do not have anything to do with our debates.”
She also said the Atlanta Press Club is “proud of our reputation [for] holding balanced and fair debates for all candidates” for the past 30 years and said the debate series was funded by an endowment from the late Charlie Loudermilk, a Republican philanthropist who passed away last week.
Former Georgia congressman and House speaker Newt Gingrich, a surrogate for Walker, told the Free Beacon the donations are an indication of the group’s political slant.
“Herschel Walker is exactly right to reject the Atlanta Press Club debate proposal as many of its leadership donated to Democrats, including radical-left Senator Warnock,” said Gingrich. “They are a one-sided, biased organization. Walker should continue to insist on open fair debates in front of Georgians. Let Warnock hide behind his liberal media supporters.”
Florida Democrat Charlie Crist hired Jack Cocchiarella after college Dems chapter ousted young activist over troubling allegations
Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s (R.) top Democratic opponent paid thousands of dollars to a young liberal activist who is facing “campus-wide allegations of sexual assault” at his former Ivy League school.
On July 8, Democrat Charlie Crist’s gubernatorial campaign paid $2,250 to Politically Correct Strategies—a consulting company registered to Gen Z liberal activist and former Dartmouth student Jack Cocchiarella—for “digital consulting.” Just weeks later, on July 28, the prestigious school’s College Democrats chapter revealed it ousted Cocchiarella from the club “in late October 2021, following campus-wide allegations of sexual assault.” Those allegations emerged publicly in a string of December 2021 Redditposts, which accused Cocchiarella of using “his Twitter notoriety and left-wing credentials to position himself as an ally. Then, once people let their guards down, he rapes them.”
Crist, who did not return repeated requests for comment, has remained silent on the accusations facing his campaign aide. By his own logic, that silence means he endorses Cocchiarella’s alleged behavior—in a June 29 tweet, Crist pressed DeSantis to condemn the January 6 riots, writing, “Is it just me, or do you agree that his silence = endorsement?”
Crist is not the only prominent Democrat to hire Cocchiarella following the troubling allegations. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R., Ga.) Democratic opponent, Marcus Flowers, has paid Cocchiarella’s firm more than $40,000 since October 2021, when the activist announced his “new role” as Flowers’s digital director.
Flowers has his own alleged issues with women. In July 2016, the Democrat attempted to dump his ex-wife—Russian national Svetlana Chudinova—at a local homeless shelter, court documents reported by the New Republic show. Flowers did not dispute the incident and instead defended his attempt to offload Chudinova, saying he “felt she had a personality disorder that was not previously disclosed.” In turn, Chudinova accused Flowers of threatening to strike her.
Flowers’s campaign did not return multiple requests for comment.
Cocchiarella, whose Twitter account boasts more than 250,000 followers and includes a photo of the activist smiling alongside Joe Biden, enrolled as a Dartmouth freshman during the 2021-22 school year. While it’s unclear what specific “digital consulting” services he provided Crist, Cocchiarella publicly endorsed the former governor over fellow DeSantis challenger Nikki Fried (D.) just days after Crist’s campaign paid him.
Flowers, meanwhile, routinely replies to Cocchiarella’s tweets to solicit campaign contributions. In October 2021, he called the young activist “an outstanding young man.” In addition to his work with Crist and Flowers, Cocchiarella has collaborated with the Lincoln Project, an anti-Republican super PAC founded by disgraced sexual predator John Weaver.
Cocchiarella reduced his public presence as allegations against him swirled. A notoriously avid Twitter user, Cocchiarella did not send an original tweet for more than a week after Dartmouth College Democrats confirmed the “campus-wide allegations,” instead opting to populate his feed by sharing posts from liberal politicians and journalists. The activist has also blocked users who raised the allegations in his replies.
Cocchiarella during an Aug. 1 podcast appearance did, however, confirm his decision to transfer from Dartmouth to fellow Ivy League school Columbia. The activist did not discuss why he opted to leave Dartmouth after just one year at the college and is yet to publicly address the allegations leveled against him.
Cocchiarella, Dartmouth College Democrats, and Dartmouth’s Title IX office did not return requests for comment.
Kirsten Engel’s support for leftist groups could alienate voters
An Arizona Democrat hoping to flip a Republican-held House seat promoted the radical immigration group whose members chased Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) into a bathroom, among other left-wing activists.
Kirsten Engel, a law professor at the University of Arizona, raved about her meeting with Living United for Change in Arizona, praising the pro-immigration group’s “efforts to help register voters.” Activists with the pro-immigration group stalked and filmed Sinema in a bathroom last year in protest over her opposition to a $3.5 trillion spending bill. The group has also called for called for the Phoenix city council to defund the city’s police department.
This was only the latest instance where Engel boosted radical progressive groups. As a state senator in 2020, Engel urged Democrats to “consider donating to, getting involved with, and learning from” several left-wing organizations to advance the Black Lives Matter cause, including the Minnesota Freedom Fund and Showing Up For Racial Justice.
The Freedom Fund has come under scrutiny for posting bail for violent criminals, including a domestic abuser later charged with murder. Showing Up For Racial Justice, a coalition of white civil rights activists, publishes a “defund the police toolkit” and supports other drastic reforms to the criminal justice system. Engel said in support of the groups that it was up to “white Americans” to “commit ourselves to unlearning the racism all around us so we can dismantle it in our institutions.”
Engel’s support for the anti-police groups could complicate Democrats’ efforts to flip Arizona’s Sixth Congressional District, a seat that is crucial to maintaining majority control of the House. Engel, who left the state senate last year, will face Republican nominee Juan Ciscomani in November’s general election. Rep. David Schweikert (R.), who currently represents the sixth district, is running in Arizona’s first district after the state’s congressional maps were redrawn.
Engel, who touts her criminal justice reform efforts on the campaign trail, endorsed the Minnesota Freedom Fund and Showing Up For Racial Justice in a June 2020 call-to-action decrying “state-sponsored violence” in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death.
“The broader public is finally becoming aware of the racist violence at the hands of law enforcement that has been so devastating to our brothers and sisters in the Black community,” wrote Engel.
The Minnesota Freedom Fund raised tens of millions of dollars in donations thanks to the help of Democrats like Engel and Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris called on her followers to “chip in now” to contribute to the fund in order to pay for bail for protesters arrested at anti-police protests. Christina Bohannan, the Democratic nominee for a House seat in Iowa, also solicited contributions for the Freedom Fund, the Washington Free Beaconreported.
The Freedom Fund paid the bail for relatively few protesters, and instead used most of its money to free inmates arrested on other charges. The fund helped free a domestic abuser, George Howard, who was later arrested on murder charges in a road rage incident. Another bail recipient, Timothy Wayne Columbus, was freed while in jail on charges of sexually molesting an 8-year-old girl.
Engel’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
