Login
Lunden Roberts, the mother of Hunter Biden’s daughter Navy Joan Roberts, told British host Piers Morgan on Thursday that President Joe Biden has never contacted his granddaughter.
Roberts formerly worked as Hunter’s assistant and has spoken out about dealing with him following their child’s birth in 2018, noting both the president and his son’s efforts to distance themselves from Navy. Roberts on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” said neither the president nor his son has ever met Navy in person and that the elder Biden has never even reached out to his granddaughter.
“Have you ever heard from either President Biden or the first lady directly?” Morgan asked.
“No. No, I have not,” Roberts answered.
Morgan followed up by asking if she thinks that’s “surprising,” with Roberts answering she does not.
Roberts also told Morgan that Hunter has never met his daughter “in person.”
“Hunter’s relationship with his daughter has been built through Zoom,” she said. “He was required to call once a month or something like that. Navy gets to pick out one of his paintings, and that’s how they would start building a relationship. However, Hunter went above and beyond. He not only called her once a month, but once they started building a relationship, he wanted to call weekly or sometimes a couple of times a week just to talk to her. When she goes into surgery, he wants to Zoom and talk to her. He calls to check on her at different times and things like that. He has gone above what the time frame required and has done that for her, which I appreciate tremendously.”
Morgan asked if there are any plans in place for them to meet in person.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Roberts answered. “Me and Hunter haven’t worked the details out with that. But, I mean, like, the world knows. Hunter has a lot on his plate right now. I think that that needs to be his main focus, and getting through this time and then the rest can come after. Navy is well aware. She knows that her father’s very busy right now, and he’s got a lot of things going on and she’s waited five years; she can wait a couple more months.”
Roberts and Hunter resolved their child support dispute in June 2023 and the Biden family finally acknowledged Navy in July 2023.
Roberts told Morgan that the “door is always open” for the president to meet his granddaughter and it “always will be.”
Hunter gave his daughter some of his paintings and he paid Roberts’ legal fees. She unsuccessfully attempted to grant her daughter the Biden last name as part of their child support dispute.
Hunter’s federal gun trial began Monday and he is facing three charges brought by special counsel David Weiss in September, which include providing false statements and knowingly possessing a gun while being addicted to drugs.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
The post Mother of Hunter Biden’s Daughter Says President Still Has Never Met or Contacted Granddaughter appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Last week, a New York City jury, prompted by the legal coordination between Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Judge Juan Merchan—both partisan actors—convicted Donald Trump on 34 felony counts having to do with falsification of business records. Or election fraud. Or more tax issues. Or … something. Nobody really knows, and apparently it was unnecessary for the jury to agree on the crime in order to find Trump guilty of one.
No matter.
Trump was convicted and may now face jail time. We’ll find out on July 11—just a few days before the Republican National Convention. Obviously, this represents opportune timing for the Biden campaign. And yet Trump remains firmly knotted with President Joe Biden in the race for the White House. There have been four polls taken since Trump’s conviction. In all of them, Biden and Trump are either tied or within two points either way.
But how? The question echoes throughout the media: How can a convicted felon be running even with the incumbent president? The answer is twofold: First, Biden is a truly awful president; second, Biden has no ground to stand on in labeling Trump a threat to law and order.
First, Biden’s terrible record. Americans have been slammed by inflation for three years. Our social fabric has continued to decay as Biden openly seeks “equity”—meaning discriminatory legal regimens designed at rectifying group disparities—in every area of the federal government. On the foreign front, Biden has hamstrung Ukraine in its defense against Russia, and openly manipulated on behalf of Iran and Hamas in Israel’s war against the terror group that performed Oct. 7. It is difficult to see an area of the world that is markedly better off since Biden took the White House.
Second, Biden’s hypocrisy. In the aftermath of the Trump conviction, Trump naturally condemned the justice system that targeted him. Biden then responded by doubling down on his narrative that Trump’s pushback represents a threat to our democracy and our institutions: Last week, Biden staggered out to the podium to claim that “the American principle that no one is above the law was reaffirmed.” He added that it was “dangerous” and “irresponsible for anyone to say this was rigged just because they don’t like the verdict.”
The problem is this: Biden as defender of our democracy and our institutions just doesn’t play. This is the same president who tried to use his Occupational Safety and Health Administration to illegally cram down vaccines on 80 million Americans; who attempted, in defiance of law, to relieve student loan debt—and then bragged about defying the Supreme Court; whose Justice Department even let him off the hook for mishandling of classified material by calling him a dotard. Biden’s party has spent years tut-tutting massive riots, appeasing pro-terrorist student trespassers, and calling for an end to parental autonomy. There isn’t an institution in the country Biden hasn’t weakened.
To hear Biden rail against Trump for undermining institutions, then, simply won’t play. But Biden doesn’t have much left in the playbook.
All of which means that Trump still—still—has the upper hand. Ironically, Trump being sent to jail might actually help him, given that most Americans will correctly see the jailing of Biden’s chief political opponent as an act of vicious partisanship unworthy of the most powerful republic in world history.
In 2020, Biden ran on the platform of stability and normalcy; he has exploded both. All he’s left with is slogans about Orange Hitler. And that’s unlikely to be enough come November if gas prices are high, groceries cost too much, and the world remains aflame.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
The post Of ‘Convicted Felons’ and Lying Frauds appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Nearly 14 months after the first of four unprecedented criminal prosecutions against former President Donald Trump commenced in earnest, the Democrat-lawfare complex got its man: The Soviet show trial in “Justice” Juan Merchan’s dingy New York City courtroom produced its preordained “guilty” verdict.
It is perhaps hackneyed to observe that, in convicting and seeking to incarcerate a former president and current leading presidential candidate, we have “crossed the Rubicon.” Well …
The Rubicon, truthfully, is a shallow, inconsequential river in Italy. That it is so shallow helps explain why Julius Caesar was able to cross it so easily. At this juncture in American history, it no longer suffices to speak of crossing a Rubicon. We are now rapidly crossing great seas—perhaps even circumnavigating the globe. You might call President Joe Biden and the rest of the Democrat-lawfare complex our modern-day Magellans.
Ruinous or not, however, their precedent has now been set. And that raises the obvious question: For Democrats, will all of this, and especially their multifront anti-Trump lawfare, prove to be worth it?
That obvious question, in turn, has an equally obvious answer: absolutely, positively not.
First, Democrats do not seem to be getting much of a bump in the early polls after last week’s verdict. In each of the two major national polls that have been conducted exclusively after the verdict, from pollsters Emerson College and Morning Consult, Trump leads by one point. As even the liberal Washington Post conceded on Thursday, “Other polls conducted before and after the verdict suggest between no change and a two-point shift toward Biden. The shifts are quite a bit smaller than pretrial polls suggested they could be.”
Considering that Trump was already leading in most national horse race polling and that the Republican Party currently has a built-in Electoral College advantage wherein its presidential candidate can slightly lose the popular vote while still prevailing in the electoral vote, the Biden-Harris campaign ought to be worried.
Democrats’ lawfare isn’t winning over many swing voters.
Former President Donald Trump sits in the courtroom May 30 during his since-ended “hush money” trial in New York City. Democrats got their preordained “guilty” verdict, but there’s no evidence it gave them the polling bump they hoped for. (Photo: Michael Santiago/Getty Images)
Second, the damage the Democrat-lawfare complex has caused to the American public’s faith and trust in the justice system is simply astronomical—and likely irreparable. Even prior to the onslaught of Trump indictments filed last year, many of us “deplorables” were already convinced we have a two-tier system of justice in this country: Consider the wholly disparate prosecutorial treatment of the BLM-Antifa rioters and the “J6-ers” present during the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol jamboree, for instance.
But the Democrat-lawfare complex’s serial overreaches have now removed any doubt as to the blatant impartiality and patent unfairness of our regnant legal order. It is impossible not to be jaded or cynical. Leviticus 19:15 commands: “You shall commit no injustice in judgment; you shall not favor a poor person or respect a great man; you shall judge your fellow with righteousness.”
Does anyone think this describes America today?
Third, the Right finally seems to be snapping out of its long lull and beginning to gear itself for pitched battle against a domestic foe that wants to punish us, prosecute us, subjugate us, and remove us from the entirety of American public life. That portends poorly for leftists.
My friend John Yoo, the Bush-era Justice Department official and law professor normally a bit less pugnacious than yours truly, opined: “Repairing this breach of constitutional norms will require Republicans to follow the age-old maxim: Do unto others as they have done unto you.”
Megyn Kelly, the influential broadcaster who has had a complex relationship with Trump going back to the 2016 GOP presidential primary, said after the verdict: “I’m going to utter words I never thought I would utter in my life: We need Steve Bannon.” The famously combative Bannon appears headed for an unjust four-month prison sentence in a few weeks, but her point stands.
Democrats have no idea what they have unleashed. Perhaps worse, they don’t even care.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
The post Democrats’ Lawfare Proves Politically Impotent, Likely to Come Back to Haunt Them appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The five criminal and civil prosecutions of former President Donald Trump all prompt heated denials from Democrats that President Joe Biden and Democrat operatives had a role in any of them.
But Biden has long let it be known that he was frustrated with his own Department of Justice’s federal prosecutors for their tardiness in indicting Trump.
Biden was upset because any delay might mean that his rival Trump would not be in federal court during the 2024 election cycle. And that would mean he could not be tagged as a “convicted felon” by the November election while being kept off the campaign trail.
Politico has long prided itself on its supposed insider knowledge of the workings of the Biden administration. Note that it was reported earlier this February that a frustrated Biden “has grumbled to aides and advisers that had [Attorney General Merrick] Garland moved sooner in his investigation into former President Donald Trump’s election interference, a trial may already be underway or even have concluded…”
If there was any doubt about the Biden administration’s effort to force Trump into court before November, Politico further dispelled it—even as it blamed Trump for Biden’s anger at Garland: “That trial still could take place before the election and much of the delay is owed not to Garland but to deliberate resistance put up by the former president and his team.”
Note in passing how a presidential candidate’s legal right to oppose a politicized indictment months before an election by his opponent’s federal attorneys is smeared by Politico as “deliberate resistance.”
Given Politico was publicly reporting six months ago about Biden’s anger at the pace of his DOJ’s prosecution of Trump, does anyone believe his special counsel, Jack Smith, was not aware of such presidential displeasure and pressure?
Note Smith had petitioned and was denied an unusual request to the court to speed up the course of his Trump indictment.
And why would Biden’s own attorney general, Garland, select such an obvious partisan as Smith? Remember, in his last tenure as special counsel, Smith had previously gone after popular Republican and conservative Virginia governor Bob McDonnell.
Yet Smith’s politicized persecution of the innocent McDonnell was reversed by a unanimous verdict of the U.S. Supreme Court. That rare court unanimity normally should have raised a red flag to the Biden DOJ about both Smith’s partiality and his incompetence.
But then again, Smith’s wife had donated to the 2020 Biden campaign fund. And she was previously known for producing a hagiographic 2020 documentary (“Becoming”) about Michelle Obama.
Selecting a special counsel with a successful record of prior nonpartisan convictions was clearly not why the DOJ appointed Smith.
The White House’s involvement is not limited to the Smith federal indictments.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ paramour and erstwhile lead prosecutor in her indictment of Trump, Nathan Wade, met twice with the White House counsel’s office. On one occasion, Wade met inside the Biden White House.
Subpoenaed records reveal that the brazen Wade actually billed the federal government for his time spent with the White House counsel’s staff—although so far no one has disclosed under oath the nature of such meetings.
Of the tens of thousands of local prosecutions each year, in how many instances does a county prosecutor consult with the White House counsel’s office—and then bill it for his knowledge?
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s just-completed felony convictions of Trump were spearheaded by former prominent federal prosecutor Matthew Colangelo. He is not just a well-known Democratic partisan who served as a political consultant to the Democratic National Committee.
Colangelo had also just left his prior position in the Biden Justice Department—reputedly as Garland’s third-ranking prosecutor—to join the local Bragg team.
Again, among all the multitudes of annual municipal indictments nationwide, how many local prosecutors manage to enlist one of the nation’s three top federal attorneys to head their case?
So, apparently, it was not enough for the shameless Bragg to campaign flagrantly on promises to go after Trump. In addition, Bragg brashly drafted a top Democratic operative and political appointee from inside Biden’s DOJ to head his prosecution.
Not surprisingly, it took only a few hours after the Colangelo-Bragg conviction of Trump for Biden on spec to start blasting his rival as a “convicted felon.” Biden is delighted that his own former prosecutor, a left-wing judge, and a Manhattan jury may well keep Trump off the campaign trail.
So, it is past time for the media and Democrats to drop this ridiculous ruse of Biden’s White House “neutrality.” Instead, they should admit that they are terrified of the will of the people in November and so are conniving to silence them.
(C) 2024 Tribune Content Agency LLC
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
The post The Myth That Biden Had Nothing to Do With the Prosecutions of Trump appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Does Time magazine really matter anymore?
It still has a circulation of more than 1 million, but that is one-third of what it was in 2012. Does anything it reports still resonate, or is it like a tree that collapses unheard in the solitude of the woods?
Time just secured an interview with President Joe Biden, when Biden has granted very few interviews to print news outlets. Time gained access to Donald Trump in April, and the first thing you notice when you compare the two interviews is the length.
At the top of the transcripts, Time claims the Biden transcript is a “28 minute read,” while Trump’s is listed as 83 minutes. Time’s “fact check” of the Trump interviews (“21 minute read”) is almost as long as the Biden interview.
Another noticeable tilt is the agenda of questions. Biden’s questions were overwhelmingly about foreign policy. There are three on inflation, three on immigration, and three on Biden’s age. There were zero questions on Hunter Biden and the Biden scandals. There were zero questions on the Trump trial or the Trump prosecutions.
Did Team Biden put any conditions on which questions could be asked? It’s a fair question, considering how selective they’ve been in handing out interviews.
By contrast, by my count, Time asked Trump 11 questions about the Trump prosecutions (and “revenge” for them), five questions about Jan. 6, two about potential political violence in 2025, four on fighting the “Deep State,” three on his “dictator for a day” joke, and four on whether he’d seek to overturn the 22nd Amendment and seek a third term.
On top of that, Trump drew 14 questions on abortion policy and six on crime. It’s obvious from the Time transcripts that they consider Trump’s opinions on domestic issues to be much more controversial—and even extremist—than anything Biden advocates.
The rest of the media picked up on Trump’s abortion answers, and Biden didn’t have to provide any abortion answers.
Even the age questions to Biden were timid softballs, and Biden’s answer—suggesting he could take his interviewer Massimo Calabresi in a fight—was taken as a joke. Calabresi told CNN’s Jake Tapper it was “lighthearted” and “quite funny.” Biden responded to a follow-up about voter concerns with his usual spin: “Watch me.” Calabresi confessed it might be a “stock answer.” So, why not push through it? Why not ask, “Everyone’s been watching you, that’s your problem”?
Time could have asked Biden why his team refuses to release audio of his interview with stolen-documents special counsel Robert Hur, with the fear Republicans will exploit the audio in advertising. But Time pretends Hur is a nobody and that Biden’s stolen documents should already be forgotten. Hur refused to prosecute Biden, and Jack Smith just keeps prosecuting Trump.
It looks a bit rigged.
By contrast, Trump’s interviewer Eric Cortellessa lectured him: “I just want to say for the record, there’s no evidence that President Biden directed this prosecution against you.” Trump rejected that: “I always hate the way a reporter will make those statements. They know it’s so wrong.” Time, like other slavishly pro-Biden outlets, refuses to acknowledge that Biden’s No. 3 Justice Department official Matthew Colangelo resigning to join Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s team of Trump prosecutors shreds the “no evidence” lie.
