Whistleblower: FBI Manipulating J6 Cases to Support Biden Narrative of a National Crisis of Extremism

Whistleblower: FBI Manipulating J6 Cases to Support Biden Narrative of a National Crisis of Extremism

BY MATT MARGOLIS   

(AP Photo/Cliff Owen, File)

According to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, an FBI whistleblower has come forward with information about how the FBI is manipulating cases related to the Capitol riot to create “the illusion” that domestic violent extremism is a pervasive problem in the United States.

Just The News reports that Jordan wrote a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray stating that “the ‘manipulative case-file practice’ was being conducted by the bureau’s Washington field office, which was instructing local FBI offices to open up cases on their books that were in fact simply related to the Capitol breach.”

Jordan wrote, “The FBI’s case categorization creates the illusion that threats from [domestic violent extremism] are present in jurisdictions across the nation, when in reality they all stem from the same related investigation concerning the actions at the Capitol on January 6.”

“Such an artificial case categorization scheme allows FBI leadership to misleadingly point to ‘significant’ increases in DVE threats nationwide,” Jordan added.

Jordan says that the whistleblower’s claims are “consistent with disclosures we have received from other whistleblowers that high-ranking FBI officials — including a senior WFO [Washington Field Office] official — are pressing front-line agents to categorize cases as DVE [domestic violent extremism] matters to fit a political narrative.”

The false narrative that the FBI is attempting to create curiously aligns with the narrative being pushed by the Biden administration. Earlier this month, Biden delivered a primetime speech warning about the threat posed by “MAGA Republicans” — whom he called a threat to our democracy.

In order to create the illusion that domestic violent extremism is a bigger problem than it really is, the FBI is also diverting resources away from investigations of other crimes.

“The whistleblower disclosed that the FBI is sacrificing its other important federal law-enforcement duties to pursue January 6 investigations,” Jordan wrote. “The whistleblower recalled, for example, being told that child sexual abuse material investigations were no longer an FBI priority and should be referred to local law enforcement agencies.

The politicization of the FBI by Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland has already come under scrutiny in the way of the raid on Mar-a-Lago last month. Based on this latest whistleblower revelation, it’s clear that the politicization and weaponization of the FBI are even worse than we thought.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/09/20/whistleblower-fbi-manipulating-j6-cases-to-support-biden-narrative-of-a-national-crisis-of-extremism-n1630716

Logos of the Big Tech giants are displayed on a tablet on Oct. 1, 2019. (Denis Charlet/AFP via Getty Images)

MEDIA & BIG TECH

Court Rules Against Social Media Companies in Free Speech Censorship Fight

'We reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say'

By Tom Ozimek

 

0:003:11

A federal appeals court in New Orleans has ruled in favor of a Texas law that seeks to rein in the power of social media companies like Facebook and Twitter to censor free speech.

The decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans (pdf), handed down on Sept. 16, upholds the constitutionality of a Texas law signed by Gov. Greg Abbott last year and delivers a victory to Republicans in their fight against big tech censorship of conservative viewpoints.

“Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say,” U.S. Circuit Court Judge Andrew Oldham wrote in the opinion.

“Because the district court held otherwise, we reverse its injunction and remand for further proceedings,” Oldham added, setting the stage for a showdown in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Groups Sue

After the law, known as House Bill 20, was passed last year, NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) sued.

The groups argued in their lawsuit that private companies like Facebook and Twitter have a First Amendment right to moderate content that’s posted on their platforms and decide on what forms of speech to allow or ban.

“The Act tramples the First Amendment by allowing the government to force private businesses to host speech they don’t want to,” NetChoice said in a statement. The groups also argued that the Texas law not only does not prevent censorship but allows Texas to “police and control speech online, overriding the First Amendment rights of online businesses.”

A lower court sided with the lawsuit and decided to block the law, with Friday’s ruling by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals overturning that decision.

“The platforms argue that buried somewhere in the person’s enumerated right to free speech lies a corporation’s unenumerated right to muzzle speech,” Oldham wrote in the opinion.

He said the implications of the big tech platforms’ argument are “staggering” as they would allow entities like social media companies, banks, and mobile phone companies to cancel the accounts of people who express views or spend money in support of political parties or views such corporations oppose.

Oldham also said that the protections sought by platforms in challenging the Texas law would allow them to win a dominant market position by attracting users with misleadings claim of being champions of free speech but later cracking down on expression.

