Well, It Turns Out He Lied.

 By Rich Kozlovich 

Jack Smith argued all this hullabaloo about his activities being illegal was strictly politics and had no basis in truth, including claims he spied on members of Congress.  Well, that's just not true.  

Jack Smith has always been vile.  Early on in his career was a "Clinton hit man to get Trump".  Then he was hired by Biden  take down Donald Trump.  The corruption of the DOJ and FBI attorneys and agents under Biden was staggering, many of which have been purged under Trump.

Well, time and truth are on the same side, and now we absolutely know Democrat Special Counsel Jack Smith spied on and lied to Congress, and it turns out spying on the legislative members of the American government is illegal.  Didn't he know that?  Well, when you're working for a group of people who intend to set up a tyrannical authoritarian state, does it matter?  I have to assume he believed he'd be protected.  

Well, now Congress has proof of a "Biden witch hunt" where Smith and his mob did spy on 20 Senators and 24 House Members.

As Daniel Greenfield states:

I’ve been saying this for years, but it bears repeating, this was Watergate times a million, here’s the latest release from Sen. Chuck Grassley who has been unrelentingly laser-focused on these abuses. I’ve met with him and some of his staffers and they’re really impressive folks. The scale of what’s being uncovered here is incredible in the sheer scope of the power grab.

Will he and his mob ever be tried, found guilty and sent to prison?  I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that.  

• Update, 10:29 AM: Zero Accountability for Traitors -  This was the closest we have had so far to a real prosecution of an official willfully and openly breaking the law and violating the Constitution. And all she gets is a slap on the wrist. Do you seriously think the bigger fish will pay for their crimes when this nobody judge can’t even get a serious penalty? More evidence that the whole system is too corrupt, too far gone for rehabilitation.... read more

The President, the Special Counsel and his Lawyers

By Daniel Greenfield, @ Sultan Knish Blog

New disclosures reveal that Special Counsel Jack Smith, tasked with taking down Trump at any cost, received $140,000 in pro bono legal services from Covington & Burling.

Covington & Burling, the prominent D.C. law firm, was Biden’s campaign counsel.

While six figures in free legal aid might seem like a lot of money, C & B’s lawyers had contributed $657,924 to the Kamala campaign and $262,171 to the DNC. But that was a drop in the bucket compared to the $737,000 that it was paid for its services by the Biden campaign and the $4.5 million that the law firm had been paid by the DNC.

The $140,000 was easily ‘paid for’ by the lucrative economic relationship that Covington & Burling enjoyed with the Biden campaign and the Democratic party during the 2024 election.

The six figure support for Smith can be viewed as part of C & B’s work for the campaign.

And Jack Smith’s campaign to take down Trump, like the Steele dossier and the Mueller investigation, should be seen as the work of a political campaign using political operatives with experience in the Justice Department to corruptly prosecute a political opponent.

What’s even more revealing is that Smith’s attorneys are Lanny Breuer and Peter Koski.

Peter Koski, a former Obama Justice Department official, serving as Smith’s lawyer also served as the attorney for Biden’s counsel Dana Remus and Biden’s 2020 deputy counsel Pat Moore during the congressional impeachment inquiry into Biden’s mishandling of classified documents Remus is also a partner at C & B so that he was actually protecting both Biden and the firm.

Koski is the lawyer you call to represent your lawyers when you’re under investigation. And that’s appropriate since Jack Smith was arguably one of Biden’s lawyers all along playing the role of prosecutor in order to take down Biden’s leading political rivals before the election.

Smith’s meeting with Koski would have been a reunion with his old colleague, having served as the chief of the Public Integrity Section in the DOJ’s Criminal Division while Koski had been his Deputy Chief. Smith’s other lawyer was his former boss, the head of the Criminal Division.

Lanny Breuer, Smith’s other lawyer, is a much better known name for his role in Clinton’s impeachment and the Fast and Furious scandal. As Bill Clinton’s counsel, Breuer had defended him during the various investigations, including his impeachment, and then stepped in to aid former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger when he was caught smuggling documents out of the National Archives in his socks and pants to cover-up Clinton’s actions before 9/11.

With that kind of resume, it was no surprise that Obama appointed Breuer as the Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ’s Criminal Division where he worked under former Attorney General Eric Holder who now occupies the position of senior counsel at Covington & Burling.

Holder, who like Smith and Koski, had come out of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, then brought in Covington & Burlin to vet Kamala’s vice presidential picks.

Covington & Burling is such a revolving door for Clinton, Obama and Biden DOJers that its offices are close to the Justice Department to make the move even easier.

When Breuer’s successor, Mythili Raman, left to join C&B, she told the New York Times that “reuniting with my former Justice Department colleagues was one of the biggest draws of Covington.” Much of her old Obama DOJ team was already there. Or soon would be.

There’s been a longtime revolving door from C&B to the DOJ. And back.

Rather than viewing the Justice Department and the powerful D.C. law firm as two separate entities, it may be more useful to see them as two resting places for the same network. That network encompassed the legal talent, in the DOJ’s political investigations arm, counsels in the White House and its defense operation of DOJ vets working at Covington & Burling.

The network had the same fundamental agendas. Its employment was purely strategic.

At the DOJ, members of the network targeted and prosecuted political opponents, at the White House, they defended their team and in private practice, they protected them.

When the law firm that acted as counsel to the Biden campaign, helped pick Kamala’s VP and is staffed by former Attorney General Eric Holder and a roster of DOJ ‘PINers’ who worked with Holder and Smith, stepped forward to offer six figures of pro bono legal work for Smith, they made it all too obvious that the prosecution campaign against Trump melded the two worlds.

Prosecuting Trump was never about the law. We know this because of multiple media leaks of Biden grousing at Attorney General Merrick Garland, for not working harder to lock Trump up. There was never anything independent about Jack Smith’s status as a special counsel. And now that the people behind the investigation are out of office when, despite their best efforts, Trump won, their partners in private practice are stepping in to offer Smith legal protection.

The only difference is that Smith is no longer being funded by taxpayers but indirectly by the former Biden campaign and the DNC which paid millions to the law firm defending him for ‘free’.

