Monthly Archives: February 2021
Time To Impeach Our Government
Our government has appointed itself as judge, jury, and executioner of its own alleged misconduct. Unsurprisingly, it has found itself innocent. This is an inherently corrupt system and the way to change it is to “impeach” our government using a constitutional convention.
The Supreme Court’s decision denying the most recent Trump election lawsuit, recalls the case of Corinna Mullen. Her brutal murder went unsolved for years until an investigator found one slip of paper.
That document revealed that his predecessor had requested that the state crime lab return evidence without testing it. The evidence was later lost or “disappeared.” It then became clear why the case had never been solved: the people in charge of investigating it were the guilty parties.
This calls to mind the scenario that Dashiell Hammett wrote about in his short story “Nightmare Town,” about a lone private investigator who encounters a town where everyone, from the mayor to the busboy, is participating in the same criminal enterprise:
“You’re fined a hundred and fifty dollars and costs. The costs are fifteen dollars and eight cents, making a total of a hundred and six-five dollars and eighty cents. Will you pay it or will you go to jail?”
“I’ll pay it if I’ve got it,” Steve said, turning to the marshal. “You took my money. Have I got that much?”
The marshal nodded his massive head.
“You have,” he said, “exactly – to the nickel. “Funny it should have come out like that – huh?”
“Yes – funny,” Steve repeated.
America today resembles Izzard, the Nightmare Town. Every public institution in America has been compromised. None will hear evidence about election irregularities, such as fake ballots and ballot mishandling, not to mention the frauds of which Democrats are proud: the voting laws changed to encourage fraud and the tech companies stifling of news and emails beneficial to Trump or harmful to Biden.
They would not listen when John Ratcliffe reported that China was behind this fraud:
“Based on all available sources of intelligence, with definitions consistently applied, and reached independent of political considerations or undue pressure—that the People’s Republic of China sought to influence the 2020 U.S. federal elections,” Ratcliffe wrote.
They would also not pay any attention when John Lott showed us that it was statistically impossible for election results to be legitimate:
The estimates here indicate that there were 70,000 to 79,000 “excess” votes in Georgia and Pennsylvania. Adding Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin, the total increases to up to 289,000 excess votes.
They ignored the FISA report that pointed out that the first Trump impeachment was entirely based on fraudulent premises:
The FISA court was lied to. Exculpatory information was withheld on those being investigated. The investigators, with some notable exceptions, were incredibly biased and used the powers of law enforcement for political purposes.
They ignored the longstanding links between the Biden crime family and companies linked to the Chinese military found in the Homeland Security Report:
Rosemont Seneca was formed in 2009 by Hunter Biden, the son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, by Chris Heinz, the stepson of former Secretary of State John Kerry, and others.
Trump and his team even presented a vast list of election irregularities that showed over a thousand incidents of vote forgery, evidence hiding, and deception. Would Nightmare Town investigate? No, they refused even to consider the evidence, much less accept it.
Like the marshal in Izzard the Nightmare Town, American institutions wanted us to know that they were stealing this one, and so they publicly admitted the “bipartisan” conspiracy to engineer the fake win:
Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.
Obviously, we cannot trust anyone in an “official” position. We need to burn down this Nightmare Town and start again by impeaching this government. We can do this by calling a convention of states:
Article V of the U.S. Constitution gives states the power to call a Convention of States to propose amendments. It takes 34 states to call the convention and 38 to ratify any amendments that are proposed.
I propose an amendment to the Constitution that closes the loopholes used by Deep State creatures to buy votes and perpetuate their power. This could have a few simple provisions, based on the things we’ve seen that have allowed the government to grow.
First, the Constitution needs a flat tax. Everyone pays; no one is excepted. As part of that, the amendment can specify that there can be no wealth transfer, or taking money, from one group to give to another. We are all in this together.
Next, it can prohibit entitlements, or government payments directly to citizens such as the ones that make up three-quarters of our budget. These are the “free things” that government uses to buy votes.
It could also clarify Marbury v. Madison, the landmark Supreme Court case that gave courts the ability to legislate from the bench. Specify that court oversight is a veto power of an entire Act, not a chance to pick and choose which parts are legal.
The amendment can revisit the Fourteenth Amendment and specify that “equal protection of the laws,” the magic phrase that enables parasitic wealth transfer equality programs, was intended in a natural rights conflict to mean that government cannot treat us unfairly, not that it has an affirmative duty to intervene in private business and social affairs to enforce equity.