The Democrats running Time are hyperbolically raising fear that a president using the Justice Department might go after his political opponents, while somehow being blind and deaf enough to ignore that Biden is using the Justice Department to go after his political opponents. They can’t believe anyone would object to their shamelessness.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
The post Time Magazine Betrays Its Tilt in Biden, Trump Interviews appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—North Carolina election officials were perplexed about how to follow President Joe Biden’s directive to expand voting among convicted felons, according to emails obtained by The Daily Signal.
Biden’s Executive Order 14019, which put the power of federal agencies behind mobilizing voters, calls for the Justice Department to ensure that convicted felons know how to restore their voting rights. Those rules vary by state.
State election officials were set to have a Zoom conference June 25, 2021, with White House officials on implementing the president’s order, including questions and suggestions.
A day before the conference, Karen Bell, executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, emailed staff about what points they wanted to address.
“The main one I can think of ideas for is about felons and voting,” Katelyn Love, general counsel for the Board of Elections replied via email, before citing the U.S. Department of Justice. “We don’t get notice from DOJ when a felon completes their sentence. This would be helpful information for us to have, so we know that the person is eligible to register again.”
Love continued: “If they don’t already, DOJ could provide information to NC felons when they start probation or when they are placed on supervised release (it’s not called parole anymore) that they are not eligible to register and vote until they complete their sentence.”
Kelly Tornow, associate counsel for North Carolina’s election board, responded: “Those are great felon ideas.”
Tornow said she was primarily concerned with enlisted U.S. service members and the Defense Department, and wrote that “the military should provide information to the service member about registering to vote.”
The Daily Signal obtained 159 pages of documents from the North Carolina State Board of Elections regarding Biden’s order on voter mobilization through a public records request.
Critics use the term “Bidenbucks” to refer to the president’s controversial executive order, which they say is meant to use the force of government to tip the scales in elections.
Federal agencies have coordinated with transparently left-leaning advocacy groups to implement Biden’s order.
Further, several Republicans in Congress contend that Biden’s order on turning out the vote could violate the Antideficiency Act, a law that prohibits federal employees from obligating tax dollars not authorized by Congress.
The lawmakers also express concern about federal agencies’ engaging in partisan political activity in violation of laws such as the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from using work time or resources for partisan political activities.
Last year, on March 13, Sarah Bolton, former policy director for North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, forwarded an email to Bell, the executive director of the state election board, who at the time was secretary-treasurer of the National Association of State Election Directors.
The email forwarded by Bolton was about paying college students to register voters. Students are viewed as a key constituency for Democrats.
Bolton told Bell to “let me know if this might be of interest. If it is, I can connect you directly.”
She forwarded a message from Michael Dannenberg, senior fellow for the College Promise and a consultant with the Foundation for Civic Leadership, in which he wrote:
We’re hoping Karen in her new role with the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) might consider joining, maybe even leading, a non-partisan effort to get state and local officials to urge [U.S. Education Secretary Miguel] Cardona to make clear that government entities, notably offices that NASED members lead, and non party-affiliated, non-profit 501(c)(3) organizations like the League of Women Voters can pay work study students with Federal Work Study funds for non-partisan voter registration work just as colleges now can for identical work.
Mitchell D. Brown, equal justice work fellow for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, sent an email Aug. 17, 2021, to Damon Circosta, then chairman of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, about the need to “target federal agencies and programs that we think would be good opportunities for voter registration.”
Copied on the email was Laura Williamson, then associate director of democracy at Demos, a liberal think tank that drafted Biden’s executive order. Demos also is working with several federal agencies to implement the order.
Brown’s email included an attachment with recommendations for using federal agencies to get out the vote. They included using U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services through its naturalization ceremonies; signing up voters on Healthcare.gov; and registering voters through the interagency Transition Assistance Program and the Labor Department’s Pathways Home program.
The documents released to The Daily Signal include a May 24, 2023, email from Doug R. Hess, a political scientist and consultant with the Institute for Responsive Governing. That organization is fiscally sponsored by the liberal Arabella Advisors’ New Venture Fund, which financially backs multiple left-leaning organizations.
Hess’ email, with a memo attached, isn’t addressed directly to North Carolina, but notes that targeting Medicaid recipients for voter registration could advance the goals of Biden’s executive order. Hess wrote:
Consider this concrete example: Six states and D.C. recently adopted automatic voter registration for Medicaid. Based on my exploratory analysis, I believe these reforms may result in an impressive number of voter registration applications, perhaps far more than social service agencies have produced in the past. Federal health and program participation surveys could advance our understanding of this reform in ways that state administrative data alone cannot. Data from these surveys would also substantially benefit the growing political science literature on policy feedback and health policy. Regarding the feasibility of this proposal, this expansion would further the goals of President Biden’s Executive Order 14019—Promoting Access to Voting.
The post ‘Great Felon Ideas’: Battleground State Struggles to Apply Biden’s Election Order appeared first on The Daily Signal.
In our modern political dumpster fire, there has never been an art so refined and illustrious as pointless pearl-clutching.
In this, the ninth year of 2016, most everyone is fairly desensitized to the political drama emanating from the Left’s ardent claims that any conservative policy or protest is an appeal to fascism as their own organizations and protesters set fire to cities (and sometimes themselves).
Republicans pass a bill banning sexually explicit content in public schools from kindergarten to third grade? Florida Democrats and media labeled it fascism.
A U.S. Supreme Court justice’s wife flies a Revolutionary War flag commissioned by George Washington? Salon’s senior writer described Justice Samuel Alito and his wife as “extremely invested in the semiotics of American fascism.”
The New Republic, The Guardian, taxpayer-funded PBS—any time a Republican so much as upholds parliamentary procedure, defends former President Donald Trump, or questions the surge of gang and cartel members amid waves of illegal immigrants—these outlets are ready in the wings to call any to the right of Chairman Mao a fascist.
The latest banner of fascism to be shouted down in a “Two Minutes Hate” session out of George Orwell’s “1984”: flying the flag of the United States upside down. The horror!
As ridiculous as it might sound—the group that has spent the past eight years defending those who burn, shred, and desecrate the U.S. flag is suddenly outraged over many in the nation who have flown the U.S. flag upside down in a symbol of distress over Trump’s political prosecution and conviction.
Many on the Left and precious few on the Right have taken to social media to lambast those who would fly the U.S. flag upside down as “disrespectful,” “treasonous,” and “idol-worshipers.”
Is this the case? Are those who reacted to Trump’s felony convictions in New York City simply bowing at his feet in a brutal backstabbing of the United States? Is this heinous, unspeakable act the very hallmark of fascism and the alleged “cult of personality” that the Left has predicted for almost a century?
Of course not, and you know that.
We needn’t walk down the halls of easily accessible history to discern how this wrist-shattering pearl clutch is both hypocritical and ignorant. But we’ll do so, not out of necessity but because heaping good data en masse against poorly constructed arguments is entertaining.
First and foremost: Flying the flag of the United States upside down is not disrespectful, illegal, treasonous, or even unprecedented.
Although 4 U.S. Code § 8, commonly referred to as the “Flag Code,” isn’t legally enforceable (because U.S. citizens retain First Amendment rights to do with their own flags whatever they wish), flying the flag upside down under appropriate circumstances wouldn’t violate the law.
The law clearly states: “The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.” (The “union” refers to the patch of blue with 50 stars.)
Thousands in the U.S. have flown our flag upside down to express their “dire distress” in such instances over the past century.
Leftists consistently flew the U.S. flag upside down throughout Trump’s presidency to signal their deep disquiet and fear, from Washington state to Louisiana. Democrats in New Jersey resolutely flew the flag upside down in protest of Trump’s inauguration in January 2017. Some Republicans flew their flags upside down when Barack Obama was reelected in 2012.
The American flag has been flown upside down as “a tribute to veterans’ sacrifice,” and was one of the many symbols of protest against the Vietnam War used by leftist demonstrators in the 1960s.
The Flag Code doesn’t specify what “extreme danger to life or property” entails, nor does it restrict such interpretation to a physical danger or a political one. Might there be a situation today in which many Americans feel in deep distress over a perceived danger to the life and property of their republic?
Never before in American history has a former president, much less one running for office again, been charged and convicted in such a kangaroo-court fashion that even his political adversaries note the insanity of the circumstances.
In an extremely heated presidential election campaign, indicting one of the two frontrunners would be considered enough of an anathema—but the case of New York v. Trump was more than precarious, it was a circus.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, ran on the promise of doing anything he could to find something to indict Trump with. Outside his jurisdiction, Bragg used a federal election statute—which the Federal Election Commission already had stated Trump didn’t violate—as a convoluted lever to turn 34 counts of “falsifying business records,” misdemeanors that by this point were outside New York’s statute of limitations, into felonies.
As if that weren’t enough, Judge Juan Merchan refused to allow a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission to testify, refused to allow the defense to speak to the jury before deliberation, and informed jurors that to convict they didn’t have to reach a unanimous decision on what crime was committed.
Such actions by Merchan set a nation on fire even as trust in institutions already was wavering.
Elie Honig, a former federal and state prosecutor, wrote for New York magazine, an extremely liberal publication: “Prosecutors got Trump—but they contorted the law.” Honig pointed out that never before in U.S. history has there been a state prosecution using federal election law.
You’ll notice that I haven’t mentioned Trump’s sex life, his character, or his business decisions—in fact, many of those expressing extreme distress at this forded Rubicon aren’t being protective of Trump like he was some kind of nonsensical religious idol.
Sens. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, and Mitt Romney, R-Utah, who have spent the past few years as Trump’s chief opposition within the GOP, both called this case and conviction despicable.
When a reporter asks President Joe Biden whether he used this case to politically persecute Trump and he casts a wicked grin in her direction, how is the nation supposed to respond?
Reporter: "President Trump refers to himself as a political prisoner and blames you directly. What's your response to that, sir?"
— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) May 31, 2024
Biden: *smiles*pic.twitter.com/CZY8JUMvKO
Why is the left side of the aisle afforded the right to ride through towns and cities shouting about the impending doom of the republic like some bastardized caricature of Paul Revere, and the right side isn’t allowed to call out the very sham John Adams unpopularly fought in court to prevent?
Spare me your clutched pearls, neoconservatives. Your faux dignity and condescension at the concerns of Americans whose carcass of a justice system is paraded openly don’t move me.
I don’t have to defend Trump’s personal life and sign onto a “cult of personality” to recognize that each of us has a right to be free from political persecution and election interference.
Commentator Alyssa Farah’s silly claims that flying the flag upside down signals “selling out” are as pathetic and hypocritical as the rest of the cast of “The View” with whom she clucks and quacks about abortion rights, gun confiscation, and anti-Catholicism.
Whistling past the graveyard and sending a “strongly worded letter” have only mired us further in the muck of Third World antics.
I reserve the right to fly my flag upside down to signal my extreme distress at this danger to the life and property of the republic I love, and I’ll do so whenever I find it appropriate.
The post To the Condescending Cranks Faking Outrage Over Upside-Down Flags appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Many things human come in pairs. Eyes, ears, hands, feet, and lungs appear in twos. Even a single nose features two nostrils.
In this context, America’s new, two-track justice system might be perfectly natural: One for the Left—in which they suffer few consequences, if any, for their misdeeds—and one for the Right, in which arrests, trials, and prison sentences are routine.
After the Supreme Court’s current term ends later this month, masons should spend this summer re-chiseling the marble above its columns. Out with “Equal Justice Under Law.” In with “Bipolar Justice for All!”
Black Lives Matter and Antifa thugs on the Left spent the summer of 2020 yanking statues from pedestals, torching police precincts, and otherwise unleashing total mayhem. Then-Sen. Kamala Harris promoted a legal-defense fund to free arrestees. Few paid any price for the “fiery but mostly peaceful” George Floyd riots.
A peaceful demonstrator shares his opinion at a Black Lives Matter march on June 14, 2020, in Los Angeles. Few, if any, of his more violent BLM compatriots suffered any legal consequences for their anything but “mostly peaceful” actions after the killing of George Floyd less than three weeks earlier. (Photo: Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images)
The Jan. 6 hoodlums on the Right who shattered windows and smashed doors to breach the U.S. Capitol deserve serious prison time. But other protesters naively entered after Capitol Police waved them in.
“Hey, look. It’s open house!” some might have thought.
Many of these accidental tourists are in huge trouble. Arkansas’ Daniel Hatcher entered the Capitol, snapped some photos for two minutes, and walked out. The FBI arrested Hatcher in Little Rock last Feb. 13. He now faces federal charges.
Left-wing Deep State functionaries John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Peter Strzok, and Andrew Weissmann advanced the Russia Hoax, which bedeviled the Trump administration and divided America for three years. Each of these men scored a book contract and a TV deal. Literally.
On the Right, Russiagate ensnared Trump aides Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos, Gen. Michael Flynn, and Roger Stone. All were sentenced to prison. Trump pardoned Flynn and Stone. Gates served house arrest. Manafort and Papadopoulos went to the slammer.
The quintessence of these two systems involves 2016’s presidential nominees and how they separately tried to influence that election.
On the Left, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign paid $175,000 to Democratic law firm Perkins Coie, which engaged opposition-research shop Fusion GPS. It hired former British spy Christopher Steele. He wrote a baseless “Dirty Dossier” that hallucinated ties between Trump and the Kremlin. Team Clinton leaked this fraudulent report, which BuzzFeed published. And the Russia Hoax was off to the races.
On the Right, Trump was accused of reimbursing his then-attorney, Michael Cohen, for paying porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 to clam up about an alleged affair with Trump that both of them have denied.
As former Justice Department official John B. Daukas wrote in the American Spectator: “So, Hillary Clinton is found to be liable for mislabeling payments for the Steele Dossier as legal fees and gets an $8,000 civil fine; Trump has been found guilty of mislabeling nondisclosure payments as legal fees and is a convicted felon.”
As Yogi Berra might have said: “Only in America.”
Clinton went on to write books, deliver lectures, and whine loudly about why she lost to a real-estate magnate and TV personality on his first political campaign. Notwithstanding emotional scars, she is out a whopping eight grand.
Trump, meanwhile, endured a six-week trial that kept him off the campaign trail for four days each week, cost him undisclosed millions in—not to coin a phrase—legal expenses, and added abundant stress to his already high-pressure life. He awaits sentencing on July 11 and could receive four years for each of the 34 counts on which he was convicted. Total: 136 years in the big house.
But is this really so wrong?
If good things come in pairs, perhaps this applies to justice.
Rather than complain about two paths to justice, one Left and one Right, maybe conservatives should celebrate this development. After all, the truth about pectoral muscles also might apply to justice systems: “One is not enough, and three are too many.”
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
The post When Lady Justice Lifts Blindfold From Over Her Left Eye Only appeared first on The Daily Signal.
“I’ll be damned if I’m going to let Donald Trump turn America into a place that is filled with anger, resentment, and hate,” President Joe Biden said May 29 in Philadelphia.
So, why did America’s self-styled uniter-in-chief decide to “stop the shouting and lower the temperature”—as he promised in his inaugural address—by recruiting Robert De Niro, one of Hollywood’s loudest hotheads?
“Trump wants revenge, and he’ll stop at nothing to get it,” the veteran actor said as narrator of a Biden campaign ad released May 24. De Niro’s overheated audio track continues: “Now, he’s running again, this time threatening to be a dictator. To terminate the Constitution.”
Biden could have tapped the suave and even-keeled George Clooney or the widely admired Julia Roberts, both talented supporters. Instead, Biden picked the boisterous, unhinged De Niro, whose comments about Trump slide from the vulgar to the violent.