The revolving door between the Justice Department and private law firms reveal an ethical divide far vaster than the federalist palatial architecture of the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building and the slick glass and steel modernism of CityCenter’s glass and steel towers where Covington & Burling occupies the office space above the luxury goods stores like

Louis Vuitton downstairs. It’s a chasm that makes Americans question the integrity of the Department of Justice and its political prosecutions.

And the Biden campaign’s favorite lawyers, bringing together the former heads of the Criminal Division and Public Integrity Section to defend one of their own who had been tasked with taking down Trump from within the government is only going to widen that chasm into an abyss of guilt.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading. 

 

More DOJ And FBI Corruption

October 12, 2024/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

A couple of weeks ago I posed the question of whether the recently-initiated federal prosecution of New York Mayor Eric Adams is legitimate, or whether it is yet another instance of abject corruption by our Department of Justice and FBI, in this instance pay-back by the prosecutors for Adams’s criticism of the regime’s immigration policies. To help you as you ponder that question, it might be useful to look at a few other things that the DOJ and FBI are recently up to.

As Item Number 1, Justice “Special Counsel” Jack Smith chose the date of October 2 — 34 days before the upcoming election — to file his brief laying out his reasons why ex-President Trump does not qualify for immunity from prosecution under the Supreme Court’s July 1 ruling in Trump v. United States. Smith’s brief, which is 165 pages long, was then promptly unsealed by the District Judge in the case, Tanya Chutkan. I am not going to quote from it here, but it is fair to say that the brief goes out of its way to be as inflammatory as possible against the former President.

In a New York Times op-ed on October 9, Professor Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School raises completely legitimate questions about the timing of the filing. Note that Goldsmith is no fan of Trump. From the op-ed:

[T]he timing of the release should receive more scrutiny, because the Department of Justice should not have allowed the information to be disclosed so close to Election Day. This event is the latest of many examples of Biden administration officials paying insufficient public attention to executive branch rules that are designed to ensure that prosecutions are, in appearance and reality, conducted fairly and apolitically. . . . 

It is . . . vital . . . for the executive branch to take scrupulous care to assure the public that the prosecutions are conducted in compliance with pertinent rules. On this score, Mr. Smith has failed. . . . The filing is in clear tension with the Justice Department’s 60-day rule, which the department inspector general has described as a “longstanding department practice of delaying overt investigative steps or disclosures that could impact an election” within 60 days of an election.

Professor Goldsmith has used the gentlest possible terms to describe outrageous conduct by Justice. What Smith has done is to construct an overheated filing against the administration’s main political rival, and to orchestrate its timing, in a clear effort to achieve maximum impact on the election. I guess that the Times should get some credit for publishing the op-ed, although if this had been a prosecution by Trump of one of his rivals we would have been treated to six different stories on the front page.

For today’s Item Number 2, consider the case of Dr. Eithan Haim of Texas Children’s Hospital. TCH is the largest hospital for children in the country. In early 2022 Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued an opinion stating that gender transition surgeries for minors were a form of child abuse. Within days, in March 2022, TCH announced that it had halted all such procedures. (From the AP, March 6, 2022: “The nation’s largest pediatric hospital has announced it has stopped gender-affirming therapies.”). Thereafter, the Texas legislature began work on a bill banning such surgeries for minors, which bill was then enacted in 2023 and signed by Governor Abbott on June 2, 2023.

Dr. Haim was working as a resident at TCH in 2022 and 2023. Haim observed gender transition procedures on minors as young as 11 taking place at TCH shortly after the March 2022 announcement, and continuing thereafter. From Health Care News, July 8, 2024:

“The hospital had said unequivocally they were going to shut down their transgender program because of potential criminal legal liability,” Haim told Health Care News. “Because I worked there, I knew that this was a lie. Categorically, it was untrue. They not only continued the program but expanded it.” The documents showed TCH performed “gender-affirming care” just days after the announcement . . . . One such procedure done shortly after the announcement was performed on an 11-year-old girl.

Haim provided documents about the ongoing gender procedures on minors to Texas authorities and to investigator Chris Rufo, who published information on this matter in City Journal on May 16, 2023. All patient-specific information had been redacted from the documents to protect the privacy of the patients. From Rufo’s City Journal piece:

I have obtained exclusive whistleblower documents showing that, despite its public statements, the Houston-based children’s hospital—the largest in the United States—has secretly continued to perform transgender medical interventions, including the use of implantable puberty blockers, on minor children. . . . I can confirm that nothing in the information provided to me identified any individual; all the documents were, in fact, carefully redacted.

In June 2024, the Justice Department issued an indictment not of TCH, but of Haim. What had he done wrong? Here is the DOJ press release announcing the indictment. The subject matter appears to be violations of medical privacy, but curiously the press release does not assert that any private patient information was improperly revealed. Rather, it states that Haim “obtained personal information including patient names, treatment codes and the attending physician from Texas Children’s Hospital’s (TCH) electronic system without authorization . . . [and] under false pretenses.” The press release does not mention what statute may have been violated, although presumably it must be HIPAA.

In other words, the theory is that finding out about ongoing illegal behavior and reporting it to the authorities and the public is now itself deemed criminal by DOJ when the behavior disclosed is deemed important to the progressive agenda. All people in a hospital who are not actually doing the gender surgeries themselves are to be prohibited from talking about them. If they can silence Haim and others like him, then TCH can go on engaging in its conduct free from concern from pesky Texas statutes.

Read some of the linked articles for more details on DOJ’s tactics of intimidation in the effort to silence Haim.

And for today’s Item Number 3, have you heard of the case of Brian Malinowski? This one comes from the August 2024 issue of Hillsdale College’s Imprimis. Malinowski was the manager of the airport in Little Rock, Arkansas, until the morning of March 19, when DOJ’s ATF conducted a pre-dawn SWAT-style raid on his house and shot him dead.

Malinowski was a gun hobbyist who sometimes bought and sold guns at gun shows. Federal law requires people “engaged in the business” of buying and selling guns to get a federal license. The statutory definition of “engaged in the business” is quite restrictive:

Congress has defined “engaged in the business” to apply to those who deal in firearms “as a regular course of trade or business with the principal objective of livelihood and profit” as opposed to those who make “occasional sales, exchanges, or purchases of firearms for the enhancement of a personal collection or for a hobby.”