It can also address the fastest-growing segment of government in the postwar era, the administrative state. These agencies represent the unelected bureaucracy that makes most of the rules. Ban them, and Congress must be accountable for government decisions.
Does it sound like a dream? The GOP has come to a resolution in its civil war; MAGA won. We are going to retake the states. We will have the votes. We can do this, but only if we have the willpower to demand it instead of just going with the flow yet again.
IMAGE: The original constitutional convention in 1787. Painting by Howard Chandler Christy. Public Domain.
Have you seen gas prices lately?
Britain: A Sanctuary for Deadly Islamic Terrorists
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Once again, the U.K. shows itself to be a safe haven for Islamic terrorists. According to a Feb. 14, 2021 report,
A terrorist who claimed asylum in Britain after he was sentenced to death in Egypt for a failed assassination plot is set to win the right to stay in this country.
Yasser Al-Sirri, 58, first claimed asylum in 1994 but was turned down and has taken the issue to court more than eight times at great cost to British taxpayers.
Al-Sirri, who was also charged in the US with assisting someone involved in the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, has appeared in several tribunals since.
And last week a tribunal decided he was entitled to remain in the U.K. as a refugee.
Among al-Sirri’s other jihadi bona fides, he was a member of Egypt’s terrorist organization, Islamic Jihad, and it was for his activities with that group—including a failed assassination attempt on the then Egyptian prime minister which instead killed a 12-year-old girl—that he was sentenced to death in absentia. One of the founding members of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad—which eventually merged with al-Qaeda—was Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader of al-Qaeda. Its original mission was to overthrow and supplant the Egyptian government with an Islamic one—basically the same mission that was for a time realized by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The “Blind Sheikh” who conspired in the 1993 World Trade Center bombings that killed six, including a pregnant woman, and injured thousands, was also a graduate of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad.
Such is the jihadi background and terrorist affiliations and activities of al-Sirri (at left in the photo above), this man who was just granted “refugee status” in Britain. Of course, granting asylum and visas to “radical” Muslims is nothing new for the U.K.
For example, despite having no papers on him—and despite telling the Home Office that “he had been trained as an ISIS soldier”—Ahmed Hassan was still granted asylum two years before he launched a terrorist attack on a London train station that left 30 injured in September 2017. The Home Office also allowed a foreign Muslim cleric to enter and lecture in London, even though he advocates decapitating, burning, and/or throwing homosexuals from cliffs. According to another report, “British teenagers are being forced to marry abroad and are raped and impregnated while the Home Office ‘turns a blind eye’ by handing visas to their [mostly Muslim] husbands.”
If the U.K. is that lenient when it comes to handing out refugee status and visas, surely those who are truly persecuted are easily granted asylum. Not so. Consider the case of Asia Bibi—a Christian wife and mother of five who spent a decade of her life being abused on death row in Pakistan for challenging the authority of Muhammad; her story perhaps best sheds light on the immigration situation in the U.K. After she was finally acquitted in November, 2018, Muslims rioted throughout Pakistan; in one march, more than 11,000 Muslims demanded her instant and public hanging.
As Pakistanis make for the majority of the U.K.’s significant Muslim population—Sajid Javid, then head of the Home Office, is himself Pakistani—when they got wind that the U.K. might offer asylum to Asia Bibi, this innocent woman whose life had been ripped apart, they too rioted. As a result, then Prime Minister Theresa May personally blocked Bibi’s asylum application—“despite U.K. playing host to [Muslim] hijackers, extremists and rapists,” to quote from one headline. In other words, Britain was openly allowing “asylum policy to be dictated to by a Pakistan mob,” reported the Guardian, “after it was confirmed it urged the Home Office not to grant Asia Bibi political asylum in the U.K.…”
Indeed, while denying Asia Bibi, the Home Office allowed a Pakistani cleric who celebrated the slaughter of a politician simply because he had defended Asia Bibi—a cleric deemed so extreme as to be banned from his native Pakistan—to enter and lecture in U.K. mosques.
Incidentally, and as discussed here, the treatment Asia Bibi received from the U.K. seems to be par for the course when it comes to persecuted Christian asylum seekers and even visitors.
Discussing how “visas were granted [by the Home Office] in July [2016] to two Pakistani Islamic leaders who have called for the killing of Christians accused of blasphemy,” Dr. Martin Parsons, a human rights activist, expressed his frustration at this topsy-turvy situation: “It’s unbelievable that these persecuted Christians who come from the cradle of Christianity are being told there is no room at the inn, when the U.K. is offering a welcome to Islamists who persecute Christians.”