On May 28, the Biden campaign staged a press conference outside the Manhattan Criminal Courts Building. Inside Room 1530 that morning, I was among those witnessing closing arguments in New York State vs. Donald J. Trump. Confirming suspicions that this bookkeeping-entry trial was a Democratic election-interference operation, like Trump’s other persecutions, De Niro and Biden-Harris 2024 Communications Director Michael Tyler stood before microphones and taunted Trump on one of the toughest days of his life.
“I don’t mean to scare you. No, wait, maybe I do mean to scare you,” De Niro said. “If Trump returns to the White House, you can kiss these freedoms goodbye that we all take for granted … And elections. Forget about it. That’s over. That’s done. If he gets in. I can tell you right now. He will never leave.”
De Niro added, “Donald Trump wants to destroy not only the city, but the country, and, eventually, he could destroy the world.” (Funny: After Trump left office in January 2021, Americans’ freedoms and elections remained, and the rest of the Earth is still there.)
This disastrously misconceived stunt then melted down as local Trump fans defended the presumptive GOP presidential nominee and swapped insults with the two-time Academy Award winner, whose screen credits include “Goodfellas” and “Raging Bull.”
“You’re trash! You’re done!” one man yelled at De Niro. Another screamed: “You ruined Leo DiCaprio!”
“You are gangsters,” De Niro hollered back. “You are gangsters!”
This was not the first time that Biden’s new spokesman devolved into what the president decries as “anger, resentment, and hate.”
But De Niro and Biden are not so far apart.
The warm, lovable Grandpa Lunchbucket Joe from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who Democrats showcased in 2020 was a mirage. Americans have learned the hard way that Biden is a nasty, vindictive man who lusts to imprison the leader of the opposition. Asked Friday at the White House about Trump’s charge that Biden had made him a political prisoner, Biden displayed an Arctic smile that seemed chilled by ice water in his arteries.
???Exclusive !!! The face of corruption. pic.twitter.com/IAvDv7X5ie
— Chris LaCivita (@LaCivitaC) May 31, 2024
Really?
Biden, 81, and De Niro, 80, deserve each other. They are a pair of mean, cranky, decaying leftists who gush anger, resentment, and hate at their political opponents.
In a word: Badfellas.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
The post ‘Badfellas’: Joe Biden and Robert De Niro, 2 Raging Peas in a Pod appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Earlier this year, Joe Biden’s campaign manager said, “We are running a campaign like the fate of our democracy depends on it.”
That’s a heady statement, but an intentional one. The president himself uses the term “our democracy” frequently, as do most progressive politicians and pundits as they wring their hands about the coming election.
Book titles such as “Reclaiming Our Democracy,” “The Future of Our Democracy,” and “Driving Our Democracy to Autocracy” are popping up increasingly as well.
A conspiracy? Doubtful. But neither is it merely coincidence.
According to Google’s Ngram Viewer, an online tool that searches historical sources to track word usage over time, only twice before has the term “our democracy” been in use more frequently than today: the late 1880s (around the time the Statue of Liberty was dedicated) and the late 1930s (during the height of the Great Depression and the onset of World War II).
Between 1950 and 1970, the term “our democracy” was rarely seen in print. But its usage has ratcheted up steadily since the Reagan Revolution began in 1981, and especially since 2000. It’s a development about which we all should be dubious.
I recall learning in 10th grade civics class (for readers born after 1980, that used to be a thing) that America is not a democracy, but a democratic republic. This is a distinction with a very clear difference, most notably the delegation by the people of various and vital public decisions to elected officials.
Although many will say that the term “our democracy” is an innocent shortcut, a catchall phrase for our nation specifically or rule by the people generally, the author of our Constitution would disagree. James Madison made clear in Federalist 14 that “under the confusion of names, it has been an easy task to transfer to a republic observations applicable to a democracy,” and that there are dangers in confounding the two.
Those dangers are manifest today. Progressives’ widespread and increasing use of this innocuous-sounding term is weakening our constitutional checks and balances and undermining the Bill of Rights, the only things standing in the way of what Madison called “the tyranny of the majority.”
Those who most traffic in the term wish to eliminate the Electoral College and reapportion the Senate by population rather than by state. They are working on multiple fronts to weaken First Amendment protections for speech and religion. They have long had the Second Amendment in their sights. And they consistently oppose individuals and organizations that push back against draconian federal restrictions such as public health lockdowns and climate change regulations.
If “our democracy” wants it, “our democracy” should get it, goes their reasoning, oblivious to Booker T. Washington’s admonition: “A lie doesn’t become truth, wrong doesn’t become right, and evil doesn’t become good, just because it’s accepted by a majority.”
During this election cycle, however, progressives are putting “our democracy” to work in an even more pointed way. Like a magician using sleight of hand to distract his audience, they’re using the phrase to present a false binary to American voters. In sports, this is called “hiding the ball.”
Donald Trump, according to the Left, is an authoritarian who not only will take away our rights but eliminate elections. The charge is, of course, ridiculous—Trump stepped down despite his objections to the 2020 election results, and last I checked it’s his opponents who are using authoritarian tactics to ensure he doesn’t win reelection. But the charge is useful, which to a Marxist mind is all the justification it needs.
Contrasting the potential “autocracy” of a second Trump administration with Biden’s ostensible defense of “our democracy” is meant to distract us from recognizing the real decision that confronts the voters and the actual threat to our republic: the creeping totalitarianism of the administrative state.
Totalitarianism is defined as “subordination of the individual to the state and strict control of all aspects of the life and productive capacity of the nation, especially by coercive measures.” Ask anybody who lived through COVID-19 if that sounds familiar.
And if you visit Britannica.com—the modern iteration of the company whose encyclopedias we used in 10th grade civics class to learn about things like history and government—you’ll see a more expansive description:
Totalitarianism is a form of government that attempts to assert total control over the lives of its citizens. It is characterized by strong central rule that attempts to control and direct all aspects of individual life through coercion and repression. It does not permit individual freedom. Traditional social institutions and organizations are discouraged and suppressed, making people more willing to be merged into a single unified movement.
I could have sworn I heard something like that last line in a video at the 2012 Democratic National Convention: “Government is the only thing that we all belong to.”
Britannica goes on to say that it was Italian dictator Benito Mussolini who first used the term totalitario, meaning “all within the state, none outside the state, none against the state.” It cites as examples of totalitarian states not only Mussolini’s Italy but Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany, and Mao’s China.
Given the growth of the federal government over the past century, totalitarianism certainly represents a greater threat to the United States than authoritarianism.
We’re not there yet, and thanks to America’s exceptional institutions perhaps we won’t get there. But as the recent violent increase in antisemitism shows, something we thought could “never again” happen very well might—all it takes is one generation of historical ignorance.
Those same institutions that have protected us from anything approaching authoritarianism increasingly are becoming our totalitarian masters. As William F. Buckley once observed, it is the extent, not the source, of government power that impinges on freedom.”
Whenever you hear talking heads refer to “our democracy,” pay special attention to what comes next. Don’t assume they’re referring to the democratic republic handed down from our Founding Fathers or trying to preserve our Constitution and its safeguards.
More likely they’re taking advantage of our increasing historical ignorance resulting from the Left’s capture of our educational institutions (which was all part of the plan).
Let’s call our nation what it is: a republic. Whether out of ignorance or malevolence, saying “our democracy” is less likely to strengthen our heritage than seed our demise.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
The post The Problem With ‘Our Democracy’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.
It’s been said that the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.
Most of us remember the national election of 2020: The COVID-19 pandemic, sudden changes to election procedures, mysterious mail-in ballots, allegedly hacked voting systems, and legions of lawyers filing scores of lawsuits.
I think we all remember the aftermath in 2021, as well. Thousands of angry conservative voters traveled to Washington, D.C., and entered the Capitol to protest the certification of the election after a surprise upset led to Joe Biden becoming the president.
Then came the speculation: Did the Chinese hack voting machines to flip the vote in favor of Biden? Were countless mail-in ballots shoved into voting machines in the dead of night?
Was Joseph R. Biden really the most popular presidential candidate in United States history even after running his entire campaign from a basement in Delaware?
I’ve prosecuted election fraud cases, but I do not know the answer to any of those questions. That’s not what this article is about. It is about why you should never be afraid to question the results of an election.
Having been in the Texas Attorney General’s Election Integrity Division, I have had more than a few conversations with people who almost seem to feel guilty about talking to me about election concerns. They usually start out with the other person saying, “Well, I’m not a conspiracy theorist but …”
That additional qualifier has never surprised me, considering how many risks there are associated with questioning the results of elections.
The moment anyone is in the vicinity of someone who claims an election was stolen, they risk becoming an “election denier.”
A few notable attorneys who filed election contests have been threatened with losing their license to practice law and even imprisonment. More than 500 of the 1,265 people who were arrested after marching on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 are—more than three years later—still awaiting trial for what may ultimately amount to a misdemeanor conviction.
The rest of us are constantly told by “experts” that there was nothing wrong with the 2020 election.
But what if those experts were wrong?
Recently, the Georgia State Elections Board voted 2-1 to reprimand Fulton County after finding significant issues with the vote tally in the 2020 presidential election. The board’s investigation concluded there had been over 140 separate violations of election laws and rules not only related to how Fulton County tallied the initial vote, but also how it conducted its recount.
It should be noted that the only vote against reprimanding Fulton County was from board member Janice Johnston and that was only because she felt the reprimand didn’t go far enough. She wanted a more comprehensive investigation conducted by the Georgia Attorney General’s Office.
Out of a plethora of issues in how the election was conducted, the investigation also found that there were more than 3,000 duplicate ballots scanned during the recount. The Georgia Secretary of State’s general counsel declared that it’s inconclusive whether or how many of the 3,000 duplicates were included in the tabulated results.
There were also more than 17,000 ballot images that are allegedly missing from the recount.
Keep in mind that Fulton County’s initial hand recount shortly after the election awarded 1,300 additional votes to Trump, and while the current numbers would not change the outcome of the election, an open question of whether there are potentially more than 4,000 votes not properly accounted for in a swing state election that was decided by only 11,000 votes is—to say the least—problematic.
The Georgia secretary of state’s position appears to be that the initial count, the hand recount, and the machine recount are all relatively similar and therefore not a cause for alarm. When Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was asked directly about allegations of election fraud, he said, “No, the numbers are the numbers … . The numbers don’t lie.”
That seems like a difficult conclusion to reach when his organization seems to not be sure what the numbers are.
It also somehow seems worse to imply that more than 140 violations of election laws were committed by the election administrator’s office for the state’s most populated county by incompetence rather than malfeasance.
Compare Raffensperger’s lack of enthusiasm with the efforts to remove Sidney Powell’s law license, or the criminal indictment of former President Donald Trump currently pending in Fulton County, both of which stem from the actions they took (or are alleged to have taken) in response to issues arising out of the way Fulton County ran the 2020 presidential election.
In fact, the results of Georgia’s inquiry stand in contrast to the popular talking point that Trump’s allegations were so spurious that even individuals in his own administration refuted his claims of election irregularity.
For example, Christopher Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the Department of Homeland Security, who claimed on CBS’ “60 Minutes” that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history.”
Not only does it now seem that Krebs was wrong, but less than a month after making that statement, it was publicly reported that Krebs and his agency had been unaware of what could be one of the largest cyberattacks of our national infrastructure in history.
There was also then-Attorney General Bill Barr publicly declaring on Dec. 1, 2020, that the Department of Justice and the FBI had not uncovered evidence of “widespread voter fraud that would change the outcome of the election”—after an investigation he had called for only three weeks prior.
In Texas, after we received an allegation of election fraud, our team of investigators and attorneys—who are already familiar with Texas election law—would seek to contact the election administrator for the county the allegation originated from to obtain their records of the election. Those records were often voluminous and would take time to review.
We would then make attempts to speak to witnesses, including the voters, to determine whether there had been fraud or irregularities in the voting process. We would investigate whether those who cast suspicious ballots were qualified to vote, whether they typically voted by mail or in person, whether their vote in that election came from their listed home address or somewhere else, whether they are even aware a vote was cast in their name, and sometimes even whether they are alive or deceased.
Consider that there were 81,139 votes—in Nevada, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona, combined—which separated Trump from Biden in the election. Among those four states, there were approximately 12,883,742 total ballots cast. Neither of those numbers would include instances where ballots had been destroyed.
The time it took for Georgia to issue its findings on Fulton County alone took three years. At the time of Barr’s statement, the FBI only had a total of 13,245 special agents in the entire bureau, spread out across the United States and other parts of the world. Even if the Justice Department devoted all its resources and limited the scope of their investigations to the largest counties of those four states, it would have taken several weeks just to compile evidence, much less come to a definitive conclusion just for one of those states.
There is also the question whether Barr even wanted the Department of Justice to be involved. The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, William McSwain, claimed that Barr told him to stand down on investigating election fraud allegations, instead ordering him to refer any complaints to the state of Pennsylvania.
While Barr disputes McSwain’s account, other witnesses testified under oath to receiving the same guidance.
In December 2020 an “irate” Bill Barr called investigators looking into Jesse Morgan’s claim of hundreds of thousands of completed mail-in ballots hauled across state lines to “STAND DOWN”
— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) April 4, 2024
“‘I told you you need to stand down on this.’
“[He was] agitated, to say the least.” pic.twitter.com/orzqQFL245
So, when Barr said he had not seen evidence sufficient to conclude that fraud would have changed the results of the election, it seems that is exactly what he meant. He hadn’t seen fraud that would change the outcome. That would be difficult to find for someone unfamiliar with election fraud—and not interested in looking for it.
Nevertheless, Barr’s statements are a common talking point for media “fact-checkers,” who are adamant that election fraud is a myth.
Take for example how fact-checkers handled allegations of Jesse Morgan. Morgan was a post office contractor who claimed that 288,000 pre-filled ballots had been shipped into the state of Pennsylvania in trailer that somehow mysteriously vanished after being delivered to a post office.
As a former prosecutor, the fact that the investigation by the U.S. Postal Service and the FBI only concluded that Morgan’s claims could not be corroborated, while Morgan himself was never charged with making a false statement to a federal agent seems to me to mean that the investigation was inconclusive. That is, neither confirming, nor denying his account.
If that’s the case, then we are left with the notion there is no security camera footage, records, manifests, receipts or explanation for a missing post-office trailer allegedly containing 288,000 ballots that was left inside a secured post-office motor pool, or that it was just a shoddy investigation.
That didn’t stop the Dispatch and PolitiFact from concluding that Morgan’s allegations were false in their entirety based on the aforementioned sound bite from Barr, and the Postal Service’s largely redacted report.
More dubious fact-checks come from The New York Times. It fact-checked 15 separate statements from Trump about the 2020 election. In the interest of brevity, I’d like to go summarize what I personally took from just a few:
Other popular rebuttals stem from the 2020 election contests. The 2020 general election was easily the most litigated in my lifetime. According to some news outlets, Trump and Republicans filed over 60 election challenges, losing almost all of them.
The results of the 2020 election cases always seem to be the easy way out of any debate over the election results. Why wouldn’t they be? The judges found there was no election fraud. Case closed.
Except they kind of didn’t.
For background, a large bulk of the work against the 2020 presidential election contests was done by the law firm of Marc Elias. Formerly of Perkins-Coie, Elias is notably famous (or infamous) for his involvement with the entirely debunked opposition research against Trump known as the Steele Dossier. Ironically, Elias also thinks Russians intervened in the 2016 election to defeat Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In addition to being at the forefront of litigating election lawsuits on behalf of Democrats, Elias’ law firm also seeks “favorable advisory opinions” from the Federal Election Commission on behalf of Democratic candidates. They are unashamedly pro-Democrat, and to put it mildly, they are very committed to what they do.