ATF took the position that Malinowski was “engaged in the business” of buying and selling firearms, despite the restrictive definition and the fact that Malinowski had a rather responsible day job. Anyway, rather than, say, writing Malinowski a letter, or issuing some kind of summons, here’s how ATF chose to proceed:

Multiple undercover ATF agents were sent to observe Malinowski selling firearms at a gun show, a GPS tracker was secretly placed on Malinowski’s car, and a search warrant was obtained for his home. Malinowski wasn’t home the first time ATF agents showed up to serve the warrant, so the second time they left nothing to chance. 

Dressed in SWAT gear, together with Little Rock police, they showed up in ten vehicles at Malinowski’s house before dawn on March 19. They cut the power to his house and put a piece of tape over the doorbell camera so that Malinowski couldn’t see who they were. Less than a minute later, after an exchange of gunfire, Malinowski was dead. And in violation of both ATF and Little Rock police policies requiring body cameras, not one of the law enforcement agents involved in this deadly raid was wearing an activated camera.

Your federal government in action. The chances of any of the personnel involved facing any consequences is about zero.

Jack’s “October Surprise” is a dud

Joe Fried CPA Oct 10, 2024 @ Joe Fried CPA Election Central

On October 2 a desperate man made a last-ditch effort to kill the presidential bid of Donald Trump. Will that effort fail?

Prosecutor Jack Smith filed a 165-page Motion that contains nothing new. The document will be revered by the MSNBC crowd, but those people already plan to vote for Kamala. The rest of America — MAGA and undecided voters — will see it as more evidence of a corrupt DOJ.

Before we delve into the details, consider this:

• By issuing the Motion in October, the DOJ violated its own rule, which precludes the release of information within 60 days of an election, if the information could affect the election.
• After waiting 3 years, this prosecutor released his allegations just 33 days before the election — in time to affect voter preferences, but just late enough to deprive Trump of time for a rebuttal.
• For several months, Trump had been subject to a gag order because Smith felt Trump’s comments could influence potential witnesses. Now, however, Smith has decided that it is OK to influence potential witnesses — and potential voters.
• According to Trump’s attorneys, the Motion was issued before Jack fulfilled his obligations to provide all exculpatory evidence to Trump (Brady Rule).

I don’t believe the American public will buy what Jack is selling.

Trump incited violence?

Throughout his Motion, Smith implies that Trump deliberately incited violence for the purpose of changing the outcome of the election. Jack Smith supports this notion with “evidence” that is laughable. For example, there is this “beauty” on page 78:

“A large portion of the crowd at the capitol – including rioters who violently attacked law enforcement officers trying to secure the building — wore clothing and carried items bearing the defendant’s name and Campaign (sic) slogans, leaving no doubt that they were there on his behalf and at his direction” (emphasis added).

Does this mean that, if a person commits murder while wearing a Biden t-shirt, there will be “no doubt” that he did so “at HIS direction”? That logic might be persuasive to cast members of “The View,” but it won’t work with the rest of America.

As noted, Smith theorizes that Trump was hoping for violence on January 6^th, but he doesn’t support the theory with meaningful evidence. In addition, this desperate prosecutor omits evidence that is clearly exculpatory. For example, Jack’s Motion omits these salient facts:

• The video of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, accepting “some responsibility” for the events at the Capitol
• General Mark Milley’s acknowledgment that President Trump instructed the Defense Department on January 3, 2021 to “make sure that you have sufficient National Guard or Soldiers to make sure it’s a safe event”
• Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller’s admission that “the President commented that they were going to need 10,000 troops the following day”
• President Trump’s words instructing supporters “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”

Except for the last item, most Americans did not learn of these facts until information “previously concealed by the Biden-Harris Administration’s Department of Defense...” was uncovered by a House Committee, and until the Pelosi video was discovered.

Jack’s immunity problem

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a U.S. president has immunity for his official acts. The court also said that, when determining whether an act is personal or official, the prosecutor is not permitted to divine the motivations of the president.

Although the promotion of election integrity was important to Trump as a candidate for re-election, it was also important to him officially, as President. This is evident because Trump began railing about election integrity issues several months before he “lost” the election.

In the summer prior to the election, Trump pointed out the dangers of mass ballot mailing — just as Democrat Jimmy Carter and Republican James Baker had done 15 years earlier. After the election, Trump continued to point out serious election integrity issues, such as the failure to match ballot signatures to registration signatures, the failure to ensure the timely filing of ballots, the failure to keep noncitizens off the voter rolls, and the failure to require adequate voter ID.

In each case, Trump’s words could be construed to be official or political, depending on his motives. In his Motion, Jack assumes that Trump’s motives were political, but the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that Jack is not permitted to make that assumption.

Free speech or criminal conspiracy?

A president does not lose his first amendment right to express his views, and he does not always have to be correct in those views. Jack handles this inconvenient problem by pretending that Trump knew, AS A FACT, that there was no election fraud. In Jack’s mind, Trump was not engaged in free speech: He was using his words as weapons in a criminal conspiracy.

To support that assertion, the Motion references a few political advisors who told Trump that there was no fraud, and/or that he had lost the election. It is clear, however, that Jack “cherry picked” the evidence because not everyone was in agreement. Many people said the opposite. Here are a few examples:

• In December 2020, sixteen Pennsylvania assembly members issued a press release, warning that there were 202,377 more ballots cast than identified registered voters. Later, that problem was confirmed to be true.
• In Georgia, the head of VoterGA, an election integrity organization, noticed irregularities in the Fulton County mail-in ballot count. The organization was able to acquire scanned ballot images, and those images confirmed the likelihood of massive fraud in Fulton County.
• In Arizona, a whistleblower alleged that he had witnessed a plot to add 35,000 votes to each Democratic candidate in Pima County (including Biden). The detailed and credible allegation was sent to the criminal division of the DOJ and to every member of the Arizona legislature, but was never seriously investigated at the federal or state levels.
• In Michigan, the Secretary of State instructed election clerks to “presume” that signatures on ballot envelopes matched the signatures in registration records. Before the election, Trump and other Republicans explained that this was unlawful — an assertion that was confirmed by Judge Christopher Murray — a few months after the election.