‘Massive Victory’ for Free Speech

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has been a staunch backer of the law, hailed the court’s decision in a statement on social media.

“I just secured a MASSIVE victory for the constitution & Free speech in fed court #BigTech CANNOT censor the political voices of ANY texan!” he wrote on Twitter.

Carl Szabo, NetChoice vice president and general counsel, issued a statement expressing disappointment in the appeals court’s ruling.

“We remain convinced that when the U.S. Supreme Court hears one of our cases, it will uphold the First Amendment rights of websites, platforms, and apps,” Szabo said.

CCIA issued a statement saying that the 5th Court of Appeals’ ruling infringes on private companies’ First Amendment rights.

“‘God Bless America’ and ‘Death to America’ are both viewpoints, and it is unwise and unconstitutional for the State of Texas to compel a private business to treat those the same,” Matt Schruers, CCIA president, said in a statement.

An appeal of Friday’s decision could put the issue before the U.S. Supreme Court, where conservatives have a majority.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/court-rules-against-social-media-companies-in-free-speech-censorship-fight_4737140.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-09-17-3&utm_medium=email&est=sVB5ITGkb8YRU3TLUT2oT44c8%2FQusgq0amXH6m9Kbrfd3iwEqwYtQed8%2BHaV

DOJ escalates Jan. 6 probe, targets Trump allies ahead of midterms

DOJ escalates Jan. 6 probe, targets Trump allies ahead of midterms

"I am happy to see that more holistic strategy apparently at work," said Andrew Weissmann, a key member of the special counsel team that investigated since-debunked allegations of Trump-Russia collusion.

By Aaron Kliegman

The Justice Department's accelerating Jan. 6 investigation has expanded far beyond its original focus on the Capitol breach to target those who questioned the 2020 presidential election, focusing on former President Donald Trump and his associates — just two months before Election Day as President Biden spearheads a political offensive vilifying opposition party leaders and voters alike as threats to democracy.

Over the past week, the department has subpoenaed several Trump associates as part of an ongoing probe that critics describe as an intimidation campaign meant to instill fear in Trump supporters.

According to the New York Times, about 40 subpoenas have been issued seeking information about the 2020 election and Capitol riot. Among those subpoenaed were top Trump advisers Boris Epshteyn and Mike Roman, who reportedly had their phones seized as evidence.

Many other Trump aides and confidantes close to the 45th president both in and out of the White House were also subpoenaed, including Dan Scavino, his former social media director.

Stephen Miller and Brian Jack, two top White House advisers under Trump, have also been subpoenaed, as has Trump adviser William Russell.

Others to be served by federal prosecutors reportedly included the Trump 2020 campaign's chief financial officer Sean Dollman and first daughter Ivanka Trump's chief of staff Julie Radford, among several others.

Many of the subpoenas seek information about plans to block or delay Congress's certification of Biden's victory in the 2020 election by submitting slates of electors pledged to Trump from swing states that Biden won.

Other subpoenas relate to a new interest of the government's investigation: Trump's fundraising efforts between the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.

Specifically, the government is looking into the Trump-aligned Save America PAC, which was formed soon after Election Day in 2020 and received a wave of donations while pushing Trump's claims that the vote was stolen.

Since its inception, the PAC has brought in more than $135 million, including transfers from affiliated committees, and spent just $36 million, leaving it with about $99 million in cash on hand at the end of July, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

The subpoenas came days after Biden attacked Trump and supporters of the Make America Great Again movement aligned with him as threats to the country in a polarizing speech delivered in Philadelphia. The timing is not a coincidence, according to Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich.

"It should surprise no one that days after Biden declared Trump supporters a 'threat' to democracy, his admin goes after those very same supporters & Save America PAC, which is committed to Make America Great Again," Budowich tweeted last week. "Biden is using government to divide & destroy this nation."

Critics and legal experts have decried the latest escalation in the government's probe as a political witch hunt casting too wide a net.

"The Department of Justice is conducting an unprecedented investigation into the political activities of one of the two major parties," said Michael Columbo, a lawyer representing some of the individuals being investigated by the department. "It is zealously including in its expansive dragnet people that range from top government officials, campaign staff, party officials, and attorneys to ordinary citizens. Moreover, it is scrutinizing a range of actions that run from objective acts of violence or vandalism to an individual's subjective political beliefs at the time they engaged in political speech."