In other words, persecuted Christians need not apply for asylum in the U.K., whereas “radical” Muslims that only hate and seek to sabotage Britain are welcomed with open arms.
Biden hints at Killing Second Amendment: ‘What Haman wanted to do on Purim’
From left to right: woman shooting gun, Joe Biden (Shutterstock)
President Biden is threatening to use an executive order to impinge upon the Second Amendment right to bear arms in what one Israeli politician describes as, “The first act of a dictator when he rises to power.”
Biden: Keeping His Second Amendment Promise
President Biden marked the third anniversary of the Parkland High School Shooting on Sunday by calling on Congress to enact strict gun-control legislation.
“Today, I am calling on Congress to enact commonsense gun law reforms, including requiring background checks on all gun sales, banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and eliminating immunity for gun manufacturers who knowingly put weapons of war on our streets,” Biden said in a statement.
At a follow-up press conference, White House Press Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked if the President would utilize an executive order to enact gun control. She answered in her characteristic ambiguously circuitous manner.
“The President has a range of actions at his disposal,” Psaki responded. “I think you were asking…about a legislative package, which I know. But he hasn’t ruled out either of those options, of course, but I don’t have anything to announce for you in terms of what the next steps would look like.”
The right to bear arms is protected by the Second Amendment to the US constitution which states simply, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Some of the reasons given for this amendment are:
- participating in law enforcement
- safeguarding against a tyrannical government
- repelling invasion
- facilitating a natural right of self-defense
Biden’s position on gun control was an explicit part of his platform. On his web page, he classified gun violence as “a public health epidemic”, promising to end it with “executive action.” On his page, he vowed to enact legislation that would hold gun companies liable for how their products are used. Biden’s plan includes the ability to sue legal gun owners even if the gun is used to prevent a crime or in self-defense. Biden added that the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act “protects these manufacturers from being held civilly liable for their products – a protection granted to no other industry.” It should be noted that contrary to Biden’s claim, no industry is held liable for the misuse of their product.
Whose Plan is it Really?
This stance, including resorting to executive action, is more consistent with the stated position of Vice President Kamala Harris than with that of President Biden. During a CNN Presidential Town Hall in April 2019, Biden was asked if he would utilize executive order to enact gun-control. He responded, “Some things you can but some things you can’t.”
Then-presidential hopeful Harris chided her future boss, saying, “Hey Joe, instead of saying ‘No we can’t, let’s say yes we can.”
Biden then reminded her, “It has to be constitutional. We have a constitution,” to which Harris responded again, “Yes, we can.”
She then stated her full intent:
“Upon being elected, I will give the United States Congress 100 days to get their act together and have the courage to pass reasonable gun safety laws, and if they fail to do it, then I will take executive action”
GUN CONTROL: ANTI-BIBLE
Though Judaism does not permit hunting as it precludes ritual slaughter, bearing arms for personal protection has many strong Biblical precedents. Abraham was proficient at war, emerging victorious in a battle against four kings. The Jews left Egypt with weapons and used them effectively many times before arriving in Israel–where God required they conquer the land. David established his reputation by using a sling against Goliath. But the need for citizens, most especially Jews, to bear weapons against a capricious government was illustrated in Shushan when the Jews chose not to wait for divine intervention and rose up in arms against their enemies.
Halacha (Torah law) most clearly requires a Jew to carry, or be prepared to carry, weapons, as stated in the Biblical precept:
And you shall very much safeguard your souls Deuteronomy 4:15
The Talmud (Berachot 58a) requires every person to protect himself and, in another section (Sanhedrin 57a) the sages applied this principle also to situations where someone other than yourself is in danger.
Image via nraila.org
FEIGLIN: “The first act of a dictator is to collect the weapons from the citizens”
Moshe Feiglin, an Israeli politician, Temple activist, and the leader of libertarian Zionist party Zehut, noted an additional Biblical precedent for the Second Amendment, or, more precisely, what happens when it does not exist. Feiglin cited the book of Samuel in which the Philistine conquerors had absolute control over the production of metal implements and, as a result, no Jews had weapons.