The “fake electors”

Throughout his Motion, Jack uses loaded language to compensate for glaring factual defects. A good example is the term, “fake electors,” who were simply “alternative electors” who had significant concerns regarding election integrity. If and when Vice President Pence felt more time was needed to investigate fraud issues, the slate of alternative electors would give him a basis for a 10-day delay of the certification process.

No alternative list was signed by any state governor, no governor’s signature was forged, and no document was stamped with an official seal (or any other seal). For those reasons it was not possible to confuse the alternative electors with the official electors. If the alternative electors were used, it would be done knowingly, and subject to legal analysis and challenge.

It is worth noting that the concept of an alternative list of electors originated with Hawaii Democrats in 1960, who had their own list of alternative electors. At that time, no one called it “fake.”

Trump’s attorney, John Eastman, advised Trump that Pence had the legal authority to delay certification; Pence’s attorney disagreed. Reluctantly, Trump accepted the legal position of Vice President Pence, without resorting to violence or threat of violence.

Conclusion

It is clear that Jack rushed out his lengthy hit piece in an effort to prevent Trump’s re-election. It is ironic that Jack Smith is charging Trump with 2020 election interference. That is exactly what Smith is doing in regard to the 2024 election!

News and Views

By Rich Kozlovich 

 

As usual I go through my watch list and add a lot of article links to my draft file... daily... and they do get out of hand so I create gazettes that not only act as informational sources, they create files that allow me, and anyone who wishes to do so, to track the history of the events, the people involved in those events, what the issues were all about, and the outcomes.   Good conclusions can only come about with good historical foundations.  

Global warming has been the hot topic for years, and in spite of the vast amount of information showing it's a gigantic scientific hoax, and a fraud, the nitwits are still touting it.  John Kerry is among the foremost nitwits.   The nation dodged a bullet when this loon "reported for duty" to be President and wasn't elected.

The WEF is demanding people stop growing their food at home.....to stop global warming, because .... now get this..... professional agriculture has a smaller carbon footprint, and the "scientists" who were funded by WEF provided a study to prove it.  So who cares, the world stopped the small amount of warming that was occurring 25 years ago, and the carbon foot print has grown substantially all that time, so the carbon foot print must not matter.   

Do these misfits really believe the things they're saying?  Now that the world is going to embrace AI and quantum computing it requires ....MASSIVE...amounts of energy !  Far beyond what we're producing now, and so far beyond what all these idiotic "alternative" environmentally destructive energy schemes are capable of producing. 

 Billionaire, Eric Schmidt, insisted because of global warming, we were  doomed.....doooomed I tell you....at least that was then.  But apparently that's not so true any more.  Amazing, and why is that?  He has now decided to abandon that profound moral outrage because he's become an arms dealer selling AI-powered drones to fight robotic wars, and AI, as stated, requires a lot of energy, and besides he notes by way of justification, “we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we’re not organized to do it”, so apparently he wants to get all he can get right now, and no longer worries about his grandchildren. 

And guess who's on board with him on that?  Mister (globalism is beautiful, all leftism is good and pure, reduce the world's population, eat bugs to save the world from global warming himself) Bill Gates.  Remarkable!   Conclusion? None of these misfits believe any of this claptrap.  

Jack Smith, the federal prosecutor who isn't really a federal prosecutor is attempting to do an end run around the SCOTUS presidential immunity ruling, in a clear attempt to impact the outcome of the election.  And Democrats are demanding Alito's recusal for.... well... it really densest' matter for what, since it's the same old tune with the same kind of nitwits pushing the same kind of hypocritical reasoning.

Why do Americans fall for this stuff?  Kevin Finn posted this artilce, How does the Left do it?, listing 12 bullet points on just how destructive the Democrat party is to America, condluing by saying:

And despite all these things and more, some people still support them. How bad does it have to get? How badly must some people be made to suffer before they wake up?

As I've often said you can't reason people out of positions they've not been reasoned into, but they can be scared out of those positions. Then who do they turn to when they get scared? They turn to the Winston Churchill's of the world, the doers and fixers, versus the Neville Chamberlains, the go along to get along feel good guys that create these messes in the first place, and they're ubiquitous.

But once their fears have been ameliorated, what do they do? Just as quickly as possible they dump the doers and fixers for the go along to get along feel good nitwits that created the mess in the first place, and it starts all over again. 

Take Arizona for instance. It's become so infested with former California residents who were feeling the taxes, regulations, crime, violence, and the gigantic mess leftists created there, and now they're turning Arizona into another California, a far left disaster just like the one they fled. 

Kamala and Hillary were chosen to be the Presidential candidates for the Democrats and neither of them had any notable achievements.   Both came to power via the men they were involved with.  Hillary with Billy, and Kamala by sleeping with a much older married man who was a political power in California, and the question everyone should be asking is this.  Is their bench so lacking that's the best they can do? Answer? Yes, that's the best they can do.

Then we have the former governor of Maryland running for the Senate and when I did my Senate election analysis in February I gave that seat to the Republicans, but since then he's confirmed  he will  ‘absolutely’ vote to certify election results, with no questions asked, made it clear if Trump is elected he will fight Trump every step of the way, and told CNN's Dana Bash on Sunday that if elected, he would only vote for Supreme Court nominees who receive bipartisan support, regardless of who becomes the next president.  Which means only Democrat approved nominees. 

I'm inclined to think a lot of Republicans may think it's better to have the adversaries outside the wall rather than inside, polluting the mind of their fellow Republicans, which in some cases won't take much.  I'm also convinced any conservatives living in Maryland will simply refuse to vote for this John McCain clone, just as conservatives refused to vote for McCain.  I've decided this seat will remain Democrat.

People are what they do, not what they say, and is it any wonder so when it comes to Pope Francis who made a gay rights advocate a Cardinal, many Catholics keep asking, "who picked this guy".