Elias’ win record speaks for itself, and I’m not discounting his firm’s successes, but the 2020 general election was an easy playing field. In election contests, “the tie goes to the runner,” and all he and his team have to do to win is make sure that none of the allegations of fraud in any of the election contests are considered sufficient to warrant discounting the results.
This was made all the easier because judges have a hard time with any case involving an election.
Take for example Trump v. Biden, where the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Trump’s suit was barred by the legal doctrine of laches. That is to say that Trump’s allegations were reasonable, but the case had been brought too late for courts to act.
To quote the court, “the time to challenge election policies such as these is not after all ballots have been cast and the votes tallied.”
Essentially, a candidate shouldn’t wait to get cheated out of an election before they sue over it.
A similar result occurred in Kistner v. Simon in Minnesota. In that case, the petitioners filed their lawsuit within days of the postelection review, but the court concluded two claims were barred as they should have been brought before the election, and for the third claim, the court found the petitioners failed to provide service to the other county officials required by Minnesota election laws.
In Arizona’s Ward v. Jackson, the Arizona Supreme Court classified instances where a “duplicate ballot did not accurately reflect the voter’s apparent intent as reflected in the original ballot” as a mere error, and held that it did not believe there were enough of these “errors” to overturn the results of the election.
Also stated by the court: “Where an election is contested on the ground of illegal voting, the contestant has the burden of showing sufficient illegal votes were cast to change the result.” It is not enough to prove there was fraud, you must prove there was enough fraud to change the outcome.
In Donald J. Trump for President v. Way, the New Jersey federal district court declined to hear a challenge to the New Jersey governor’s executive order No. 177, which directed the state to send mail-in ballots to all registered voters and extended ballot counting to all ballots received up to 48 hours after the polls closed on Election Day.
After the suit was filed, the Democrat-controlled state legislature passed a bill codifying the governor’s decree, thereby making it law. One of the bill’s co-sponsors allegedly claimed that the bill’s purpose was to “undermine the Trump campaign’s lawsuit.”
The court’s ruling in that case was that it would defer to the state on whether to suddenly change election rules in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sidney Powell’s suit in Wisconsin, Feehan v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, was dismissed after the court ruled a Wisconsin voter and potential elector lacked standing to contest the election process in Wisconsin. The federal District Court of the Middle District of Pennsylvania came to the same conclusion in Donald J. Trump for President Inc. v. Boockvar. The result was the same in Nevada in Donald J. Trump for President Inc. v. Cegavske.
Also from Nevada is my favorite postelection opinion by far, Law, et al. v. Whitmer, et. al. In that case, the judge stated that he considered witness declarations—typically statements submitted under the penalty of perjury—to be “hearsay of little or no evidentiary value,” citing that per Nevada’s election code, election contests “shall be tried and submitted so far as may be possible upon depositions … .”
At the time of this suit, America was still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic and many courts were not even permitting contested hearings out of fear that several people in an enclosed space listening to live testimony could spread the virus.
That prohibition often extended to requests to take someone’s deposition, which was a hurdle I ran into in some of my own cases. Before reading this opinion, I would have thought that “so far as may be possible” under those circumstances would be broad enough to increase the viability of sworn statements to be presented as evidence. I would have been wrong.
Considering the court’s order only gave the contestants from Nov. 17 to Dec. 3 to gather their evidence and granted only 15 depositions to both sides, it’s not clear what evidence the judge expected them to be able to marshal.
I’m not insinuating there was bias, but it feels that way, reading the 10 paragraphs devoted to just bolstering the credibility of the defense expert compared to the five paragraphs the judge spends on the why he felt the entirety of the evidence presented by the other side was inadequate.
The bottom line is, a significant number of the election challenges brought in 2020 appear to have been thrown out for procedural reasons, rather than evidentiary ones. In the few cases where election fraud was discussed, the courts seemed to consistently hold that those bringing the case hadn’t shown enough fraud. Just don’t tell the fact-checkers at Reuters that.
Going into the election of 2024, it’s not even clear who will be able to successfully contest a national election. Neither voters nor electors appear to have standing to contest an election in their own state, and at least a state attorney general and House Representatives do not have standing to challenge elections in other states.
Those who do make it past the standing requirement only have weeks to depose as many witnesses as it takes to prove that enough fraudulent ballots were counted to change the result of the election.
If you’re unfamiliar with an election case, that could potentially mean finding thousands of fraudulent ballots in less time than it would take to contest a speeding ticket. Good luck with that.
The silver lining in all of this is that a byproduct of the controversies surrounding the 2020 presidential election is that we are at least talking about it. And the public outcry has been substantial.
Once a niche topic, election integrity is now at the forefront of public discourse, and several states—including Georgia—are engaged in massive undertakings to identify vulnerabilities in their electoral process and have already taken steps to pass new laws seeking to prevent election integrity issues.
When Texas ran into hurdles with its high criminal court declaring it was unconstitutional for Attorney General Ken Paxton to unilaterally prosecute election fraud, the voters responded by voting out three of the eight justices who signed on to the opinion, and they were the only three up for reelection.
I do not know what happened in 2020, and I don’t know what’s going to happen in 2024. But I do know election fraud exists, and it has been around for a long time. So long as there are ways to cheat the system to obtain power, there will be people seeking to take advantage of them.
I also know that behind every successful election challenge, investigation, prosecution, and legislation are individuals courageous enough to come forward and question the results when something seems off.
That courage is becoming less and less rare after 2020, and it will be a force to be reckoned with in 2024.
That’s why I encourage everyone to never be afraid to question the results of an election when they see something suspicious, and act on those suspicions.
Maybe you win, maybe you lose, but the only way it will change is if you’re not afraid to talk about it.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
The post The Many Reasons You Shouldn’t Be Afraid to Question Election Results appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The United States of America, a few years short of its 250th birthday, is at war.
This is not a war with Russia or China. It is not an amorphous war on terror or a war on drugs. This is a war from within. It is an unconventional war. It is a systems-level attack on the foundations of this nation. It is an insidious, sophisticated attack built on decades of a sustained, strategic decay of our nation’s infrastructure: our legal system, our election system, our culture, our commonality, our civic intelligence, and our institutions.
This is not an insurrection, a series of race riots, or even a police riot at a protest over a stolen election.
It will be the last war in which the United States participates if it’s not won by Americans.
You are not living in the same country you were born in.
Right now, a president, who record numbers of Americans don’t think even won the last election—and for good reason—has ordered the legal, intelligence, and law enforcement services of this country to arrest and detain his chief political rival. It is the product of a sustained, nearly decade-long covert and overt operation using every tool at the government’s disposal and their command of the propaganda machine of the legacy media to destroy Donald J. Trump.
Joe Biden is not the head of this lynching, however. He is a senile patsy serving as a prop figurehead. Even on his best day, he could not have orchestrated and overseen this project. His very presence as the source of authority from which the domestic terrorists draw their appeal to legitimacy is proof positive of the enemy’s success in overtaking the apparatuses of governmental power. Joe Biden is merely the tragic comedy illustration of how much real power the enemy has taken. That he can be the puppet shows how little effort needs to be expended to fake legitimacy for this takedown operation.
As the enemy actually utilizes the power of the systems that it has corrupted, the professional organizational apparatus of the opposition party meekly and pathetically appeals to those same structures for its salvation. Such weak acts are playacting. The con is based on a fundamental miscalculation that the American people believe such acts constitute a legitimate effort to protect and save this country.
In no place is this more clear that in the halls of the United States Congress. Take, for example, the one institution in which the American people are alleged to have access to actual power right now: the House of Representatives. The 2022 midterm elections, once billed as an incoming “Red Wave,” were supposedly an opportunity for Americans to provide a check on the lawless occupation of the U.S. government.
Instead, the enemy was unfazed. They had fundamentally changed the structure of the U.S. government two short years before, in 2020, in a way that protected their power. The election system itself had been conquered with illegitimate changes to the very way in which people are meant to realize the promises of a constitutional republic.
The election system, much like the legal system, is no longer a neutral instrument. In 2020, there was a dramatic and hostile transformation of the election system from a voting system into a contest of one party’s political machinery and its ability to distribute and collect unaccountable mail-in ballots.
Only one side has a machine. The professional Right—the politicians and their consultants—fails to understand that the rules changes themselves were designed to ensure a permanent advantage to the Left. The best knockoff imitation of the Left’s illegal voting operation on the Right only gives legitimacy to this new government structure where ballots are collected instead of votes to select our leaders.
The professional Right was willfully clueless about this point on the night of the midterm elections. In fact, the vipers instead used it to support the Left and its attack on Trump.
I sat in my living room watching Fox News on the evening of the midterms and watched talking head after talking head attempt to spin the results as a referendum on the man who wasn’t even on the ballot. And just like that, the 2024 Republican Primary was off in full swing. The result was Trump-hating Republicans paying parasitic consultants and pollsters hundreds of millions of dollars to distract and detract resources and protection away from Trump.
The professional Right on Capitol Hill has been spectacularly useless in its ability to protect America from the damage being wrought by the Left. It has settled into a pretzeled rhetorical defense of Trump while leaving every resource on the table that could be used to protect this country, like withholding funding and releasing an avalanche of actually enforced subpoenas.
While the Jan. 6 committee proved the damage that such committees could cause, this recent Congress also has proved their uselessness. Take, for example, the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government and its chairman, Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. That subcommittee was the pound of flesh extracted for Kevin McCarthy to become speaker of the House and was supposed to be a supercharged committee aimed at de-weaponizing the attacks on Trump and all Americans.
It has been none of that. As I write this, the subcommittee is on pace at the end of this Congress to return nearly two-thirds of the $15 million supplemental budget it was given. Members are literally “tipping” the Biden administration for election interference while pretending to be fighting it in their cable news appearances and their fundraising letters.
Part of the problem is that the elected Right is too busy fighting itself to fight the Left. The biggest fight comes from a class of elected politicians trying to resist the fundamental transformation of the conservative movement that Trump created. They are content to give lip service to “America First” appeals if it means that they can get back to the business of funding foreign wars and serving as lobbyists for special interests.
And House members are still fighting over who gets to be in charge of this mess. Any limitation that Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has politically imposed on himself to gain the support of the furthest Left elements of the Republican caucus has also been accepted by Jordan, who is desirous of Johnson’s job. That kind of capitulation does not create the type of environment in which a hard-charging legal process and investigations can be conducted—elements that are critical to see any positive results out of the weaponization subcommittee.
Perhaps the only bright spot is the work of House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., and his staff. Unlike his counterparts, Comer’s team has meticulously proved the corruption of the Biden family with ample evidence, to include the literal receipts.
Legacy media and establishment politicians will never give him the credit he deserves. But the truth can be seen in the data. Since Comer got to work, poll after poll shows that a majority of Americans now accept that the Bidens engaged in corrupt activity.
So, what the hell do we do about all of this? We do everything at the same time—now.
Congress must immediately hire a congressional special counsel and equip that individual with all constitutional authority to do the job. In other words, the weaponization subcommittee should give its unused budget to someone else. This work includes a record-setting number of forced depositions and subpoenas backed by the enforcement authority of holding people in contempt of Congress. And no more requiring votes for every minor investigative change. Have one vote now and let the special counsel get to work. And nothing done by the special counsel gets referred to Biden’s Department of Justice. Instead, it is delivered to relevant state and local prosecutors for action.
On the election, we must first admit that the 2024 election has already been interfered with in a substantial and incurable way. The basic demographics of this country have been altered by an illegal invasion of illegal aliens organized by Biden. Simultaneously, every reasonable preventive mechanism to keep them from voting is forcefully opposed by the Regime. The basic fundamental structure of flooding the country with unaccountable mail-in-ballots exists.
The Right has made incremental and positive gains in some areas, only to be outdone by a matter of degrees because of the Left’s control of the basic election machinery. The country is flooded with propaganda from regime media, creating conspiracies to try to keep Trump off the campaign trail and out of office by subjecting him to a series of kangaroo court cases—and finally, a conviction. There is no chance of a free and fair election. That ship has sailed. The only question is if we will have a certifiable election.
What can happen is that Trump can win by a margin bigger than the other side’s capacity for cheating. Every step must be taken to mitigate the ability of the Left to illegitimately alter the election. This includes mass litigation, of course, but also immediate overt action by state and local officials to protect the integrity of their elections.
One area to immediately begin with is kneecapping Biden’s ongoing efforts to use the whole-of-federal-government approach he has created as his get-out-the-vote operation, where agencies that deal with members of the public who most likely lean Democratic are used to help them register to vote. States have the ability to kick this activity out of their jurisdictions.
Members of the general public need to demand the change they wish to see. There is a war happening right now, and only one side is fighting it. The other side maintains its limited hold on power by providing rhetorical mentions of Americans’ concerns but in every real sense, does nothing to fix them.
Politicians on both sides are able to survive in this political landscape by the entrenched power of party politics, obscene amounts of money in politics, and the support of the dying power of traditional media, who—in a search for content—is willing to provide pomp and circumstance to the doldrums of fundraising letter-sending and low-budget government hearings.
We don’t have to live this way. There is still time to turn the ship around. The real damage is made permanent if the Left is able to finalize its takeover of the election and judicial systems in a way that makes elections and prosecutions pro forma. That day could come very soon, but for now, it is not today, and there is still time to fight.
The post America Is Under Attack appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Democrats might control the Senate, but they’ll have a hard time getting things done if 10 of their Republican counterparts have anything to say about it.
Following a New York jury’s guilty verdict against former President Donald Trump—and President Joe Biden’s subsequent cheerleading of the decision—10 Republican senators vowed to oppose Democrats’ legislative priorities and nominations.
“The White House has made a mockery of the rule of law and fundamentally altered our politics in un-American ways. As a Senate Republican conference, we are unwilling to aid and abet this White House in its project to tear this country apart,” the Republican senators said in a statement released Friday.
It currently has 10 signatories:
Notably missing from the list is Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., whose milquetoast response Thursday—about four hours after the jury’s decision—drew scorn from conservatives.
These charges never should have been brought in the first place. I expect the conviction to be overturned on appeal.
— Leader McConnell (@LeaderMcConnell) May 31, 2024
The statement signed by the 10 Republicans outlines three areas where they plan to stymie Democrats:
Democrats currently control 48 seats with three independent senators who caucus with them. Their narrow majority gives Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., little room to navigate, particularly on matters requiring a 60-vote threshold.
Now, with 10 Republican senators promising to make things even more difficult for Schumer, Democrats face the prospect of a Senate stuck in a stalemate.
Lee spearheaded the effort and wants to recruit more senators to the cause.
I hope to have every Republican senator sign this.
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) May 31, 2024
This is a call for Senate Republican Conference unity.
Now is a time for choosing.
Will we let the Republic fall or are we going to do something about it? https://t.co/QcYQwsYv4E
“We are no longer cooperating with any Democrat legislative priorities or nominations, and we invite all concerned Senators to join our stand,” Lee wrote on X.
Scott, who is running to for GOP leader in the next Congress, endorsed the effort Friday.
“Our country is in real trouble,” Scott said. “Republicans must stand together and end this madness.”
PRIMETIME EXCLUSIVE: @SenRickScott is vowing legislative retaliation against the Democrats who supported Trump’s prosecution. pic.twitter.com/s95CJXmE8u
— Jesse Watters (@JesseBWatters) June 1, 2024
Marshall put the blame on Biden’s “partisan hack judges,” accusing them of weaponizing the judicial system against the president’s political opponent.
The jury found Trump guilty Thursday on all 34 charges of falsifying business records to hide “hush money” payments in 2016 to former pornographic movie actress Stormy Daniels.
Upon leaving the courthouse, Trump called the trial a disgrace and said, “This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who is corrupt.” He continued: “The real verdict is going to be Nov. 5 by the people.”