Thus on the day of the battle, no sword or spear was to be found in the possession of any of the troops with Shaul and Yonatan; only Shaul and Yonatan had them. I Samuel 13:22
“The first act of a dictator when he rises to power is to collect the weapons from the citizens,” Feiglin told Israel365 News. “This is a historical fact that we also learn from the Bible. Taking away weapons from the people has nothing to do with preventing murder and everything to do with controlling the people. This is the definition of a conquered nation; one in which the people do not have the right to carry weapons.”
“It is clear that Haman was not able to take the weapons from the Jews, otherwise, the story of Purim would have ended very differently,” Feiglin said.
“If the US government really cared about the lives of their children, they would make it illegal to own a private pool since far more children die from drowning in private pools than die from guns. I doubt there is one American who would call for filling in all the pools.”
“The right to own a pool is certainly no greater than the right to carry a gun and, in fact, is only justified by a pleasure principle whereas the right to own a gun has many serious justifications,” Feiglin added.
He went on to explain the religious basis for having a gun.
“The Torah is based on the freedom of the individual,” Feiglin said. “Man must be free to serve God. It is for this reason that the Philistines took away the right to carry arms. Their real intent was to drive the Jews away from serving God. “
The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killed 17 people, making it the deadliest high school shooting in US history. After the shooting, Governor Rick Scott implemented new restrictions to Florida’s gun laws and also allowed for the arming of teachers who were properly trained and the hiring of school resource officers.
LIMBAUGH DEAD AT AGE 70…
Via Fox News:
Rush Limbaugh, the monumentally influential media icon who transformed talk radio and politics in his decades behind the microphone, helping shape the modern-day Republican Party, died Wednesday at the age of 70 after a battle with lung cancer, his family announced.
Limbaugh’s wife, Kathryn, made the announcement on his radio show.
The radio icon learned he had Stage IV lung cancer in January 2020 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Trump at the State of the Union address days later. First lady Melania Trump then presented America’s highest civilian honor to Limbaugh in an emotional moment on the heels of his devastating cancer diagnosis.
Pic of the Day………….
Biden Takes ‘Death to America’ Terrorists Off Terror List, Replaces Them With Republicans
The Biden administration responded to protests against its stolen election by embedding a domestic extremism office into the National Security Council. The man in charge of making it happen, Joshua Geltzer, had previously denied that Black Lives Matter was a terrorist threat and had attacked the Trump administration’s response to Antifa and BLM violence in Portland.
That means that the only domestic extremists the NSC will be fighting are Republicans.
Even while the Biden administration is preparing to double down on Obama’s abuse of the national security state to target his political opponents, it’s also giving real terrorists a pass.
Joe Biden, whose biggest bundlers included the Iran Lobby, announced he was ending support for American allies fighting the Houthis, and then went even further by preparing to remove the terrorist organization whose motto is, “Death to America”, which took American hostages and tried to kill American sailors, from the list of designated foreign terrorist organizations.
The motto of Iran’s Houthi Jihadis is, “Allahu Akbar, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews, Victory to Islam.” The Houthis took over parts of Yemen as a result of the chaos unleashed by Obama’s pro-Islamist Arab Spring. Since then they’ve been engaged in a protracted war while causing a local famine by confiscating food from the local population.
Last year, the Trump administration had finally secured the release of three American hostages, Sandra Loli, an American aid worker who had been held for 3 years, another American who had been held for a year, and the body of a third American, in exchange for 240 Houthis, including three dozen Islamic terrorists who had been trained in the use of missiles and drones by Iran.
Like those launched at the USS Mason.
The Houthis lived up to their “Death to America” slogan by repeatedly launching cruise missiles at the USS Mason which had been protecting shipping in the area. And they lived up to the second half of their slogan by ethnically cleansing the remaining local Jewish population, locking them up, and confiscating their homes and land. Local reports stated that the Houthis were “cutting off water & electricity to Jewish homes and preventing Jews from purchasing food.”
“No Jew would be allowed to stay here,” one of the Jewish refugees said.
The Iran-backed Islamic terrorists fight using 18,000 child soldiers. The soldiers, many abducted, some as young as 10, are taught to hate America and to kill enemies of Iran.
None of this stopped Biden’s State Department from taking the Houthis off the terror list.
“Secretary Blinken has been clear about undertaking an expeditious review of the designations of Ansarallah,” the State Department claimed. “After a comprehensive review, we can confirm that the Secretary intends to revoke the Foreign Terrorist Organization and Specially Designated Global Terrorist designations of Ansarallah.”