Think about this.  In the last few years the Democrats have picked three losers as their candidate for President. Hillary, an incompetent, vile unliked and unlikable human being as there ever was one, with no accomplishments other than being married to Bill, a true test of tolerance, Joe Biden who no one thought he was the brightest pebble in the brook, and Kamala, another unliked and unlikable mess who's biggest accomplishment was her political advancement which came about by sleeping with a politically powerful married man.

The question everyone should be asking is this.  Is their bench so empty that's the best they can do?  Answer?  Yes!

There's a lot of talk about Trump's tariffs versus free trade, and much of it's hyperbole with cries about the American consumer.  But we need to grasp this.  Everything is about "the basics" and understand there are outright economic reason to impose and dispose of tariffs. And there are outright political reasons to impose them or dispose of them. If Richard Nixon hadn't opened up China to world trade the economic mess created by Mao as a result of his "cultural revolution" would have most likely sunk the CCP.

When Kissinger went to China and was sitting with Mao and Zhou Enlai, Mao's head butcher, Kissinger said the nice thing about all this is we don't want anything from each other. Mao said if I didn't want something from you, I wouldn't have invited you, and if you didn't want something from me, you shouldn't have come. I was never impressed with Kissinger, the Tallyrand of the 20th century, and what Mao wanted was to save himself and the CCP at the civilized world's expense.

It's time to reimpose those economic conditions on China, Russia, Iran, and any nation that proves to be a threat to civilization, and stop funding their military and economic efforts to destroy us. Trade agreements are about what's good for America's economy, and that doesn't necessarily mean it should be good for American multinational corporations, who on the best of days are leaky vessels as allies, and would sell the nation down the river for a good quarterly report, leading to bankruptcy and/or conquest.  Neither is good for the American consumer. 

These kind of policies require something on the order of Col. John Boyd's strategic military concept, OODA loop. Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. Which means paying attention and making whatever adjustments are necessary as circumstances change in order to attain necessary goals. It should be a matter of hard goals combined with flexible strategy.  I would be far more worried about regulations, which drive up prices, which drive up costs, which drives up wages, and creates larger more oppressive government.  Add outrageous spending and all this becomes a vanguard to dystopia.   

And what's Kamala's solution?  Equality of outcome!    

The competent to high achievers lose their incentive to produce at above average levels. Many will grow discouraged, put forth less effort, and slide into mediocrity -- or worse. And the "loafers" learn that they will be rewarded over and above what they earn. They will see no need to improve......Productivity and quality workmanship drops, the economy tanks, and the living standards for most of us "go down with the ship." Alas, there are reasons why state-controlled socialist or communist economies with equality of outcome as a goal are inferior to those in the relatively free market West, which while imperfect, still has substantially more respect for (and realization of) equality of opportunity.

I owned a pest control company for many years, and was involved in my industry's affairs, and even the nation's trade associations are pushing this DEI insanity, losing sight of the mission for which they were created. I said this a long time ago, and it's as true today as it was then:

"Diversity without accomplishment is philosophy without form and incompetence without consequence".

The Inevitability Factor: When Reality Reaches It's Apex! - America isn't perfect, but America has never offered perfection.  What America offered, with all our historical warts and moles, is the most acceptable imperfection.  As a result American republican democratic capitalism brought more people out of misery and suffering than any system in the history of the world.

That's a foundational truth! 

One thing is clear as a bell, Netanyahu gets it, and he always did, it just took this vile October 7th attack for force everyone else in Israel to get it, and Netanyahu was right to rebuke France’s Macron.

If you saw the Mel Gibson movie, The Patriot", you'll remember in one scene when discussing France's aid to the revolution, his character snorts in disgust saying, "the French", and I laughed when he did that. Let's try and get this about the French using this illustration.

"Once you drop a hammer in a gravity field (positive meaning it pulls downwards), you instantly know it is falling towards the ground, even before it actually hits, because the force of gravity is acting on it and pulling it down, regardless of whether you see it land or not; the act of releasing it is enough to confirm its descent."

People's character is defined by their history, and can be just as definitive as the effect of gravity, and French history is replete with actions that give more than enough reason not to trust anything they say or agree to.  Trusting the French is like believing the tooth fairy really leaves money under your pillow.

That's especially so since France is now so heavily infested with Muslims the city of Lyon has a 30 percent Muslim population, and the French are bending to that population's demand they accept sharia ..... or else... and they're doing so out of fear, and Macron is doing little about it.  

Macron is intellectually vacuous, since it appears he refuses to see that Israels is the canary in the coal mine, and France will be among their next victims. Or.... maybe he just want's stay in power and will happily sell Israel and France down the river to do so, but once Muslims take over, he will be lucky to survive.  

Once you turn monsters loose on society no one is safe, just like this former governor of NY was assaulted in Manhattan.  

Finally,  Russian sentences 72-year-old American to nearly 7 years in prison for fighting in Ukraine. My first thought this was a set up, but it turns out he really was there fighting.  My second thought then was:  What in the world was that nitwit thinking? 

The Missing Factors of Jack Smith’s Latest Trump Filing

Piercing the political veil. 

By Mark Angelides | Oct 3, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News, Tags:  Articles, Crime & Punishment, Opinion, Politics

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Judge Tanya Chutkan, of the US District Court for Washington DC, has unsealed the latest filing by special counsel Jack Smith. The document relates to Smith’s efforts to prosecute former President Donald Trump over his actions related to January 6, 2020. Coming just a month out from the presidential election, her decision to publicly release the details on Wednesday, October 2, was panned by Trump as “election interference.”

After the Supreme Court ruled that presidents enjoy a level of immunity for official actions, Smith was forced to go back to the drawing board with his prosecution. In September, he refiled a 165-page indictment. Judge Chutkan dismissed claims that the timeline would be prejudicial, saying, “The electoral process and the timing of the election … is not relevant here. … This court is not concerned with the electoral schedule.”

The key takeaway from the filing, Smith wrote, was that “At its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private one. He extensively used private actors and his campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and operated in a private capacity as a candidate for office.”

Trump took to social media to make his feelings known. His ire was not directed at the judge, however. He instead excoriated Jack Smith and the Department of Justice:

"For 60 days prior to an election, the Department of Injustice is supposed to do absolutely nothing that would taint or interfere with a case.  They disobeyed their own rule in favor of complete and total election interference.  I did nothing wrong, they did!  The case is a scam, just like all of the others, including the documents case, which was dismissed!"