His sentencing hearing will take place July 11, just days before the Republican National Convention convenes in Milwaukee.
Business as usual is no longer an option—Biden and his leftist regime have, by their actions, decreed it’s no longer “politics as usual.”
— Kevin Roberts (@KevinRobertsTX) May 31, 2024
They’re trying to steal the election—which is why they are already weaponizing the full power of the federal government against President… https://t.co/9Vi62Esreg
“The White House’s weaponization of our government to target President Trump for political gain represents the pinnacle of two tiers of justice,” Blackburn wrote on X. “We cannot allow this grave injustice to prevail in the United States of America.
Tuberville, who last year delayed the promotions of military officers over a dispute with the Biden administration, signaled he was once again willing to engage in a similar tactic.
Just one of those military officers remains in limbo today: Air Force Col. Ben Jonsson, whose controversial statements endorsing critical race theory in 2020 prompted an outcry. Schmitt is blocking his promotion to brigadier general.
“Democrats have destroyed the integrity of our justice system, and made a mockery of the Constitution—all in the name of maintaining political power,” Schmitt wrote on X. “My colleagues and I aren’t going to go along with the status quo. Enough is enough.”
The post How Republicans Plan to Stymie Democrats After Controversial Trump Verdict appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Shortly after 5 p.m. Thursday, a New York jury brought the country to an unprecedented brink by finding Donald Trump guilty of financial fraud, making the former president a convicted felon for now (unless or until the conviction is overturned on appeal) and making the upcoming election a referendum, he now hopes, not just on his record against Joe Biden’s but the entire political system.
Republicans call it a miscarriage of justice; for Democrats, it’s proof that no one is above the law.
History will remember it as a new chapter: Donald J. Trump is the first former president to be convicted of a crime.
“We didn’t do anything wrong. I am a very innocent man,” Trump told reporters after the verdict, dressed in his trademark blue suit and too-long tie at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York.
Then a familiar script as the former president embraced martyrdom, arguing that his conviction was part of a larger war for the soul of a nation.
“I’m fighting for our country. I’m fighting for our Constitution,” he said. “Our whole country is being rigged right now.”
Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in a case stemming from “hush money” payments to porn star Stormy Daniels in the waning days of the 2016 presidential campaign. Each count carries a maximum prison term of four years.
Sentencing is scheduled for July 11, just four days before Trump is slated to accept the Republican presidential nomination for a third consecutive time.
Although questions abound about the fate of the former president and the nation, there is little to no chance Trump will end up behind bars before the end of the year. He is expected to remain free on bail pending appeal, a process that is not likely to be exhausted until well after Election Day.
The case now shifts to the appellate courts—as well as the proverbial court of public opinion.
Democrats have been desperate to cast the election as a rematch of Biden v. Trump with an emphasis on character, not a judgment on President Joe Biden’s first term in office. They may have gotten what they wanted.
“Donald Trump is a racist, a homophobe, a grifter, and a threat to this country,” said Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. “He can now add one more title to his list—a felon.”
Sources close to the former president prefer a different description.
A senior Trump campaign official predicted weeks before the decision that a conviction would “make him the Nelson Mandela of America,” comparing Biden to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his imprisonment of political rival and late dissident Alexei Navalny.
The framework suits Trump, who blasted out an email fundraiser shortly after his conviction calling himself “a political prisoner,” arguing both that “justice is dead in America” and “our country has fallen.”
This kind of rhetoric, complete with comparisons of the U.S. to the Third World, is likely to accelerate in the weeks and months ahead. Both major presidential campaigns now argue that the other could end democracy.
“These people would do anything and everything to hold onto political power. They don’t care if they destroy our country in the process,” said the former president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.
Martyrdom has been a central theme of Trump’s return to politics. After his indictment in New York last year, the GOP nomination was practically a fait accompli and his campaign nearly told RealClearPolitics as much at the time. It is unclear whether that phenomenon will translate to a general election.
Court has not crippled Trump so far, however, and Biden has not surpassed his rival a single time this year in the RealClearPolitics Average of polls. Well aware of those numbers, the Biden campaign attempted to tamp down jubilation on the left over the bad legal news consuming the right. They warned that Trump still could win.
“There is still only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: at the ballot box,” said Biden-Harris communications director Michael Tyler.
Ian Sams, spokesman for the White House counsel’s office reacted to the news by saying only, “We respect the rule of law, and have no additional comment.” By remaining silent, however, he ceded the spotlight to Trump, allowing his rival to shape the first 24 hours of the narrative.
[Biden didn’t comment until early Friday afternoon, when he noted before turning to the Israel-Hamas war that, “just like everyone else,” Trump will have an opportunity to appeal the verdict. The president added: “That’s how the American system of justice works. And it’s reckless, it’s dangerous, and it’s irresponsible for anyone to say this was rigged just because they don’t like the verdict.”]
Nothing bars Trump from running for president as a felon. It is unclear, however, if he will be able to cast a vote for himself while his case goes through the appeal process.
A more immediate consequence of the trial ending: Trump’s schedule just opened up, and Trump can return to the campaign trail in earnest.
Sources in regular contact with the former president report that the prospect of prison has not cast a shadow over Trump personally. One told RealClearPolitics that Trump “sincerely believes” that divine providence now guides his steps and “that he has been chosen for a time such as this.”
Trump has six months to convince the country to return him to the White House, and in the most extreme circumstance, to preserve his freedom. Republicans were as bullish over those odds as they were angry.
“Today’s verdict from this partisan, corrupt, and rigged trial just guaranteed Trump’s landslide victory on Nov. 5, 2024,” Mike Davis, founder and president of the pro-Trump Article III Project, told RealClearPolitics.
Former Rep. Peter Meijer, a Michigan Republican who voted to impeach Trump, echoed that sentiment, warning that a conviction would backfire on Democrats. “The chain reaction will cause infinitely more damage than whatever they think they are preventing,” he told RCP.
The conviction created a tidal wave of donations as Trump began fundraising almost immediately after leaving court. The Trump campaign buckled briefly at the surge. The fundraising website, WinRed, temporarily crashed under the strain of heavy traffic.
“I’ll lose friends for this,” wrote Shaun Maguire in a lengthy post on X announcing his $300,000 donation to Trump. A partner at Sequoia Capital and a former Democratic donor, Maguire said that “lawfare” in part inspired his donation:
“Fairness is one of my guiding principles in life,” he said, “and simply, these cases haven’t been fair for Trump.”
Following the conviction, there was a discernable shift on the right among conservatives who normally argue that the judicial system ought to remain apolitical. Some Trump allies described the guilty verdict as “the Rubicon.”
Asked about the new Republican appetite to use the courts to go after political opponents, Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller told RCP that “the good guys must be as tough as the villains or freedom is doomed.”
The field of potential vice presidential candidates snapped to attention in their immediate condemnation of the conviction.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said the verdict was “a complete travesty that makes a mockery of our system of justice.” Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, called it “election interference.” Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., said it was an “absolute injustice” that “erodes our justice system.”
“From the start, the weaponized scales of justice were stacked against President Trump. Joe Biden, far left Democrats, and their stenographers in the mainstream media have made it clear they will stop at nothing to prevent President Trump from returning to the White House,” said Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., in a lengthy statement to reporters.
“This lawfare should scare every American,” said a more succinct North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican. “The American people will have their say in November.”
The safest thing for any Republican elected official anywhere Thursday night was to attack the judicial system. Defending that institution, meanwhile, was verboten.
Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a frequent Trump critic now running for Senate, appeared to miss the memo when he shared a statement calling for GOP leaders to “reaffirm what has made this nation great: the rule of law.”
Replied Chris LaCivita, a senior Trump adviser dispatched to oversee the Republican National Conventio: “You just ended your campaign.”
The most common sentiment among Trump’s close circle of advisers and friends was that something had changed permanently, not in the former president personally but in the country.
“Today marks a turning point,” said Brooke Rollins, who led Trump’s Domestic Policy Council before launching the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank often described as a Trump White House in waiting. “I see it as a fire that has been lit. I see the sleeping giant of the American people awakened.”
On the second day of jury deliberations, Trump had kept up appearances with a smile. A verdict was not expected Thursday, and by the afternoon, Judge Juan Merchan was preparing to dismiss the jury for the day.
The foreman replied instead that the jury had reached a verdict. He read each of the 34 charges and followed by a one-word pronouncement: “guilty.”
A smile turned to a grimace, and Trump, surrounded by his defense team, stared forward stone-faced as he listened to the verdict and American history. He vowed in brief remarks to reporters afterward that he would “fight till the end and we’ll win because our country’s gone to hell.”
It was like so many of the pronouncements he has made after so many of the other controversies that have defined his political life. It was also different. A loss, if the conviction stands, could mean prison.
Rollins predicted that Trump would persevere, as he has before.
“From my perspective,” she said, “it is almost biblical to see this sort of courage and leadership and unwillingness to back down even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.”
The post Trump Vows to Fight On Despite Conviction appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The story of America is scrappy, daring, and revolutionary. Our Founding Fathers took an idea—democracy—that had been dead for centuries and revived it with little more than an amateur militia and a dream for a better world.
The great American experiment has been led by consequential presidents. They were warriors, leaders, and titans. Some of them, like Abraham Lincoln, literally stood above the crowds with imposing height. Military heroes such as Ulysses S. Grant and Teddy Roosevelt had the kind of courage you only read about today.
Thomas Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence. Ronald Reagan, an actor before entering the political sphere, pioneered conservative policies and paved the way for the modern conservative movement.
From innovators, thinkers and writers to generals, orators, and businessmen, the presidency of the United States used to be a job that attracted the best of the best.
Fast-forward to 2024. America’s president is the butt of jokes around the world. President Joe Biden gets lost on stage, forgets what he’s saying in the middle of a sentence, and bears little resemblance to the charming “Uncle Joe” that many Americans admired during the Obama administration.
Adding insult to injury, the Biden administration makes wrong decision after disastrously wrong decision. It’s been four years of failure and intentionally destructive policies.
To put it plainly, Biden does not measure up to the legendary presidents of American history.
Just this week, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre admitted from the podium that the Biden administration could take executive action to fix the border crisis, but it won’t. In fact, she bragged about the executive actions Biden took early in his presidency to destroy the progress of President Donald Trump‘s administration.
Biden stumbled through nine errors in a recent speech that White House staff had to clean up afterward.
Biden’s White House issued condolences for the death of the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi—a man nicknamed the “Butcher of Tehran” for his human rights abuses and whose leadership led to a rise in terrorism and instability in the Middle East.
In another gaffe, Biden claimed to have been vice president during the COVID-19 pandemic. He also gave some bizarre marital advice: Marry a woman with a lot of sisters. He incorrectly announced that a person being held hostage by Hamas terrorists since Oct. 7 was in the crowd at an event.
He repeatedly stumbles up the stairs of Air Force One. He slips and falls on stage. He crashed his bike while riding at a slow pace. He reads aloud, with squinting eyes, the speech cues on his teleprompter.
He tells strange, inconsistent, and false stories about vague family members and friends.
Rather than cause alarm, Biden’s gaffes have become a punch line for late-night television. Hollywood brushes it off. Mainstream media happily provides him cover.
Unlike the media elites, the American people are horrified. They don’t think that Biden is truly capable of running the country. The chaos erupting around the world—in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Israel, and Taiwan, to name a few—doesn’t calm any of those fears.
Biden is a liability on the campaign trail—and his team knows it. That’s why they’re trying so hard to keep Trump tied up in court, because when you put these two side by side, there’s no comparison.
The president shouldn’t be a punch line. He’s the most powerful person on the planet and leader of the free world. Presidents are supposed to inspire hope; they don’t hide in a basement.
The upcoming debates between Biden and Trump will make the choice explicitly clear.
When Americans head to the polls on Nov. 5, they will be reminded of the American presidents who have changed the course of history, some for better and others for worse.
Our great American revival can only happen when we embrace true leadership and put America first. Our next president must bring us closer to the promise of “E Pluribus Unum”—out of many, one.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.
The post The Many Ways Biden Doesn’t Measure Up appeared first on The Daily Signal.
“You can’t lead America with ancient ideas.”
That was the claim—shouted, not spoken—by the president of the United States in what was considered by many to be the most divisive State of the Union address ever given before a joint session of Congress.
President Joe Biden’s March 7 lecture seemed to punctuate what has become a brutally disheartening term in office, with liberals demanding Americans throw aside traditional values and institutions for a “liberating” future of hedonistic affirmation in the pursuit of an ambiguous “equity.”
This bastardized system of values—promoted by the Left to usurp the traditional American institutions of faith, family, and community—are now in the sights of Florida’s senior senator.
“Faith, family, community—teach us who we are and what we’re here for,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R.-Fla., calls out in a new video, juxtaposing some of the most stark contrasts ever seen between the American Left and Right. Older video clips of Americans from every background singing, marching, and praying are contrasted with those of more recent LGBTQ+ parades, pro-abortion rallies, and news coverage of violent pro-Hamas protests.
Unlike many political videos delivered amid the presidential election season that we observe every four years, making bland statements about the economy and the border, Rubio appears to be throwing a spotlight from his office on the stark divide between the two opposing political movements and ideological foundations beckoning to an exhausted and weary country battered by calls to abandon “ancient ideas.”
These classic institutions “are the ones who teach us who we are and what we’re here for,” Rubio intoned, “but ties like these pose a threat to the Left, which insists that relationships exist only to affirm fleeting feelings and identities.”
That charge isn’t without warrant, as public school officials and liberal activists around the country have spent the past several years and millions of dollars attempting to separate children from their parents, encouraging children to confide in those outside their “unsupportive” families.
Rubio asserted that “the Left claims the only idea worth believing is its changing definition of ‘equity.’” That contrasts sharply with an image of Vice President Kamala Harris, who in a January 2023 speech created her own definitions for the words “equality” and “equity,” drawing wide criticism.
Equality is when the teacher gives every student the same test
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) January 20, 2023
Equity is when the teacher gives every student the same mark
Here’s our VP explaining that: pic.twitter.com/GC0xe7pK08
“Faith in woke ideology cannot replace faith in the Almighty God,” Rubio said. “Government programs and bureaucrats cannot stand in for family, and political echo chambers on social media are no match for real community.”
Rubio’s assertion is not only correct, it’s a timely message Americans have shown they are drawn to. Favorability toward the Biden administration has plummeted sharply as a country that was told it was going to experience “unity” and “a return to normal” received instead crisis and devastation in the economy, at the border, and on the world stage.
If other conservatives continue pushing messages like those in Rubio’s video, this could be a turning point for American society. A return to celebrating faith, family, and community as essential to the success of the United States would provide a far better foundation for growth as the Left’s fearmongering and guilt trips over these institutions no longer appear to hold voters in their sway.
The post EXCLUSIVE: Sen. Rubio’s Killer Video Blow to the Left’s Depressive Values appeared first on The Daily Signal.
President Joe Biden makes no speech without mentioning the importance of democracy in our nation.
We would like to believe this comes from deep ideals about human liberty lodged within our president.
But more accurate is that Biden, a politician all his adult life, is defined by just that—politics. No word, no act emanates from our president that does not emerge from some political calculation.
In the case of the ongoing reminders about the importance of democracy, the subliminal message Biden wishes to convey is to always remind us of the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol and to brand Donald Trump as an anti-democratic autocrat.
But let’s go beyond this and examine Biden’s premise about democracy itself.
In Biden’s latest speech, on Memorial Day, he said, “Our democracy is more than just a system of government. It is the very soul of America.”
Hanging on a wall in my offices in Washington, D.C., is a picture of Booker T. Washington, with his quote saying, “A lie doesn’t become truth, wrong doesn’t become right, and evil doesn’t become good just because it is accepted by the majority.”