‘Ansarallah’ or ‘Defenders of Allah’ is what the Houthis call themselves. Blinken had only been confirmed on Tuesday. By next Friday, he had already somehow completed the “comprehensive review”, amid all the other minor business like China, Russia, and a global pandemic, and decided that the Islamic terrorists whose motto is “Death to America” aren’t really terrorists.
How can the Biden administration deny that Islamic Jihadis backed by Iran who attacked Americans are terrorists? The State Department claimed that this, “has nothing to do with our view of the Houthis and their reprehensible conduct, including attacks against civilians and the kidnapping of American citizens.” Not to mention the attacks on the USS Mason.
But the Biden administration isn’t even going to pretend to care about attacks on our military.
The Bidenites are claiming that they’re taking the Houthis, whom they don’t deny are terrorists, off the list of designated terrorist groups because of the “humanitarian consequences”.
That’s a lie, no matter how often you hear it in the media, because Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States would be providing licenses to “humanitarian activities conducted by non-governmental organizations in Yemen and to certain transactions and activities related to exports to Yemen of critical commodities like food and medicine.”
That’s despite the fact that the humanitarian crisis in Yemen was caused by the Houthis.
Nevertheless the media, echoing propaganda from the Iran Lobby and Qatar, a close terrorist ally of Iran, has falsely claimed that the Houthis are the victims of the Yemen famine. A number of politicians, mostly Democrats, but some Republicans, as well as various aid groups, have pushed this same disinformation campaign about the causes of the Yemen famine.
America and its allies have spent billions providing food, medicine, and other humanitarian aid to Yemen. That aid has been seized by the Houthis who have used it for their own troops or to resell on the black market. This is a familiar problem from Syria to Somalia, and aid groups have refused to honestly address their complicity in aiding the terrorists who caused the crisis.
There’s no money in admitting that the aid an organization is providing is being seized by the terrorists, prolonging the conflict and worsening the humanitarian crisis. Some aid organizations share the same goal as the Houthis of worsening the crisis because it boosts their donations.
That’s why international aid organizations don’t want to talk about the Houthis taking their food donations, or about their use of child soldiers. “It’s a taboo,” an anonymous aid official had said.
When Secretary Pompeo announced that the United States was finally designating the Houthis a foreign terrorist organization, the United Nations took the lead in claiming that it would cause a humanitarian crisis. But the UN’s World Food Program had already admitted that its food shipments weren’t getting to the starving people because the Houthis were intercepting them.
The Middle East director for UNICEF also admitted that the Houthis were seizing food.
An Associated Press investigation found entire stores seling “cooking oil and flour displaying the U.N. food program’s WFP logo.” The former Houthi education minister said that 15,000 food baskets that were supposed to go to hungry families instead went to the Houthi terrorists whom the Biden administration is defending. Massive amounts of aid have been pumped into Yemen, and the famine has only grown worse because the Houthis have used starvation as a weapon.
The only way to end the famine is to end Iran’s grip on Yemen through its Houthi terrorists.
That’s obviously not what Biden or the Democrats have in mind. The loudest Democrat voices against designating the Houthis as a terrorist group have a troubling history with Iran.
“Reversing the designation is an important decision that will save lives and, combined with the appointment of a Special Envoy, offers hope that President Biden is committed to bringing the war to an end,” Senator Chris Murphy tweeted.
Murphy had been among the loudest voices against the designation.
And Murphy had met with Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif last year. That same year, he had advocated lowering sanctions on Iran for “humanitarian reasons”. Biden had also joined the push to use the pandemic as a pretext for reducing sanctions on the terror state.
That same year, the Left succeeded in forcing out Rep. Elliot Engel, one of the few remaining pro-Israel Democrats, and replaced him with the militantly anti-Israel Rep. Jamaal Bowman, whose election was backed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and her antisemitic ‘Squad’.
Engel, who had served as Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was replaced by Rep. Gregory Meeks, a strong backer of the Iran Deal. Meeks’ position was cheered by Iran Lobby groups. As far back as 2009, Meeks had declared at a hearing, “I have developed a tremendous appreciation for the work of the National Iranian American Council. I am pleased that we will hear the perspective of NIAC’s President, Mr. Trita Parsi.”
Emails released allegedly showed Parsi telling Iran’s Foreign Minister, “I am having a meeting with Gilchrest and Meeks, and they asked for our assistance in getting some communication going between the parliamentarians.”