It seems the former president is keen to derail the prosecution in the court of public opinion before it ever makes it to trial.

A Political Predicament

Two key issues remain for Jack Smith. First, he must prove that then-President Donald Trump was operating in a purely personal capacity in every action he took. Any statements, calls, or processes that Trump engaged in that can reasonably be deemed within the course of his duty as the commander-in-chief are – as the Supreme Court ruled – to be viewed through the lens of immunity.

 

The second issue is that Smith’s efforts could be null and void by November 6 (or by January 20 at the latest). The decision to prosecute is always a political one. Should Trump regain office, it is almost certain that he will order the Department of Justice to drop the case entirely. A cascading effect here is that should Trump win the White House and Democrats take the House, Smith’s groundwork will likely be used as the basis for a third impeachment effort. If he has, as the 45th president suggests, rushed his filing in order to weaken the Republican nominee’s chances of re-election, any weakness in his case will be exposed and could cause lasting reputational damage to the department he represents.

But how strong or weak is his new filing?

A PT Barnum Gambit?

Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley detailed the Hail Mary efforts of the special counsel:

“He is trying to thread the needle in this filing to get around the Supreme Court immunity decision.  Notably, Smith removed evidence from the new indictment but kept the same claims, including conduct that seems to fall within protected areas.”

So, does this mean that the new filing is weaker sauce than the original? “What Smith was not willing to do is actually reduce the underlying claims. The new case is to indictments what shrinkflation is to products — same package just less content,” Turley wrote. Or perhaps, as PT Barnum once noted, “Advertising is to a genuine article what manure is to land, – it largely increases the product.”

(Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

“Smith knows that he has a motivated and supportive judge and wants to simply prove the same basic claims on less evidence,” Turley concluded.

However, even if Mr. Smith were given the benefit of the doubt regarding Trump’s claims that the timing of the filing is meant to interfere with the upcoming election, another horological Sword of Damocles hangs over the special counsel’s head.

Who’s On First?

When the Supreme Court ruled, in Trump v. United States, that presidents enjoy a level of immunity while exercising their official duties, Justice Clarence Thomas felt it necessary to make a specific point regarding who can actually be appointed as a special counsel. He declared in a concurring opinion:

“I write separately to highlight another way in which this prosecution may violate our constitutional structure. In this case, the Attorney General purported to appoint a private citizen as Special Counsel to prosecute a former President on behalf of the United States.

“If there is no law establishing the office that the Special Counsel occupies, then he cannot proceed with this prosecution. A private citizen cannot criminally prosecute anyone, let alone a former President.”

This writing was prompted by the decision of Federal Judge Aileen Cannon, who, in July this year, dismissed Smith’s other case against Donald Trump regarding the mishandling of classified documents. While that verdict explicitly restricted itself to the Florida charges, Trump lawyers will likely use the ruling to push for a Supreme Court hearing. Liberty Nation News Legal Affairs Editor Scott D. Cosenza explained at the time:

“The Appointments Clause, found in Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution, gives Congress great authority over who is appointed to exercise powers granted to the Executive branch. Here, to prosecute federal charges, one must be an ‘officer of the United States,’ and those must be appointed with consent from the US Senate, as US Attorney positions and the Attorney General are, for instance. If not, then the appointment must be supported by some other law passed by Congress.”

The Supreme Court will be back in session this coming Monday, October 7. There is little doubt that a challenge to Smith’s position is waiting to wind its way through the DC court circuit, and from there, perhaps back to the highest Court.

Impact Baked-In?

Donald Trump claims that both the prosecution itself and the timing of the filings (and unsealing) are motivated to do him damage just weeks before the November 5 election. While it is true that the DOJ does not usually take action on politically sensitive cases within two months of an election, it is a common practice rather than a rule. However, if the past is prologue, Mr. Trump may not have too much to worry about on this side of Election Day.

Bored? Check This Out!

Each time he has been taken to court or ruled against in court, his poll numbers have not suffered. In fact, there’s a good case to be made that each successive action by state and federal prosecutors has actually strengthened his position, presumably because a significant portion of the public believes the charges against him are politically motivated.

Kamala Harris has tried to paint herself as the underdog in this election – despite being the sitting vice president. This position was already a hard sell, but with the media again focusing on the numerous charges against the former president, it becomes an almost unbelievable assertion. That the charges were coming back was never in doubt – that they might not actually make a difference come November could prove to be a decisive factor in the public perception battle.

Dig Deeper into the Themes Discussed in this Article!

Liberty Vault: Trump v. United States

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Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.

 

Read More From Mark Angelides

Three Big Blows

July 02, 2024/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

In the 235 or so years since our Republic was founded, until now, no ex-President has ever been prosecuted for allegedly criminal acts committed while in office. This has been a political norm of great consequence. Any such prosecution of an ex-President cannot avoid being inherently problematical, inevitably bringing to a head the conflict between, on the one hand, constraining the President in the exercise of his constitutional duties and, on the other hand, declaring him “above the law.” By far preferable would be for this conflict never to arise, and for the applicable legal rules never to get defined and to remain ambiguous.

So for all those 235 years, our predecessors in the government, whatever their political differences and contentious disputes, have largely refrained from the temptation to use the criminal justice system to bring down political adversaries, and entirely so in the case of ex-Presidents. That political norm came to an abrupt end with the massive “lawfare” campaign initiated during the past two years by Democratic Party prosecutors in multiple jurisdictions against ex-President (and current candidate) Trump.

You might think that people abrogating a political norm like this, so central to the proper functioning of the Republic, would only do so in the face of the most clear-cut circumstances of obvious and significant statutory violations, crying out for criminal redress. But of course that is not the MO of our current garbage political powers-that-be. Instead, we see broadly-worded criminal statutes that would never be so used against anyone else, twisted out of context in the effort to take down a hated political foe. Now, the Supreme Court has been forced to rule on several issues in these cases, and has come out in unsurprising ways.

During the past week, the lawfare campaign against Trump suffered three major blows from Supreme Court decisions. The first of those came in a decision called Fischer v. United States, issued on June 28, and the other two in Trump v. United States, issued yesterday (July 1).