Columbo, a partner at the Dhillon Law Group, added that by probing actions protected by the Constitution such as freedom of speech and assembly, the Justice Department will overreach.

"An investigation of this breadth and intensity into activity at the core of constitutional protections will almost inevitably produce excesses and outrages," he said. "The risk is all the more acute because the DOJ's culture and practices reflect a mission typically targeting violent criminal enterprises, terrorists, and fraudsters — and partisan members of Congress desperate to influence votes in the impending election have been goading it to be more aggressive."

Just the News has previously reported on growing outcry among legal experts and civil libertarians over what they described as the Justice Department's strong-arm tactics targeting Trump allies and critics of the Biden administration. Many of the incidents under scrutiny were related to the Jan. 6 probe.

"Law enforcement seems to be using arrest tactics on Trump supporters that are generally reserved for violent and/or fleeing suspects," renowned civil liberties lawyer Alan Dershowitz said at the time. "They do not seem justified in many of these cases."

Dershowitz recently told Just the News that Trump critics both in and out of government are "stretching the law" in order to "get" the former president and see him criminally charged as part of the Jan. 6 investigation.

The Justice Department didn't respond to a request for comment for this story.

The latest wave of subpoenas appears to represent a strategic shift for the Justice Department, which for months had focused on investigating, arresting, and charging protesters who were on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6.

The Justice Department has arrested nearly 900 people for charges related to Jan. 6, imprisoning most without a trial. Several have said the FBI, Justice Department, and federal prison officials under the Biden administration violated their civil and constitutional rights. The vast majority weren't accused of carrying a weapon, assaulting law enforcement, or destroying property. Many didn't even enter the Capitol building.

Amid these arrests, some observers argued the Justice Department had the wrong approach — most notably Andrew Weissmann, a former top Justice Department official and senior prosecutor in the Trump-Russia investigation.

Weissmann criticized the Justice Department for adopting a "bottom-up" criminal investigation by focusing primarily on Jan. 6 protesters rather than Trump and his top allies.

"A myopic focus on the Jan. 6 riot," wrote Weissmann, "is not the way to proceed if you are trying to follow the facts where they lead and to hold people 'at any level' criminally accountable, as Attorney General Merrick Garland promised."

Weissmann argued the Democrat-led House committee investigating Jan. 6 has presented evidence at a series of recent hearings that should "transform" the Justice Department's probe.

"The evidence gathered in the hearings describes a multiprong conspiracy — what prosecutors term a hub and spoke conspiracy — in which the Ellipse speech by President Trump and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol were just one 'spoke' of a grander scheme" to cause an insurrection by overturning the results of the 2020 election, said Weissmann.

The country will "be a banana republic if we ignore an illegal coup by a former president," Weissmann added on Twitter.

Just the News asked Weissmann whether he thinks he pushed the Justice Department to shift the focus of its investigation.

"I really could not say if I or others had an effect on DOJ or caused folks there to rethink the strategy," he told Just the News. "Whatever the cause, I am happy to see that more holistic strategy apparently at work."

Whatever the direction of the probe, the 2020 election and Capitol riot aren't going away ahead of the midterm elections, as House Democrats' Jan. 6 committee gears up to resume its public hearings as Congress returns from its August recess.

Over the roughly six-week recess, committee members reportedly interviewed witnesses and tried to get cooperation from others, including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and former Vice President Mike Pence.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/all-things-trump/doj-escalates-jan-6-probe-targets-trump-allies-ahead-midterms?utm_source=referral&utm_medium=offthepress&utm_campaign=home

The DoJ Argues that the Intelligence Community Overrides the Judiciary

The DoJ Argues that the Intelligence Community Overrides the Judiciary

By Clarice Feldman

At this point in time I have no regard for the probity or competence of the Intelligence Community and neither, apparently, does Judge Aileen Cannon, who earlier this week ordered the appointment of a Special Master to review those documents seized in the Mar-a-Lago raid, which it claims are classified. The Department of Justice appears to have been surprised that it has lost credibility and filed a motion seeking a stay on that portion of the order and a Notice of Appeal to the Eleventh Circuit indicating its intention to file an interlocutory appeal.