Speaking to the Islamic Republic News Agency, the official state news agency of the Islamic terrorist state, Chairman Meeks allegedly stated that he was willing to travel to Iran and had been engaged in dialogue with Iranian legislators.
Meeks took the lead in attacking the designation of the Houthi Islamic terrorists as terrorists, arguing that, “No solution in Yemen will be sustainable unless the Houthis are involved.”
And that gets at the real reason why Biden and Democrats oppose the designation.
It’s not about humanitarian aid, which would have kept on going anyway, only to be stolen by the Houthis. It’s about supporting Iran’s bid to take over parts of Yemen in order to control shipping and tighten the grip of the Islamic terrorist regime over the entire region.
The ‘diplomatic’ solution advocated by Biden and the Democrats would finalize Iran’s grip over parts of Yemen. Designating the Houthis as terrorists would get in the way of another in a series of Islamist dirty deals with Iran that began with Obama and that will continue on under Biden.
Even while the Democrats insist loudly that the Houthis must be part of the solution in Yemen, they just as vocally cry that the Republicans must be isolated and eliminated in America.
The Democrats militarized D.C. with an armed occupation and are criminalizing political dissent. They have claimed that one riot, after a year full of them by their own activist wing, requires a permanent state of emergency that will be run through the National Security Council.
The Biden administration is not only taking the Houthis, and likely other Islamic terrorist groups, off the terror list, it’s putting the domestic political opposition on its terror list. This is an extension of the same Obama policy that illegally shipped foreign cash to Iran even while it was using the NSA to spy on pro-Israel members of Congress and on the Trump campaign.
The Democrats are happy to fight terrorism by designating their domestic political opponents as terrorists while removing the “Death to America” Houthis who have kidnapped and killed Americans, who fired on the USS Mason, and ethnically cleansed Jews, from the terror list.
And what do the Houthis plan to do with their newfound support from the Biden administration?
In addition to sanctioning the Houthis, the Trump administration sanctioned three of their leaders, beginning with Abdul Malik al-Houthi. The Houthi leader has made it clear that he intends to build up the same missile program that was used to attack the USS Mason.
“To have rockets that could reach far beyond Riyadh, this is a great achievement,” he said, referring to the Saudi capital.
He also promised to send terrorists to fight against Israel.
“Many of Yemen’s tribesmen are ambitious to fight against Israel, and they are looking for the day to participate along with the freemen of the Islamic nation against the Israeli enemy,”
This is the terrorist group that the Biden administration and the Democrats are bailing out even while they’re criminalizing the Republican political opposition as terrorists.
“Death to America” is something that the Houthis and their Democrat supporters can agree on.
Back to the Future with FISA
Last month DC Circuit Court Judge James Boasberg gave FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith probation, a small fine, and community service instead of the five years in prison and the $250,000 fine his crime deserved. As it happens, Boasberg is also presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court that Clinesmith had defrauded. More than a travesty of justice, Boasberg’s action lifted the robe of secrecy on the FISA court, whose unchecked power troubles many in Congress.
“The FISA court is a judicial body with no parallel in American history,” Sen. Ron Wyden explained in 2013. “A group of judges operating in complete secret and issuing binding rulings based solely on the government’s arguments.” As Sen. Richard Blumenthal clarified, the FISA court “exercises vast invisible power.” From the start, that powerful court was all about targeting American citizens.
“FISA was originally enacted in the 1970s to curb widespread abuses by both Presidents and former FBI officials of bugging and wiretapping Americans without any judicial warrant,” Sen. Patrick Leahy testified in 2002. One of the victims was the leftist Morton Halperin, who wrote in Defense Strategies for the Seventies that the Soviet Union constituted no danger to the United States, and the USSR never contemplated the use of military force against Western Europe. Halperin’s telephone was illegally tapped by officials in the Nixon administration.
“It is a great pleasure for me to testify again on FISA,” Halperin said in the same 2002 hearing. “As you know, I was deeply involved in the process that led to the enactment of it. I urged the Congress to support it. I still think it is in the national interest and plays a vital role.”
Sen. Edward Kennedy introduced the FISA Act in 1977, during the administration of Jimmy Carter. Ronald Reagan’s defeat of Carter so enraged Kennedy that he sought help from the Soviet Union, then headed by the KGB’s Yuri Andropov, a hard-line Stalinist. Kennedy offered to help Andropov deal with Reagan and in return the Soviet boss would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election.