An important reminder from Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee University, is that there is good and evil in this world, and they are transmitted to us through the Bible and our faith.
Democracy can only be the means through which a nation accepts or does not accept these eternal truths. But democracy does not invent them.
We should recall, again, the words of President George Washington in his farewell speech in 1796.
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. … Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
In the 1850s, Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois proposed to use democracy to solve the problem of whether slavery would be permitted in new states entering the union.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act provided that new states would determine by the vote whether it would be a slave state.
Abraham Lincoln rejected this proposition.
Per Lincoln, “Judge Douglas interrupted me to say that the principle of the Nebraska bill was very old, that it originated when God made man and placed good and evil before him, allowing him to choose for himself, being responsible for the choice he should make.”
“The facts of this proposition are not true as stated,” said Lincoln. “God did not place good and evil before man, telling him to make his choice. On the contrary, he did tell him that there was one tree, of the fruit of which he should not eat, upon pain of certain death.”
What really interests Biden is growing government to advance his left-wing agenda, thereby diminishing individual freedom.
In 1950, shortly after World War II, federal government spending accounted for 14.1% of gross domestic product.
Per the Congressional Budget Office, in 2024, federal government spending will consume 23.1% of GDP; in 2034, 24.1%; in 2044, 25.7%; and in 2054, 27.3%.
Social Security trustees now project bankruptcy of the system by 2033. Revenues will fall short by 21%. Why doesn’t Biden support letting every American choose to opt out and instead invest in their own private retirement account?
Why doesn’t Biden support the right of parents to send their child to whatever K-12 school they choose?
The only place where Biden wants more choice is to hide behind his religion and give women the right to destroy their unborn child until the final moments of her pregnancy.
The founders of our country conceived of a nation rooted in core truths, which, by limiting government, would enable individual liberty.
They would not recognize our politicized nation today under Joe Biden.
Distributed by Creators.com
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post Biden’s Democracy Smoke Screen appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Former President Donald Trump has put the issue of world government at the forefront of the 2024 presidential race, vowing to “protect American sovereignty” and the U.S. Constitution from the designs of unelected global bureaucrats.
Trump took aim at global governance institutions in general, and the World Health Organization specifically, on Saturday, promising to shred and annul the WHO Pandemic Agreement unless President Joe Biden submits the document to the U.S. Senate for ratification, as required for treaties.
“As we speak, Joe Biden’s minions are in Geneva, secretly negotiating to surrender more of our liberty to the World Health Organization,” Trump told the Libertarian National Convention, eliciting a fulsome chorus of boos. “Drafts of the agreement show that they want to subjugate America to foreign nations, attack free speech, [and] empower the World Health Organization to redistribute American resources.”
Multiple drafts of the proposed accord show the WHO limiting national sovereignty by demanding nations follow its regulations on “routine immunization” and “social measures,” turn over 20% of all vaccines for global redistribution, and abide by the agreement’s terms even after they withdraw.
“They’re going to take our money and send it all over the world to other countries that we need for our own citizens,” in the event of a pandemic, Trump told the crowd in Washington on Saturday, warning that a pandemic “could happen again” in the United States.
His comments came just days after the Department of Health and Human Services took the first steps to deny future federal grants to the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization that funded gain-of-function research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I will protect American sovereignty from the creeping hands of global government,” promised Trump.
By contrast, the Biden administration has signaled its desire to sign the agreement, which WHO downgraded from a “legally-binding treaty” after Biden realized the U.S. Senate would never ratify the controversial document.
“I am hereby demanding that Joe Biden submit these monstrosities to the Senate as treaties,” declared Trump on Saturday. “If he does not, I will rip them up and throw them out on Day One of the Trump administration.”
Opposition to the WHO pandemic treaty-turned-agreement has spread throughout America, including all 49 Republican U.S. senators, two dozen Republican governors, and 22 state attorneys general.
“The globalists are making a run over American sovereignty,” said Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., on the most recent episode of “This Week on the Hill,” hosted by Tony Perkins. “We can’t allow these global organizations to dictate to us what our policy is going to be.”
Although the body tasked with drawing up the agreement, the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body, failed to finalize its text before the World Health Assembly commenced its annual meeting in Geneva on Monday, WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus insisted the globalists would eventually prevail. “I remain confident that you still will” complete the global power transfer and have it adopted, he told delegates Monday. “Where there is a will, there is a way.”
But the internationalists compiling the sovereignty-destroying agreement will proceed from a radically government-centered philosophy alien to the American founding, experts say.
“Some of these nations come from a very different governance perspective than the United States,” one which “says it’s normal to look to the federal government to deal with these problems,” Travis Weber, vice president for policy and government affairs at Family Research Council—who is currently in Geneva monitoring the World Health Assembly proceedings—told guest host and former Rep. Jody Hice on “Washington Watch” Tuesday.
“Constitutionally, there are areas enumerated to the federal government under our Constitution. If they’re not, the issue in theory should be left to the states,” Weber told Hice. “We have a philosophy of government going back to our founding which depends on a self-governing, moral, and religious people. So, this really sets the stage for people in the United States to say, ‘Why should the federal government be tackling [this] issue in the first place?’”
Trump also cited constitutionalist themes in his pitch for libertarians to endorse his candidacy at Saturday’s convention.
“I unbound the United States from globalist agreements that surrendered our sovereignty. I withdrew from the Paris accord. I withdrew from the anti-gun U.N. arms treaty. And I withdrew from the corrupt and very expensive World Health Organization,” said Trump, emphasizing that any institution of global governance is “not a good thing, not a good thing.”
Trump delivered a message precision-targeted to libertarian concerns. “Marxism is an evil doctrine straight from the ashes of hell,” said Trump. “We believe that the job of the United States military is not to wage endless regime change wars around the globe.”
“We will shut down our out-of-control federal Department of Education and give it back to the states and local governments. I will return power to the states, local governments, and to the American people. I am a believer in the 10th Amendment,” said Trump. “I will always defend religious liberty and the right to keep and bear arms. And I will secure our elections.”
Trump also pledged to put a libertarian in his Cabinet and in senior posts of his administration.
“What you’re witnessing under Biden is a toxic fusion of the Marxist Left, the deep state, the military-industrial complex, the government security and surveillance service, and their partners all merging together into a hideous perversion of the American system,” he said.
Libertarian Party Chair Angela McArdle also invited Biden and independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to address the convention. RFK Jr., who has said the WHO Pandemic Agreement “should be dead in the water,” delivered extended remarks to the delegates Friday afternoon. Biden demurred. Former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, former Rep. Ron Paul, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, also spoke at the convention.
Trump vied for the party’s backing, quoting at length a Deroy Murdock article, “The Libertarian Case for Donald J. Trump,” and encouraging delegates to nominate him—but only “if you want to win. If you want to lose, don’t do that. Keep getting your 3% every four years.”
The 3.3% of the 2016 vote, won by former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, a Republican, actually represented an outlier for the Libertarian Party, which typically claims to 0.5%-1% of the presidential electorate.
Ultimately, the collected Libertarian Party delegates nominated Chase Oliver, an Atlanta-based activist who describes himself as “pro-police reform, pro-choice,” as well as “armed and gay.”
Oliver supported COVID-19 lockdowns and mask mandates, opposed bills protecting minors from transgender injections and surgeries, and posed with a drag queen. The Georgian, who forced a runoff in the 2022 Senate race that saw Democrat Raphael Warnock defeat Republican Herschel Walker, plans to gear his campaign toward young people, “in particular those who are upset with the war going on in Gaza.”
Some hope liberty-minded voters will ignore the Libertarian Party’s official endorsement and support Trump out of prudence. Walter Block, an economics professor and prolific libertarian author, urged libertarians in swing states to vote for the 45th president this November. “In Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, we could make the difference,” wrote Block in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Tuesday.
He reminded readers that “Libertarian nominee Jo Jorgensen received roughly 50,000 votes in Arizona in 2020, when Mr. Trump lost the state by about 10,000 ballots.”
Absent a more conservative government, America may be yoked to the WHO Pandemic Agreement without Senate ratification, circumventing the democratic process.
“It only breeds more public distrust when people are not able to fully share their concerns and air their grievances,” Weber told Hice. “The people of the United States need to be heard in terms of their concerns about the WHO, about the way the COVID-19 pandemic was handled, about the way their health information might be distributed or shared, or given over to some government program.”
Originally published by The Washington Stand
The post Trump Vows: I Will Rip Up, Throw Away WHO Pandemic Agreement appeared first on The Daily Signal.
President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are scheduled to debate on June 27, but the debate will be unlike those held between presidential candidates in the recent past.
Trump told Biden he would debate him “Anytime. Anywhere. Anyplace,” and Biden accepted, but with stipulations. The Biden campaign said it would only agree to a debate if there was no live audience, hearkening back to the first televised presidential debate in 1960 between Democratic Sen. John F. Kennedy and Republican Vice President Richard Nixon, which was telecast live from a TV studio without a studio audience.
Fox News reports that the Biden campaign also stipulated that the debate should be hosted by a “broadcast organization that hosted a Republican primary debate in 2016 in which Donald Trump participated, and a Democratic primary debate in 2020 in which President Biden participated—so neither campaign can assert that the sponsoring organization is obviously unacceptable: if both candidates have previously debated on their airwaves, then neither could object to such venue.”
Those stipulations limited the hosting networks to a handful of outlets, including CNN. The outlet’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will co-host the debate at CNN’s studios in Atlanta. The debate gives CNN the opportunity, amid low ratings, to appeal to Americans who have come to view CNN as little more than a mouthpiece for the Left.
During prime time in March, Deadline reports, CNN averaged 601,000 views, falling far behind MSNBC’s 1.31 million-viewer average during the same time of day, and Fox News’ 2.14 million. CNN’s prime-time viewership is up 5% for the first quarter of 2024, compared with the previous year.
With additional Biden campaign stipulations requiring that a “candidate’s microphone should only be active when it is his turn to speak,” viewers will be watching whether CNN adheres to this rule equally between both candidates.
Perhaps most importantly, CNN’s Tapper and Bash will be judged by the questions they do or don’t ask.
Apart from questions related to the economy, which are bound to be asked, given Republican and Democratic voters’ shared concerns over inflation, CNN should take the opportunity to show U.S. voters it will hold Biden’s feet to the fire on the president’s border and immigration policies and his handling of foreign policy, with regard to China, Russia, and Iran, and support for Israel.
If CNN fails to conduct a substantive debate between the two candidates, ABC News will have the opportunity to do so on Sept. 10, but CNN will have missed a golden opportunity to show Americans it can do more than pander to the Biden administration.
On this week’s edition of the “Problematic Women” podcast, we discuss what to expect during the upcoming presidential debates.
Also on today’s show: A Target store’s tough anti-shoplifting measures in California show how far blue cities have fallen. Plus, ahead of Memorial Day, we honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation. And as always, we’ll be crowning our “Problematic Woman of the Week.”
Listen to the podcast below:
The post Trump, Biden, and CNN: What to Know About the First Presidential Debate appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—After President Joe Biden signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to work with private organizations to mobilize voters, senior White House officials asked agencies for “bold ideas” and explained plans to coordinate with “stakeholders.”
One message from the White House, obtained by The Daily Signal, said: “We look forward to working with you to”—but the rest of the content is blacked out by a redaction.
The specifics of those “bold ideas” and “stakeholders” isn’t knowable right now because “upon the advice of the White House Counsel’s Office, the information is being withheld under the presidential communications privilege,” according to a cover letter to The Daily Signal from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The letter accompanied 99 pages that The Daily Signal obtained from USDA through a request under the Freedom of Information Act.
Since Biden signed his executive order on elections in March 2021, members of Congress, the press, and watchdog groups have struggled to get basic information on how the administration is implementing the order. Some details have trickled out through FOIA law, which requires that basic information from the government be available to the public.
Earlier this month, two House committees intensified their investigations of Biden’s order on turning out voters.
Although records obtained previously by The Daily Signal under FOIA requests contained redactions and cited exemptions, the responses didn’t refer to “presidential communication privilege.”
“The presidential communications privilege protects communications among the president and his advisors,” the cover letter to the released but redacted documents says.
“The records being withheld here consist of email communications concerning President Biden’s Executive Order 14019 and attached records that were solicited and received by the president or his immediate White House advisers who have broad and significant responsibility for investigating and formulating the advice to be given to the president,” says the letter signed by Alexis R. Graves, director of the USDA’s Office of Information Affairs.
Other exemptions to disclosure cited in Graves’ cover letter include the deliberative process privilege and attorney-client privilege.
Critics of Biden’s executive order, some of whom refer to it as “Bidenbucks,” argue that its implementation could cause bureaucrats to violate the Hatch Act, a law that prohibits political activity using resources of the federal government. Critics also say the order may violate the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits agencies from spending taxpayers’ money for reasons not approved by Congress.
Separately, the Justice Department has invoked presidential privilege to shield documents about Biden’s order in a public records lawsuit brought by the Foundation for Government Accountability, a watchdog group.
“In recent years, the presidential communications privilege has become an increasingly common excuse used by federal agencies to sidestep their disclosure obligations under federal law,” Stewart Whitson, senior director of federal affairs at the Foundation for Government Accountability, told The Daily Signal.
“During the current administration, federal agencies have shown an increasing willingness to stretch the presidential communications privilege well beyond what is allowed under current law—documents or other materials that reflect presidential decision making and deliberations that the president believes should remain confidential—to any and all documents received by White House advisers and their staff,” Whitson said.
“If allowed to persist, federal agencies and the politically appointed bureaucrats leading these agencies will gradually render the FOIA law meaningless. Government transparency and our very democracy are under threat,” he said.
Stephonn O. Alcorn, then the associate director of racial justice and equity at the White House, sent an April 1, 2021, email to all federal agencies that is heavily redacted in the released version.
Alcorn’s email was about an interagency meeting to be convened eight days later, on April 9, by the White House Counsel’s Office and the Domestic Policy Counsel. The agenda is completely redacted.
Alcorn notified agencies that taking the White House lead on Biden’s election executive order would be Justin Vail, special assistant to the president for democracy and civic participation with the Domestic Policy Council, and Larry Schwartztol, an associate White House counsel.
In September 2021, Kumar Chandran, senior adviser for nutrition to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, notified Vail of a change of plans for how the USDA wanted to implement Biden’s order. In the released record, however, the change is blacked out from public view.
“After input from Sec. Vilsack this week, we are considering a change to one of our proposed actions, which would result in [redacted],” Chandran wrote.
“We need to do some further diligence to determine if it is viable, but if it is, we think it might be more meaningful,” he added.
A White House press release that month gave a broad overview of how the USDA would implement Biden’s order on mobilizing voters.
“The Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Service will encourage the provision of nonpartisan voter information through its borrowers and guaranteed lenders, who interface with thousands of residents in the process of changing their voting address every year,” the White House press release said. “In addition, Rural Development agencies—which are spread throughout field offices across the country where rural Americans can apply for housing, facilities, or business assistance—will take steps to promote access to voter registration forms and other pertinent nonpartisan election information among their patrons.”
Getting to the point of how the USDA would push Americans to vote appears to be a tedious process, based on what’s discernible from the released records.
Some messages were more heavily redacted than others. For example, a September 2021 message from USDA Deputy Undersecretary for Rural Development Farah Ahmad says only “This is” before the text is blacked out.
A June 2021 email from Vail to Chandran was about the “interim report template.”
“At this point,” Vail’s message began, followed by several lines of redacted information. He continued: “We just want to ensure that all agencies are taking steps to generate bold ideas and begin to flesh out those ideas; it will also allow the opportunity for us to provide feedback.”
This statement is followed by more heavy redactions.