Fischer v. United States involved a defendant who attended the protest at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and who ended up entering the building. He was prosecuted under 18 U.S.C. Section 1512(c)(2), for “otherwise obstruct[ing], influenc[ing] or imped[ing] any official proceeding.” The feds prosecuted many January 6 protestors under 1512(c)(2), particularly because the charge came with penalties that were extraordinarily high compared to the nature of the wrongdoing (up to 20 years in prison). The language of 1512(c)(2) may seem at first blush to be plausibly applicable to the events of January 6; but there is a statutory construction issue in that Section 1512(c)(2) follows immediately after Section 1512(c)(1), which deals only with someone who “alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object.” The Supreme Court held that Section 1512(c)(2) must be read in the context of Section 1512(c)(1), and only used in circumstances where the defendant “impaired the availability or integrity for use in an official proceeding of records, documents, objects, or other things used in an official proceeding. . . .”

Trump was not a party in Fischer, but it turns out that in special prosecutor Jack Smith’s D.C. prosecution of Trump over the events of January 6, one of the four counts of the indictment is for alleged violations of Section 1512(c)(2). And that count does not involve anything about impairing the availability of records, documents or objects for an official proceeding. Moreover, that count is very much the heart of the indictment. 

The other three counts of the indictment are even more problematical: 

1. Count 1 alleges that the January 6 events constituted a “conspiracy to defraud the United States” under 18 U.S.C. Section 371; 
2. Count 2 alleges that the alleged violation of Section 1512(c)(2) inherently also violated Section 1512(k); and 
3. Count 4 alleges a supposed “conspiracy to suppress exercise of rights,” under 18 U.S.C. Section 241. In short, beyond 1512(c)(2), it’s novel theories under vague statutes that would never be used in a similar way against anyone else.

Trump v. United States is mainly about the issue of presidential immunity from prosecution. As you have likely already read, the case deals a second major blow to the lawfare campaign by finding that the President has a broad swath of immunity for certain acts taken while in office: absolute immunity from criminal prosecution “for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,” and presumptive immunity from prosecution for “all his official acts.”

That leaves what could be a large area of acts not taken in the President’s official capacity. The line may not be easy to draw. But the case discusses certain of the factual allegations of the indictment, and specifically directs that Trump’s interactions with members of the Justice Department to try to get them to take certain actions are clearly within the category of “official acts.” Those interactions form a significant part of the indictment.

The case now goes back to the District Court to try to draw the lines set by the Supremes among the various acts alleged in the indictment. If the case should last that long, given the hostility of the District Judge and the D.C. Circuit to Trump, I would not be surprised to see the Supreme Court weigh in again on these issues.

The Fani Willis prosecution in Georgia is also deeply impacted by the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling. Here is a copy of the indictment in that case. There are some 41 counts. The large majority appear to involve some aspect or another of official acts of the President.

The third major blow to the lawfare campaign is in Justice Thomas’s concurrence in Trump. Thomas questions the entire basis of Jack Smith’s standing to act as a prosecutor:

In this case, the Attorney General purported to appoint a private citizen as Special Counsel to prosecute a former President on behalf of the United States. But, I am not sure that any office for the Special Counsel has been “established by Law,” as the Constitution requires. Art. II, §2, cl. 2. By requiring that Congress create federal offices “by Law,” the Constitution imposes an important check against the President—he cannot create offices at his pleasure. . . . If this unprecedented prosecution is to proceed, it must be conducted by someone duly authorized to do so by the American people. The lower courts should thus answer these essential questions concerning the Special Counsel’s appointment before proceeding.

Justice Thomas’s question impacts both of Jack Smith’s prosecutions, the one in D.C. over the events of January 6, and also the classified documents trial in Florida. To date, the Justice Department and mainstream press commentators have pooh-poohed this issue; but now, with Thomas’s opinion, both District Judges will have to take it seriously.

With these three major blows, it is very hard to see how any of these cases should proceed further. They should all be dropped. But I can confidently predict that none of them will be. In their zeal, the prosecutors will soldier on, the Republic be damned.

Jack Smith, Clinton's DOJ Hit Man, Comes After Trump

Daniel Greenfield November 30, 2022 @ Sultan Knish Blog

When Bruce Wasserstein, a billionaire backer of the Clintons, provided a $25 million donation to Harvard Law, future Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, then serving as dean, welcomed it. The gift built on the Wasserstein Fellows Program already established at Harvard Law which brought “outstanding public interest lawyers” to Harvard and provided them stipends of up to $24,000 to meet with and influence students toward social justice at the prestigious law school.

When Jack Smith became a Wasserstein Fellow, even while, unironically, serving as head of the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section, seemingly soliciting and accepting a grant funded by a leftist billionaire (but who watches the integrity of the head of the Public Integrity Section) he joined a list of leftist activist lawyers working for the ACLU, Earthjustice, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Soros’ Open Society, Catholic Charities and the UN.

The mission of the Wasserstein Fellows was to gather “a diverse group of accomplished public interest lawyers who are enthusiastic about sharing their passions with law students on how to utilize their legal education to promote social justice.” Those passions included illegal migration, letting criminals get away with committing crimes and dismantling America.

How the DOJ’s Jack Smith would go about promoting social justice was a question that was answered twice. At least twice in public view where everyone could see and hear it.

The latest came when Attorney General Garland picked Smith as the Special Counsel to go after Trump. But before that anyone wondering what Jack Smith did to be chosen as a social justice lawyer would have had to be paying close attention to the IRS scandal that took place a year before he was made a Wasserstein Fellow.

Under Obama, the IRS and the DOJ had illegally targeted conservative nonprofits in order to silence political dissent. While Lois Lerner, sourly testifying before Congress, became the profoundly unsympathetic face of the IRS, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee revealed who was playing a key role in criminalizing dissent.

“The Justice Department convened a meeting with former IRS official Lois Lerner in October 2010 to discuss how the IRS could assist in the criminal enforcement of campaign-finance laws against politically active nonprofits. This meeting was arranged at the direction of Public Integrity Section Chief Jack Smith,” the Committee stated.