I don’t think the trial judge who issued a very well-considered order will grant the stay. I don’t think the Eleventh Circuit will, either. I don’t think the Eleventh Circuit will even grant an interlocutory appeal on this matter. I do think all of these pleadings reveal the weakness of the grounds for a search and seizure of materials at the home of Donald J. Trump, the overreach of the warrant, and the expansive search itself. Worse for the DoJ and FBI, I believe their actions amount to a claim that under no circumstances does the judiciary have a right to question anything the Intelligence committee does as long as it makes a claim of “national security.” Such a claim is scary and should be -- and I think will be -- denied.

Without going into all the fine points of what it means to say a trial court order is an interlocutory order, basically it means that the order is not a final one. In this case, it is merely an order covering discovery matters in a trial. As Seth Barrett Tillman tweeted, ”The government has not been forced to return any materials, and no privilege rulings have been made for which to take an appeal.” He also gives an example of such an interlocutory, unappealable action by a trial court: He notes that J. Messitte refused to decide Trump’s motion to dismiss the Emoluments Clauses case and sat on it for three years until after the election when he dismissed it as moot after Trump lost.

Why is the DoJ so desperate to prevent a Special Master, even one with security clearance, to view those documents the department asserts are classified? (The parties each have offered two candidates for the position, one of Trump’s candidates, in fact, sat on the FISA court. Is he less certain to do this job properly than the National Archivist?) There are several possible explanations for the desperation I can think of -- none of which do credit to the attorney general. The first and most common supposition is that the documents which they claim must be kept even from the eyes of the Special Master relate to the FBI and DoJ’s role in fashioning and perpetrating the phony Russian Collusion fairytale. That would be damning indeed, and frankly, I see it as the most likely explanation: It is improper to classify documents simply to prevent embarrassment to persons or agencies. And anyone who does this is subject to sanctions. Obama’s Executive Order 13526 reads in relevant part:

Sec. 1.7. Classification Prohibitions and Limitations. (a) In no case shall
information be classified, continue to be maintained as classified, or fail
to be declassified in order to:

(1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error;
(2) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency;
(3) restrain competition; or
(4) prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security.

Despite leaking staged photos of the fruits of the search, along with claims that it involved “nuclear” information, in the latest pleading it’s revealed that the searchers seized copious amounts of news clippings, some clothing, passports, personal tax records and material clearly covered by attorney-client privilege. In other words, the agents seem to have viewed this is a general warrant to grab everything, something not permitted. The only “nuclear” thing mentioned is some document about the nuclear capacity of a foreign government -- hardly the nuclear code which had been bruited about by some media lackeys.

I think the delay rankles and disturbs DoJ as much as the likelihood that a Special Master will find the “classified” information was legally declassified by Trump and had been improperly classified in the first instance to protect those who engaged in this wrongful smear of a political candidate.

This, the second of my suppositions is related to the Hail Mary effort to stay the portion of the order which temporarily enjoins the government (pending completion of the Special Master’s review or further court order) from reviewing and using the seized materials for investigative purposes. The warrant was issued before the grand jury in D.C. even received or reviewed the 15 boxes of documents Trump turned over to the government. This suggests the department was eager to use whatever they could hose up at Mar-a-Lago before a further examination of the legality of their actions could be done -- and not coincidentally -- in time to affect the midterms.

In the meantime, the department yet again has been engaged in a leak to poison public opinion and any potential jury trial.

The feds continued to leak like crazy after the order, in a form of lashing out, getting the word out to The Washington Post that some of the documents related to a foreign government’s nuclear program (the leak didn’t say that such documents were classified). For years during Russia Collusion attacks, whenever there was a news cycle that might help Trump in the public eye, the feds leak something to grab back the news cycle; that tactic seems to be renewing itself.

Like Mark Wauck, I see these pleadings as asserting that the Intelligence community -- the very folks who promulgated and promoted the Russian Collusion story and went on to cast substantial doubt on the Hunter Biden computer contents, asserting they were likely “Russian disinformation” -- should be the sole arbiter of such matters. The problem with losing your credibility is that no sensible person will trust you again. As lawyers often tell juries, “"false in one thing, false in everything." True of government officials and agencies as it is for the rest of us. 