White House official Devontae Freeland, special assistant to the racial justice and equity team, notified agencies on July 2, 2021, about an upcoming conference with “stakeholders” on Biden’s executive order.
Separate document releases show that a Zoom conference the following July 12 involved Biden administration officials and numerous far-left political organizations, among them unions. The groups included the Southern Poverty Law Center, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations, the Stacey Abrams-founded Fair Fight Action, and the Al Sharpton-founded National Action Network.
“As you know, we’re coordinating some input from stakeholders, including what we hope you found to be an informative session yesterday afternoon with state and local election officials,” Freeland wrote.
“We’ve also planned a session for nonpartisan nonprofit organizations engaged in voting rights advocacy to provide their recommendations and thoughts on best practices; we will follow up shortly with an additional session from nonprofit organizations with substantial expertise in reaching out to and engaging particular populations of voters who may be more difficult to reach. We hope that each of these sessions will provide helpful feedback,” he wrote, before more redactions blacked out the text.
In another heavily redacted message, Vail wrote USDA officials in late September 2021 with the subject line “Voting EO/Follow up items.”
On Oct. 6, 2021, Vail wrote to agencies about meeting on Biden’s executive order in coming days.
“We look forward to working with you to [redacted],” he wrote.
The next interagency meeting would be Oct. 20, Vail wrote.
Spokespersons for the White House and the Agriculture Department didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s inquiries about this report before publication.
The post ‘PRIVILEGE’: What the White House Doesn’t Think You Should Know About Biden’s Order on Mobilizing Voters appeared first on The Daily Signal.
President Joe Biden made a well-publicized commencement address on May 19 at Morehouse College in Atlanta, a historically black college. The networks touted the speech but didn’t put any “fact-checkers” on it. It contained at least four fibs.
In an echo of his 1987 lies that crumbled in his first presidential campaign, Biden claimed, “I was the first Biden to ever graduate from college.” A newspaper obituary for his maternal grandfather Ambrose Finnegan noted he graduated college.
He repeated his story that his son Beau died of a brain tumor after he spent “a year in Iraq as a major—he won the Bronze Star—living next to a burn pit.” In 2019, FactCheck.org noted the science on cancer from exposure to burn pits in Iraq was “insufficient,” but Biden tells that story often.
Then Biden uncorked his typical race-baiting: “Today in Georgia, they won’t allow water to be available to you while you wait in line to vote in an election.” Georgia’s Legislature passed a bill in 2021 that said no person should “give, offer to give, or participate in the giving of any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink” within 150 feet of a polling place. It doesn’t mean you can’t have water!
Biden also claimed, “there’s a national effort to ban books—not to write history, but to erase history. They don’t see you in the future of America.” The leftists all said that “erasing history” bunk about Florida’s education standards, when it was crystal clear that black history was mandated, not erased.
None of these fact-check moments made the front-page New York Times story gushing over the Morehouse speech. It mentioned Biden spoke of deaths in his family and left out the “burn pits” part.
Biden’s recent lie that inflation was at 9% when he became president was so blatant that most of the liberal “fact-checkers” called it out: AP, CNN, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, Snopes, and The Washington Post. (Lead Stories and Reuters did not.) We’ll see if these latest Biden falsehoods get checked (again).
They could also check Biden’s four whoppers in remarks the day before at a campaign fundraiser in Atlanta.
The president told his backers, “I wasn’t going to run again after my son died because of being in Iraq for a year in those burn pits.” He said, “We were supposed to lose in 2020.” He claimed Donald Trump told Time magazine, “States should monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate the abortion bans.” Trump did not say that. Biden also claimed Trump said there were “really good people on both sides” in Charlottesville protests, implying he praised neo-Nazis. That’s an ongoing hoax.
At a Sunday afternoon campaign event in Detroit, the president again dragged out the line, “I’m the first in my family ever to go to college.”
A Sunday night speech at the NAACP brought more of the tired-brain gaffes. Biden claimed he was vice president “during the pandemic.” He said Obamacare was “saving millions of families $800,000—$8,000 a year in premiums.” The White House transcript adjusted it down to $800.
Then he returned to “folks wanting to ban books” and “erase black history, literally.”
He misquoted Trump as saying, “I’ll be a dictator on Day One” and “just inject bleach” to cure COVID-19. He bungled in claiming Trump said if he lost, there will be “bloodshed.” Trump implied an economic “bloodbath.”
The more Biden mangles the facts, the more you can be sure that national TV coverage is going to edit out the embarrassing parts. Call it “erasing history as it unfolds.”
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post Bungling Biden’s Commencement Whoppers appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The top House Republican is warning that the Democratic Party is trying to jail its chief political rival before November’s election.
Appearing with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Saturday morning’s episode of “This Week on the Hill,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., declared, “Donald Trump is being targeted because of who he is. If he was not running for president again, I don’t think you’d see any of this barrage of prosecutions, these local district attorneys and state attorneys who are after him … .”
Referring to the myriad state and federal indictments leveled against former President Donald Trump over the past 15 months, Johnson added, “They have targeted him because he is soon to be officially the nominee of the Republican Party for president, and this is their only way to stop him.”
“Everybody around the country can see this for what it is, anybody who looks at what is happening objectively has to reach the same conclusion. They are targeting him because of who he is,” Johnson explained.
He continued, “And the real threat to this … is it is the weaponization of our system of justice itself. … You have to understand this is something that would undermine a very foundational principle of our country. The people have to trust that the justice system is fair, that there really is equal justice under law. And if we don’t have that, we lose something very important to maintain a constitutional republic.”
Perkins added, “The former president says it’s not just about him, but it’s what he represents, the people that he represents, the fact that he has stood up to the Left, to the media. That’s the reason he is the target.”
Johnson agreed: “I think he symbolizes a pushing back against that federal corruption and the Deep State and the bureaucracy and all the things that frustrate the American people. They see in Donald Trump someone who is unafraid to sort of crash through those barriers in a certain respect.”
He further noted, “I think that’s why he is such a threat to them, and that’s why they pulled out all the stops.”
Over the course of 2023, four criminal indictments, amounting to a total of 88 felony charges, were issued against Trump. The first, consisting of New York state charges, alleged that the former president had falsified business records. That trial is currently underway in Manhattan.
The Department of Justice indicted Trump last June for allegedly illegally keeping classified documents pertaining to national security—after having left the White House in 2021. A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., then indicted Trump for allegedly attempting to “defraud the United States” by overturning the 2020 election results. Almost immediately afterward, Trump was indicted in Fulton County, Georgia, for alleged racketeering related to the 2020 election results.
“What they’re doing here really is a travesty of justice,” Johnson said of the Democrats’ campaign against Trump, which critics have characterized as “lawfare.”
“Very practically speaking, this was [Trump’s] fifth week of trial in Manhattan on this charge, a crime that they can’t even adequately define. Prosecutors passed on bringing these charges eight years ago. They did it now for political reasons, and they kept him off the campaign trail.”
Perkins noted that left-wing lawfare extends far beyond just Trump, pointing to the 57-month prison sentence handed down to pro-life activist Lauren Handy for blockading the entrance to a Washington, D.C., abortion facility in 2020.
Handy is reportedly the first person to be sentenced to prison under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, although the Biden administration’s Justice Department is actively prosecuting other pro-lifers, too. Johnson said that the Biden administration’s targeting of pro-lifers is an “instance of priorities being exactly in the wrong place.”
“They’re aggressively prosecuting people who are exercising their First Amendment freedom to talk about the sanctity of human life on a public sidewalk. And meanwhile, they catch and release dangerous criminals, persons who come across the border illegally, and people who are violent offenders multiple times over,” Johnson stated. “And yet they’re targeting people that have a different political viewpoint. I just think it’s such a blatant example of exactly what we’re talking about. And the people see this. They see a two-tiered system of justice, and that’s a real threat to us.”
“If you lose the rule of law, if you lose the foundational underpinnings of a constitutional republic, what you ultimately result with, again, is a return to tyranny, because the people who are in charge have abused their authority,” the speaker explained. “And we know that power corrupts, and as Lord Acton observed, absolute power corrupts absolutely. You have to have all these checks and balances. You have to have the separation of powers, and you have to have the maintenance of law and order.”
Recent polling suggests that a supermajority of Americans agree that the Biden administration is carrying out a lawfare campaign against the former president.
A March survey from McLaughlin and Associates found that nearly 70% of voters believe the slew of indictments against Trump are politically motivated, and almost 60% of voters (including close to 40% of Democrats) think [President Joe] Biden has played a role in the crusade against Trump. Additionally, 56% of voters (including a third of Democrats) said they believe that “Joe Biden wants to stop President Trump from winning the election by putting him in jail.”
The monthly Harvard CAPS/Harris polls have found some shifting over the past few months on whether voters would still support Trump if he were convicted on various charges, with voters typically being split 50-50 with a slight advantage in Trump’s favor, but the latest poll’s findings demonstrated that the flurry of lawsuits against the former president isn’t helping Biden’s popularity.
Originally published at WashingtonStand.com
The post ‘A Travesty of Justice’: House Speaker Dissects the Left’s ‘Lawfare’ Campaign Against Trump appeared first on The Daily Signal.
President Joe Biden, who wears bespoke sneakers to prevent embarrassing collapses and whose command of the English language rivals that of most kindergartners, is in bad political shape.
It is unsurprising that Democrats have resorted to some of the slimiest tactics imaginable to derail President Donald Trump’s comeback bid and push their senile octogenarian across the November finish line. Properly skeptical of their chances to topple Trump in a fair mano-a-mano, the Democrat-lawfare complex in 2023 conjured up four separate criminal prosecutions—two federal probes and two state probes—targeting the 45th president. After all, if you can’t beat him, then … prosecute and incarcerate him! All in the name of “our democracy,” naturally.
Suffice it to say that the Democrat-lawfare complex’s brazen, cynical attempt to subvert our constitutional order in the name of saving it has not gone according to plan.
In Washington, D.C., Special Counsel Jack Smith’s crown-jewel case against Trump, pertaining to the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6 jamboree at the U.S. Capitol, has been interrupted by the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices stepped in to assess the thorny constitutional question of the scope of immunity from criminal prosecution for former presidents, and a decision is not expected until late June.
The most likely result is a mixed opinion that holds some “core” Article II presidential functions are immune from post-presidency prosecution, but other acts are not. This would require a remand to the trial court for fact-finding to determine which legal category the acts in Smith’s indictment fall into. That trial court finding could then be appealed, too. There is virtually no chance Smith can wrap this all up before November.
In Florida, Smith’s other federal case has not been more successful. The Florida prosecution, pertaining to Trump’s post-presidency handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, had at least some potential on the legal merits. But Smith wildly overplayed his hand by charging Trump with violating the controversial World War I-era Espionage Act, and the proceedings have frequently been set back due to the strenuous demands of the Classified Information Procedures Act—a 1980 statute first introduced in the Senate, ironically, by then-Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del.
Recently, Judge Aileen Cannon indefinitely postponed the trial start date, which had initially been scheduled for May 20. There is again little to no chance Smith can reach a jury before November.
The case in Fulton County, Georgia, which once seemed the most perilous of them all due to Georgia’s sprawling Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the far-left Atlanta jury pool, and the potential for high-profile prosecution witnesses, has gone totally off the rails. Ever since January, the only questions in the case have not been substantive legal issues such as whether Trump oversaw a grand conspiracy to “overturn an election,” but tabloid fodder such as whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her illicit extramarital lover and appointed special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, are too compromised to bring the case.
The trial court’s finding that only one of them must recuse is now pending before a Georgia appellate court, and it is likely the Supreme Court of Georgia will weigh in, too. This case isn’t reaching a jury before November, either.
That leaves the ongoing drama in New York City, where a literal porn “star” (Stormy Daniels) and a convicted felon (Michael Cohen) are aiding the George Soros-funded prosecutor’s case of … well, he hasn’t exactly told us what it is. We surmise the case entails alleged New York State fraudulent bookkeeping charges in furtherance of a federal campaign finance law violation—which doesn’t even fall into the local district attorney’s jurisdiction.
The prosecution is about to rest its case, and we don’t even know for sure what the actual black-letter legal case is. On Thursday, the “star witness” convicted felon’s testimony was so bad that far-left CNN anchor Anderson Cooper remarked: “I think if I was a juror in this case watching that, I would think this guy is making it up as he’s going along.”
Brutal.
The Democrats’ strategy is failing. But it is up to the American people to make them pay for it.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post Will Democrats Pay a Price for Their Crumbling Lawfare Strategy Against Trump? appeared first on The Daily Signal.
A federal Justice Department attorney expressed concerns to a Michigan judge about conservative media coverage suggesting that President Joe Biden’s administration is persecuting Christians and pro-lifers for their beliefs.
The discussion took place during a March pre-trial conference in USA v. Zastrow, in which the federal government brought Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act charges against eight pro-life individuals who tried to stop abortions of unborn babies from taking place at Michigan abortion clinics.
Those pro-life activists are Calvin Zastrow, Eva Zastrow, Chester Gallagher, Heather Idoni, Caroline Davis, Joel Curry, Justin Phillips, and Eva Edl (a communist death camp survivor who recently spoke with The Daily Signal).
The FACE Act is a 1994 law that prohibits individuals from obstructing the entrances of both abortion clinics and pregnancy resource centers, although it has been heavily enforced by Biden’s DOJ against pro-lifers since the June 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade.
During the pre-trial motion hearing, according to a transcript obtained by The Daily Signal, DOJ attorney Laura-Kate Bernstein raised concerns that “there’s a great deal of press about this case and the case in Nashville recently.” Bernstein was referring to a case in Tennessee where six pro-lifers were praying outside of an abortion clinic in 2021 and were charged with FACE Act violations.
Bernstein did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Where?” questioned Judge Matthew Leitman. “I haven’t seen any.”
Bernstein explained that she was referring to online media “like Mike Huckabee’s show or Laura Ingraham’s show, and those sorts of sources, and some written sources, too, in which at least one of the defense attorneys is making very acerbic statements about the government’s case and the legitimacy of the laws at stake, and that the Biden regime is persecuting Christians.”
WATCH:
“My concern is one of the jury pool,” she continued. “My concern is that as these national media reach more and more people, including people in the district, that they may be tainted with a preconceived notion of the Biden regime’s persecution of Christians and be unable to try the case as neutral jurors.”
The DOJ attorney said that she was not asking the court to do “something in particular,” but then told the judge that it is the court’s “affirmative, constitutional duty to minimize the effects of prejudicial pretrial publicity.”
Leitman, after asking for clarification on her question, noted that he could ask the jurors whether they had read anything about the case. But he said that Bernstein’s question seemed to be rooted in “important political speech.”
“It seems to me that your first statement, the Biden administration is persecuting Christians … that’s pretty core, important political speech, whether you agree with it or not,” the judge said. “I mean, I’d be hard pressed to tell somebody not to say that.”
The DOJ attorney then pushed back, saying she was referring to interviews in which the pro-lifer’s attorney said that “this case is a war on pro-lifers, that the Department of Justices is using the FACE Act as a weapon against pro-lifers,” or that “the clients are victims of political persecution.”
She also pushed back against the idea that “there’s a two-tier justice system, one for friends of the administration who go free and one for people who are on the wrong spiritual side of the administration.”
“There’s also extremely inflammatory language undermining the legitimacy of the laws to be implied in this case, that you’ve already ruled on—the constitutionality of it—whether reproductive health care includes abortion, as the statue defines it,” she continued. “And because the court has this affirmative, constitutional duty, we wanted to bring it to your attention.”
Bernstein then asked the judge to admonish Thomas More Society attorney Steve Crampton “about speaking about this case in inflammatory and acerbic ways that might taint the jury pool.”