According to the Republican National Lawyers Association, “Public Integrity Section Chief Jack Smith told investigators that officials at the Justice Department discussed targeting conservative nonprofit groups with Lerner as early as October 2010.”

A year later, Smith became a Wasserstein Fellow.

Despite all this, Smith flew under the radar. While Lois Lerner was denounced, Smith remained virtually as anonymous as his name, including his actual name, John Smith, but Smith was just doing his job. Not on our behalf, but for those who had put him in his role.

Smith had been handpicked to run the DOJ’s public integrity section by Lanny Breuer.

Breuer, Bill Clinton’s Special Counsel who defended him during his impeachment hearings, and then Sandy Berger, after he stole classified documents from the National Archives to cover up Clinton’s actions, had been brought in by Obama to head up DOJ’s criminal division.

The Clinton consigliere, widely disliked, distrusted and hated even by fellow Democrats and lefties over his connections and client list, a man whom no one in D.C. believed had an ounce of integrity, then brought in Jack Smith to do some of his dirty work.

Would Lanny Breuer have picked anyone with integrity to head public integrity?

A New York Times review of some of Breuer and Smith’s cases appear to focus almost entirely on Republicans, touching on names like Sen. John Ensign, Rep Tom DeLay, Rep. Jerry Lewis, and Rep. Don Young, while mentioning the convictions of Rep. Rick Renzi and Gov. Bob McDonnell: respectively pardoned and overturned.

Public integrity under Obama meant targeting Republicans. It still does under Biden. Much as it did under the Clintons. Three corrupt administrations united by their abuses of the DOJ.

When a new day seemed to be dawning after Trump’s victory, Jack Smith made a timely exit from the government and became the head of litigation for the Hospital Corporation of America.

The Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) had become stocked with Obama administration veterans a few years earlier.

Marilyn Tavenner, almost as much of a staple of Obama scandals as Lois Lerner, who had headed the disastrous Obamacare rollout and tried to explain why the website wasn’t working, had come out of HCA. Nancy-Ann DeParle, the architect of Obamacare, became an HCA director.

Their real purpose of the HCA-Obamacare connection wasn’t to implement things on the consumer side, but to help broker a dirty deal that brought HCA on board with Obamacare. When King v. Burwell was poised to take on Obamacare, the HCA filed a brief on behalf of the illegal program to defend the exchanges as part of the dirty deal that it had made with the Obama administration.

Even as future Senator Rick Scott, the ousted former CEO of HCA, campaigned against Obamacare, warning, “If we have more government involvement we’re going to have dramatically worse health care”, Biden boasted of the HCA joining a deal to “cut costs” to make Obamacare work.

With that kind of history, Jack Smith going to work for HCA made a lot of sense.

To ordinary people, Smith’s career, the DOJ, war crimes prosecutor in Yugoslavia and the head of litigation for a hospital chain seem interestingly random. They do have one thing in common.

These were all priority projects of the Clintons.

Hillary Clinton had been obsessed with a government takeover of healthcare long before Obama. The disastrous intervention in Yugoslavia was a Clinton project. And the Clintons had been fixated on seizing control of the DOJ and punishing their political enemies.

That is what the DOJ began to do from Hillary’s abuse of FBI files to Russiagate.

Even Smith’s role as a Wasserstein Fellow has a familiar ring to it.

Bruce Wasserstein had a history with the Clintons. When Rahm Emanuel left the Clinton White House, he got a job running Wasserstein’s office in Chicago. And before long, the Clinton adviser and future Obama Chief of Staff and Mayor of Chicago had made $16 million.

Wasserstein did more than just host fundraising events for Bill Clinton, alongside Alec Baldwin, not to mention donating to Hillary Clinton, Gore, Schumer and so many other Democrats. (Although he was also briefly Mitch McConnell’s brother-in-law.) On his passing the corporate raider was praised for his “passion for social justice”. He never saw Hillary Clinton rise and fall.

It may be a coincidence, but Smith’s resume is what one might expect of a federal careerist with Clinton connections. Even his extended European vacation was the sort of thing that Clintonites used to build up their resumes. That resume became outdated in the Obama era, but Smith still seemed able to hit a lot of the right notes.

Smith was even named one of the “International Gender Champions” and claimed that he was “strongly committed to working with my Office to ensure that gender equality, as part of diversity and inclusion, is a key consideration to everything we do.”

There is one curious final note as to how Smith was picked as the Specialist Prosecutor for the Yugoslavia war crimes trials in the Hague. Smith was chosen in 2018 “after a selection process organised by the European Union” and was “appointed by the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo mission head, Alexandra Papadopoulou”. In 2020, Papadopoulou, a Fulbright Scholar, became Greece’s ambassador to the Biden administration.

Washington D.C. may appear small compared to some other major cities, but it’s a vast hive of careerists, contractors, consultants, lobbyists and activists all scurrying around the stone and glass buildings, the eateries and shops, whose relationships to each other are as entangled as they are hostile to us. As George Carlin once said, “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it.”

Jack Smith is a lifetime member of the club. And now he’s been given the biggest job of his career. It’s not one that is likely to reap much in the way of immediate rewards. Just ask Bob Swan Mueller III, but it’s an act of public service to the political network that runs D.C.

And parts beyond, into the European Union, which helped contribute to Russiagate.

Since Smith’s leg was broken after a bicycle accident (a hazard in the Biden administration), he’ll be running the investigation of Trump from Europe. And no one finds it odd that an investigation of a former president will operate from the capital of the European Union.

But it’s not like we run our own country anyway.

The upper echelons of the administrative state are a network of political alliances by ambitious men and women looking for the next rung to power. They don’t work for us. Instead they serve their sponsors and use political connections to navigate the public-private career ladder.

The media is already building up Smith’s mythos. “A  Justice Department lawyer out of central casting,” the New York Times gushed, with a “grizzled mien”. And, “an idealist and a brilliant independent thinker and a gutsy lawyer”. Central casting always needs good actors to play the part and fool the people long enough for the next phase of the plan to kick into action.

And, at least unlike Bob Mueller and Joe Biden, Jack Smith probably knows where he is. And he knows who really runs things and whom he needs to serve to get that next big job.