In sum, my hunch is that this latest effort by the Deep State is not going to go anywhere for a long time, if at all.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/the_doj_argues_that_the_intelligence_community_overrides_the_judiciary.html

An oil worker removes a thread cap from a piece of drill pipe on a drilling lease owned by Elevation Resources near Midland, Texas, on Feb. 12, 2019. (Nick Oxford/Reuters)

EXECUTIVE BRANCH

Biden Administration Settles With Eco Groups, Blocks Oil Drilling Leases on Almost 60,000 Acres

By Naveen Athrappully

 

0:003:36

The Biden administration has entered into a legal settlement with pro-environment groups, agreeing to block drilling for oil and gas on more than 58,000 acres of public land.

The lawsuit, filed in 2021, challenged the Trump administration’s decision to award 113 leases for fossil fuel exploration and drilling in 2019 and 2020. The case was filed by a coalition of conservation groups led by the Sierra Club and WildEarth Guardians just a few days before Biden took office.

According to the terms of the settlement, the government has decided to halt issuing any drilling permits in the 58,617 hectares of land covered by the 113 leases located in South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) will only issue a final decision on the future of leases and drilling permits once it completes an additional climate and environmental impact analysis.

The analysis will comply with the April 2021 order issued by Department of the Interior secretary Deb Haaland that insists on prioritizing climate change goals in such reviews.

In June, lawsuits filed by WildEarth Guardians and other groups forced the Biden administration to reconsider its decision to sell almost 4 million acres of land as part of oil and gas leases.

In 2020, the conservation groups won a lawsuit overturning the BLM’s decision to sell 145,000 acres of oil and gas leases in North Dakota and Montana.

The settlement comes weeks after Terry Doughty, U.S. district judge for the Western District of Louisiana, issued a permanent injunction against the Biden administration’s pause of new oil and gas leases in federal lands. The injunction applies to 13 U.S. states.

Decline in Drilling

The Biden administration has leased the least number of acres of federal land for oil and gas drilling than any other U.S. administration since World War II.

An analysis by The Wall Street Journal shows that the Interior Department has leased just 126,228 acres of land for drilling during the first 19 months of Biden’s presidency.

The last time a president leased so little land was during President Harry Truman’s tenure, when only 65,658 acres were leased between 1945 and 1946. Under the Trump administration, 4.4 million acres of land were leased in the first 19 months. For the Obama administration, it was 7.25 million acres.

“The president said he was going to stop leasing. And he’s been remarkably successful,” David Bernhardt, an energy lawyer and former interior secretary in the Trump administration, told the media outlet.

During his 2020 election campaign, Biden pledged in a debate with Bernie Sanders that he would support “no more drilling on federal lands, no more drilling, including offshore.”

When Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021, Brent crude oil futures were trading at roughly $56 per barrel. As of Sept. 8, they’re trading at around $89 per barrel, an increase of more than 58 percent.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/biden-administration-settles-with-eco-groups-blocks-oil-drilling-leases-on-almost-60000-acres_4718781.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=BonginoReport

The seal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is seen outside of its headquarters in Washington on Aug. 15, 2022. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

VIEWPOINTS

Can This Be Happening in America?

Conrad Black

 

0:008:00

Commentary

We have familiar experience of the phenomenon of what are clearly intolerable circumstances being tolerated if they worsened only gradually. Everyone has looked back on a grueling experience and thought that it could not have been endured had the individual known how unpleasant it would become. No matter how familiar anyone may be with the horrors of the Nazi regime, it remains to us inconceivable that the culture of Beethoven and Goethe could have committed such crimes.

The United States has now reached the point where the sequence of outrageous and unconstitutional measures that have occurred in the last six years would have been inconceivable six years ago.

It’s unimaginable that anyone who has ever been nominated for president by a serious American political party could be an intelligence asset for a foreign power. We now know that there has never been one scintilla of evidence remotely hinting that Donald Trump was guilty of any such offense, or that he had any inappropriate relations or even a particular regard for the government of Russia. Yet for over two years it was endlessly bandied about that Trump had been “groomed” by Russian agents like the Manchurian Candidate to debase the presidency of the United States into boot-licking subordination to the national interest of Russia. The former directors of the National and Central Intelligence Agencies, James Clapper and John Brennan, solemnly told national audiences that Trump was a Russian intelligence agent and was guilty of treason in favor of the Russians.