Sen. Kennedy collaborated with a hostile foreign power to influence an American election. The FISA process failed to stop or expose this criminal collaboration, which did not emerge until the 1990s. Greater failures were yet to come. As Sen. Arlen Specter also testified in 2002, FISA played no role in stopping the terrorists of September 11, 2001.
“The failure to obtain a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for Zacarias Moussaoui was a matter of enormous importance,” Specter said. If American officials had gotten into Moussaoui’s computer, and followed up on reports of terrorist flight training, Specter said, “9/11 might well have been prevented.” It wasn’t, yet the FISA court, a body with no parallel in American history, continued to wield unchecked power.
By 2016, the “composite character” David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama had transformed the nation into a more authoritarian arrangement. The outgoing president picks his successor and rigs the FBI and DOJ to support Hillary Clinton and attack Donald Trump. His campaign was not collaborating with Russia, so the task for the FBI and DOJ was to get creative. Enter Kevin Clinesmith, of the FBI’s national security and cyber law division.
The FBI lawyer falsified an email to say that U.S. Navy veteran Carter Page was not a CIA asset, when in fact he was. That exposed the Trump associate to surveillance under FISA. Were it not for DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, the crime would have gone undiscovered.
In August 2020 Clinesmith pleaded guilty to falsifying the email, so in January 2021 he was an admitted felon awaiting sentence, not a “defendant,” as Boasberg described him. The FISA court boss also told the court Clinesmith had made a “misstatement,” a strange description of deliberate falsification. The FISA warrant to surveille Carter Page, Boasberg also explained, would have been approved even without the lawyer’s misstatement.
Judge Boasberg made these statements in open court, and his conduct is evidence of the way he acts as presiding judge of the FISA court. That body holds a distinct advantage over the U.S. Supreme Court, which operates in public, with rulings and opinions endlessly analyzed.
In 2014, Chief Justice John Roberts appointed Boasberg to the FISA court, but there was no public hearing to determine his fitness to serve on that body. The president of the United States can be impeached and so can justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. It remains unclear if FISA court judges can be impeached, and whether the secret court would allow any impeachment attempt to be made public.
Boasberg knew the FISA court would have approved the warrant on Carter Page without Clinesmith’s falsification. So Boasberg doubtless signed off the entire process, bogus dossier and all. The FISA court boss then slips back into his circuit court robe and lets Clinesmith go with a tap on the wrist. This has no parallel on the U.S. Supreme Court.
John Roberts, Sonia Sotomayor, Clarence Thomas et al cannot let stand a lower court ruling then step down to the lower court and participate in the sentencing process. So even without lifetime tenure – FISA court judges have a seven-year term – Boasberg holds a distinct advantage. In effect, Boasberg is the nation’s most powerful justice, and the FISA court the most powerful in the land.
Kevin Clinesmith was the only person to face criminal charges from the investigation of U.S. Attorney John Durham. The alleged man of integrity brought no charges against FBI director James Comey and FBI counterintelligence boss Peter Strzok. They operated above the law and got away with it, and that travesty of justice will have serious consequences going forward.
If the FBI wants a warrant to spy on any American for partisan purposes, presiding FISA court judge James Boasberg will be okay with it. Meanwhile, Morton Halperin, who was “deeply involved” in the creation of FISA, is now a senior advisor with the Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros. The leftist billionaire is surely delighted with the way things have turned out.
Bombshell report reveals that terrorists exploiting weak borders to try and infiltrate country, wage war
by: Pat Droney
A couple of years ago, former President Donald Trump was mocked when he suggested that terrorists, whom he described as “some real bad ones” had crossed the border at the same time he was attempting to convince Congress to pay for the border wall.
As it turns out like it nearly always has, Trump was correct, the Washington Free Examiner reports, or at least correct that such a scenario could easily play out in the United States as it had in Europe.
In a new book set to be released this week, “America’s Covert Border War, The Untold Story of the Nation’s Battle to Prevent Jihadist Infiltration,” journalist and former counterterrorism official Todd Bensman writes that a model in Europe is something that likely could also show itself in the United States.
In Europe, Bensman found 104 terrorists who had crossed the border, which he notes proves the concept that illegal border crossings by terrorists can and does happen.
According to government records, Bensman said that 22,000 aliens referred to as “special interest aliens,” or terrorist-related immigrants had been encountered in the eleven years between 2008 and 2019.
(Excerpt) Read more at lawenforcementtoday.com …
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