Both these senior officials on occasion allegedly lied to Congress but were never prosecuted. Former FBI Director James Comey, who improperly removed government property from his office, improperly leaked confidential information to the media, improperly presumed to decide that Hillary Clinton should not be prosecuted for destroying 33,000 emails that were under subpoena from Congress, signed a false affidavit in support of a FISA warrant to conduct illegal telephone intercepts on the Trump campaign, and supported the pretense that the infamous Steele dossier, which he knew to be a pastiche of lies and defamations, was authentic intelligence, indicating the guilt of Trump of unlawful collusion with the Russian government. The ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and other Democrats repeated ad nauseam that they had conclusive evidence of Trump’s guilt. They lied. The inspector general of the Justice Department recorded 17 separate instances of improper official behavior. There has been no prosecution of any of this.

In all of pre-Trump U.S. history, there had been two impeachment trials of presidents: Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. Neither of them should have occurred and both failed, but in the last four years Trump was impeached twice, once for a telephone conversation with the president of Ukraine in which he asked if the Biden family and particularly the current president’s son Hunter Biden had committed illegalities in Ukraine. He did not direct the verdict; he did not ask for any incrimination of the Bidens. This was a completely inadequate pretext for impeaching a president and yet he was impeached, and on one count 49 senators including a former Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, did vote Trump guilty, though he was, of course, acquitted. And at the end of his term, he was impeached again for having allegedly fomented an insurrection even though the FBI director had already testified that there was no evidence that Trump or his campaign organization or his administration were connected in any way to the trespass and the vandalism that occurred at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and Trump requested and offered extra security, but this was declined by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Washington mayor Muriel Bowser.

The various comprehensive accumulations of evidence about the behavior of Hunter Biden incite the strong inference that he has committed a number of illegalities and that the president repeatedly lied to the public about his own connections to his son’s activities. There is no evidence that U.S. official conduct was altered in respect of Ukraine, China, or other countries, in consideration for bribes paid to the Biden family. But there seems to be no doubt the current president and his family were engaged in improper activity that not only allegedly involves substantial lawbreaking by family members but also seems to have been suppressed rather than investigated by the FBI. The allegation that the FBI seems to have suggested to Facebook that the allegations against Hunter Biden were likely Russian disinformation and requested that they not publicize them would have been unthinkable six years ago. But it seems to have been assimilated by the American political community as a perfectly normal and acceptable occurrence.

It seems clear that in the 2020 presidential election, where Trump could have prevailed in the Electoral College if 50,000 votes had flipped in Pennsylvania and any two of Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, that millions of ballots potentially passed through hands that could not be identified. All of this occurred in swing states where rules were changed ostensibly to facilitate voting during the pandemic. But in the case of a number of states, contrary to the Constitution, these changes were determined not by the state legislatures but by executive branches or state judiciaries. In every one of the 19 lawsuits launched to attack these questionable changes to voting and vote counting rules, the judiciary, including in the case of the Texas attorney general’s action against the swing states and supported by 18 other state attorneys general, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear any of these cases on their merits; they were disallowed for technical reasons, some of those quite spurious.

Now we have had, on the complaint of federal archivists, the intrusion and occupation for nine hours of the former president’s home on a warrant alleging just cause to believe that crimes have been committed involving the improper removal and retention of classified information. Trump had been collaborating with the archivists, possessed the power to act as he pleased with classified material when he was president, and this isn’t a classified material case anyway. He didn’t pack any of this himself as he left the White House, has not mislaid or misused any of this material, and 19 months have gone by since he left office. It’s a document-handling case. There’s no conceivable justification for such a sensational invasion in the absence of any plausible claim of significant wrongdoing—except that it’s a political tainting job against the former president, and the Presidential Records Act isn’t a criminal statute. This is just the Democrats transmuting a grumpy librarian’s complaint into the insinuation that the former president committed unimaginable crimes.

A disastrous and shaming flight from Afghanistan is described by President Joe Biden as “a triumphant success.” Dr. Anthony Fauci retires with dignity after doing terrible damage to the country with his nonsense about shutting schools, “droplets,” the ups and downs of masking, the “abolition of hand-shakes”—almost all of it now thoroughly discredited.

Six years ago, no one could have imagined that these outrages would have occurred, much less that they would be accepted by a bedraggled, degraded, demoralized America, its federal government in the hands of lawless and authoritarian myth-makers, applauded by the complicit national political media. Can this be America?

https://www.theepochtimes.com/can-this-be-happening-in-america_4694920.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-08-30&utm_medium=email&est=XckyGPYJlOoD4JulV6W6bsSuLtatyFphTMuFyWDuLY2DIozY6MKB24NK8RVj