“This isn’t about trying to, you know, interfere with any of his First Amendment rights,” she followed up, noting that Crampton is “of course” free to speak about his clients. “It’s about trying to protect the due process rights in this trial and the government’s right and the public’s right to a fair trial.”
Crampton clarified to the court that Bernstein was referring to Tennessee pro-life activist Paul Vaughn’s interview on the “Mike Huckabee Show,” in which Vaughn made such comments “only after the jury verdict” was entered in his case.
In January, a federal jury convicted Vaughn and five other defendants of a felony conspiracy against rights and a FACE Act offense for trying to stop abortions from taking place at a Mount Juliet, Tennessee, abortion clinic in March 2021.
BREAKING: Six pro-life activists were just found guilty in federal court after being prosecuted by Biden's DOJ under the FACE Act for protesting outside a Nashville abortion clinic.
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 30, 2024
Here's a snippet of the protest, which occurred on March 5, 2021.
For the crime of praying and… pic.twitter.com/UPzZvtZebM
“Any reference to United States against Zastrow and this case were, at best, minimal to nonexistent,” the Thomas More Society attorney said. “So I think the government, perhaps, is overreacting to the press coverage of the Nashville case. Nobody’s called any press conference regarding this case, and we certainly have no intention of doing so.”
This week, seven pro-life defendants have been sentenced to prison time on DOJ FACE Act charges related to their attempts to stop abortions from taking place at a Washington, D.C., abortion clinic. That abortion clinic is run by Cesare Santangelo, an abortionist who has been accused of allowing babies to die if they survive his botched abortions.
The District of Columbia does not have laws restricting abortion.
The DOJ said in a release Wednesday: “Lauren Handy was sentenced to 57 months in prison, John Hinshaw was sentenced to 21 months in prison, and William Goodman was sentenced to 27 months in prison,” adding that “Jonathan Darnel was sentenced to 34 months in prison, Herb Geraghty was sentenced to 27 months in prison, Jean Marshall was sentenced to 24 months in prison, and Joan Bell was sentenced to 27 months in prison.”
Those efforts are led by Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, who just admitted, following a report from The Daily Signal, that she hid an arrest and its subsequent expungement from investigators when she was confirmed by the Senate to her Justice Department post.
“Violence has no place in our national discourse on reproductive health. Using force, threatening to use force, or physically obstructing access to reproductive health care is unlawful,” said Clarke in a statement accompanying this week’s DOJ release.
“As we mark the 30th anniversary of the FACE Act, it’s important that we not lose sight of the history of violence against reproductive health care providers, including the murder of Dr. David Gunn in Florida—tragic and horrific events that led to passage of the law,” she added. “The Justice Department will continue to protect both patients seeking reproductive health services and providers of those services. We will hold accountable those who seek to interfere with access to reproductive health services in our country.”
The post EXCLUSIVE: DOJ Attorney Expressed Concerns About Conservative Media Coverage of Biden Admin Persecuting Christians, Pro-Lifers appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The Department of Justice under President Joe Biden failed to comply with federal protections when suspending whistleblowers’ security clearances, according to a memo released Tuesday by the Office of the Inspector General.
The inspector general found that the Justice Department doesn’t give employees a way to appeal suspended security clearances, which does not align with a federal regulation updated in 2022, according to its memo. Additionally, the inspector general found that the DOJ under Biden failed to provide employees a reasonable opportunity to stay on the federal payroll if they think the department suspended their clearance to retaliate against them for protected whistleblower activity.
“Existing DOJ practice is inconsistent with the intent of the federal statute,” the inspector general’s office announced in a news release.
House Republicans accused the FBI in a May 18, 2023, report of retaliating against FBI special agent Stephen Friend, FBI special agent Garret O’Boyle, and FBI staff operations specialist Marcus Allen for speaking out against the agency. O’Boyle said being placed on unpaid suspension by the FBI left his family effectively homeless.
The Office of Inspector General said it unearthed these concerns after receiving complaints from “employees alleging that their security clearances were suspended in retaliation for protected whistleblowing activity.”
Empower Oversight President Tristan Leavitt, who represents Allen through his organization, stated on social media that the memo was prompted in part by Allen’s complaint.
? This morning @JusticeOIG released a memo citing concerns about DOJ's compliance with whistleblower protections for employees with a security clearance. The review was in part prompted by the whistleblower complaint of @EMPOWR_us's client, Marcus Allen. https://t.co/Xg0u8bSCGM
— Tristan Leavitt (@tristanleavitt) May 14, 2024
Though the DOJ provides employees with an appeals channel if their security clearance is revoked, no such path exists for employees whose clearance is suspended pending a final decision on whether or not to revoke it, according to the Office of Inspector General. The inspector general identifies this as a problem because the law requires the DOJ to provide a path for whistleblowers to challenge suspensions lasting longer than a year as retaliatory.
Since the DOJ lacks a way for employees who suspect retaliation to contest suspensions if they go on for longer than a year, the agency “does not meet the requirements” required by law, according to the inspector general’s memo.
Losing security clearance often means DOJ employees can no longer do their jobs, seeing as jobs in the department can require that employees have clearance in order to perform their duties, according to the memo. This means, in addition to having their clearance suspended, these employees are often suspended from their jobs without pay.
Federal law mandates that individuals who believe the DOJ suspended their security clearance in retaliation for whistleblowing must be permitted, as far as it is practical, “to retain their government employment status” during the course of the suspension, according to the inspector general.
The Office of Inspector General also found that the DOJ’s existing policies create “the risk that the security process could be misused, as part of an inappropriate effort to encourage an employee to resign.”
The DOJ did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
The post Inspector General: Biden DOJ Broke Law on FBI Whistleblower Protection appeared first on The Daily Signal.
In previous years, people might have missed the irony. But not now—not after the meteoric rise of women’s basketball.
When the WNBA champs visited the White House last week, reporters didn’t cover it out of obligation. They covered it because it was a real story. And President Joe Biden’s betrayal of girls sports only made it more of one.
The timing of the photo op couldn’t have been more politically inconvenient for the president, whose administration has been lit up by lawsuits over the dismantling of the very thing the team was there to celebrate—women.
While Biden was applauding the champs for “showing that the future of women’s sports is brighter than the Vegas lights,” most people couldn’t help but notice how utterly disingenuous he was being. After all, Biden is the one trying to eradicate 52 years of women’s progress. He’s the one insisting biological men make better girls than our daughters. And it was his idea—not Congress’—to turn Title IX into a manifesto of transgender rights.
Yet, he stood at the podium and with a straight face declared, “It matters to girls and women, finally seeing themselves represented—and it matters to all of America.”
“That’s why,” Biden insisted, “as a nation, we need to support women’s sports … .” Not just during the championships, he tweeted later. “But all year-round. Let’s grow women’s sports and continue inspiring the nation.”
As a nation, we need to support women’s sports by showing up in person and watching on TV – with more sponsorships and programming.
— President Biden (@POTUS) May 10, 2024
Not just during championships. But all year round.
Let's grow women’s sports and continue inspiring the nation.
The reaction was instantaneous. After three years of this administration, most parents, coaches, and teachers understand exactly what this president wants to do to women’s sports—and it isn’t growing them. It’s erasing them.
“Here’s something @POTUS could do to support women,” Alliance Defending Freedom’s Kristen Waggoner fired back: “ … Keep men out of women’s sports.”
Here’s something @POTUS could do to support women instead of watching TV:
— Kristen Waggoner (@KWaggonerADF) May 10, 2024
Keep men out of women’s sports. pic.twitter.com/FZ7FP4bELn
The Family Research Council’s Meg Kilgannon was equally incensed by the president’s hypocrisy. “President Biden wants to ‘grow’ women’s sports by allowing men who ‘identify’ as women to play. Forcing women to accept men in our locker rooms, sports teams, and even prisons IS NOT supporting women,” she argued. “Protecting women’s sports and female athletes would be truly inspirational for the nation’s women and girls, and the men who love us.”
Former NCAA All-American Riley Gaines was just as appalled, saying on her “Gaines on Girls” podcast that the “easiest way to support women’s sports is to keep men out of them.” And frankly, the Independent Women’s Forum pointed out, it’s difficult to believe the “audacity” of Biden’s comments considering that he “just mandated that girls surrender their sports opportunities to boys.”
Members of Congress, who just took turns grilling Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on this absurd rewrite of Title IX, were appalled that Biden would try to play both sides of this debate based on the harm he’s already done. The rule Biden’s team released has already triggered a number of lawsuits from more than 20 states—a fact not lost on the House Education and the Workforce Committee.
After the president’s phony hype for girls sports, Republicans tweeted, “Three weeks ago, the Biden admin finalized a radical rewrite of #TitleIX that would ERASE women’s sports by allowing biological males to compete in female sports. The guy doing the most to harm women’s sports should sit this one out.”
In one of those hearings, Cardona’s refusal to even protect his own daughter prompted a passionate response from Rep. Burgess Owens, R-Utah. When Biden’s top education official couldn’t answer whether he’d step in if his daughter was uncomfortable dressing in front a biological boy, the dad of girls couldn’t believe his ears.
“I’ll say this, Mr. Secretary, before I go on to the next topic,” Owens paused. “With all due respect, I pray that our country will never, ever have the vision that your policies are driving us toward in terms of manhood. It’s a vision that teaches our boys that harming girls is no big deal. I pray that we remain a country that produces overwhelmingly massive majorities of men who feel the way I do about my girls.
I will give my life in a heartbeat for my girls. And the blessing I have is that they have no doubts about that. There are millions of men and women across this country that do not have faith, do not have trust in you protecting our girls because of policies you can’t say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to.
By the way, those are not very hard questions as a father.
He repeated that sentiment with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Saturday’s edition of “This Week on the Hill.” Asked why he took Cardona to task, Owens replied simply, “I have five girls—and I grew up in an age where we were taught, very simply, [to be] a very proud young man, have a good legacy, a good name, be happy when it’s all said and done. Learn to love God, country, family. Respect women … particularly motherhood and womanhood. We all know that’s what makes our country what it is—how we think of our ladies and what they bring to our culture.”
But right now, Owens pointed out, “We have an administration that could care less about our ladies.” Equally as frustrating, he said, they don’t care what their transgender agenda is doing to our sons. “Young men have no idea what it is to respect ladies. They have no idea what it is to not be bullies. And they don’t mind harming ladies in any way they can.”
The reason he put Cardona on the spot, he explained, is that leftists may have a way of dealing with the fallout of this rule in theory, “but when it comes down to their kids, they think quite differently. They use their common sense. Well, not [being] able to answer commonsense questions about putting his daughter in harm’s way shows the American people cannot trust him. He needs to leave,” Owens insisted, adding:
He needs to do something else. We cannot trust this guy to take care of protecting our kids or educating our kids standing up for our culture.
It’s all backward, Owens argued. “The upside is that we now know what they’re all about. And [the] American people will not stand for it.”
This past Friday, former President Donald Trump illustrated the stark difference between the two men’s policies when he vowed to roll back Biden’s extreme new Title IX immediately.
“We’re going to end it on Day One,” he promised.
“Don’t forget, that came down as an executive order. And we’re going to change it. … Tell your people not to worry about it,” he said, calling Biden’s idea of letting boys in the girls’ locker rooms “crazy.”
“It’ll be signed on Day One,” Trump repeated. “It’ll be terminated.”
A slightly modified version of this article was originally published at WashingtonStand.com
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post At WNBA Ceremony, Biden Urges America to Support the Women’s Sports He’s Destroying appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The Justice Department’s Kristen Clarke allegedly reached out to her ex-husband Reginald Avery in May 2021, he told The Daily Signal, asking him for a statement saying that she was not a domestic abuser during a confirmation process where she did not disclose her past arrest.
The revelation is significant given that Clarke, at that time, had been nominated for a high-ranking position in the Department of Justice but chose not to disclose her 2006 arrest during a domestic violence incident. She now serves as the assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.
The Daily Signal first revealed the existence of that arrest, and its subsequent expungement, in an April 30 report that has prompted calls for her resignation from figures including Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah.
“Kristen Clarke is in charge of enforcing civil rights laws,” said Lee on April 30. “She enforces those laws aggressively against anyone who sneezes near an abortion clinic. And not at all against those who vandalize churches. She lied under oath during her confirmation proceedings, and should resign.”
New allegations indicate that Clarke sought her ex-husband’s help handling the potential publicization of her arrest just days before she was officially confirmed.
In May 2021, as some evidence emerged that Clarke might have an arrest in her background, Avery says that Clarke called him with her publicist on the line. According to Avery, Clarke asked him to provide her with a statement that clarified she was not a domestic abuser.
At this point, Clarke’s April 14, 2021, confirmation hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee had already taken place. She had already submitted her “responses for the record” to senators.
That includes her answer to Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton’s question: “Since becoming a legal adult, have you ever been arrested for or accused of committing a violent crime against any person?”
“No,” Clarke responded.
Avery says that at Clarke’s request, he sent an email on May 19, 2021, to his ex-wife’s publicist, Clothilde Ewing. The email, which he shared with The Daily Signal, read: “Kristen Clarke was not an abuser in our relationship.”
Clarke did not end up publicly using the statement from Avery, which related to a 2006 incident wherein Avery says she was arrested after she allegedly stabbed him with a knife. Earlier this month, following the publication of The Daily Signal’s report, Clarke accused Avery of being a domestic abuser but confirmed that she had not disclosed the arrest.
Avery told The Daily Signal that Clarke and Ewing (who did not respond to requests for comment) wanted him to say that Clarke was not “the” abuser in their relationship. He chose to say “an” rather than “the” to avoid giving the impression that he himself was an abuser, he shared.
Since Clarke and Avery share a son (who is now 19), Avery said he was eager to put the matter to to rest. He said his understanding at the time was that Clarke was facing underhanded attacks from conservatives and that his statement would “bring closure to the whole thing.” He does not have a record of the 2021 phone call.
“I thought it was harmless,” he explained of the email. “Looking back, it was a huge mistake, but I didn’t foresee any of this coming. So it was probably stupid on my part. But the bottom line is, they did approach me.”
The same day that Avery sent this email to Ewing, the American Accountability Foundation (AAF)’s Tom Jones published a report on AAF’s findings that the FBI failed to properly vet Clarke when it did not interview Avery.
AAF had distributed that report to its lists around 11:30 a.m. on May 19, 2021. Avery could not recall the exact day on which Clarke called him, but his email to Ewing was sent at 11:50 a.m. on May 19, 2021.
Jones previously told The Daily Signal that he began digging into Clarke’s background during her confirmation process and spoke to Avery around the same time. In early May 2021 text messages, Avery told Jones that Clarke attacked him with a knife, slicing his finger to the bone, during a domestic dispute in July 2006.
“The accusations against Kristen Clarke of lying to Congress and domestic violence are deeply troubling,” Jones told The Daily Signal last week. “Clearly she does not possess the character or integrity to be in any position of power. She must resign now.”
Clarke was confirmed to the DOJ, to lead the Civil Rights Division, on May 25, 2021.
Congratulations to Kristen Clarke on making history — there’s no one better to lead the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. I know she’ll work tirelessly to advance civil rights and push our nation closer to our founding ideals of liberty, justice, and equality for all. https://t.co/57OTZDrb8c
— President Biden (@POTUS) May 26, 2021
The revelation comes after The Daily Signal published a report April 30 highlighting evidence that Clarke had not disclosed a 2006 arrest and subsequent expungement during her 2021 confirmation to the DOJ—and then explicitly denied ever having been arrested to Cotton in an interview April 21, 2021.
Clarke has not responded to requests for comment from The Daily Signal, though the DOJ acknowledged receipt of these requests. She did speak to CNN earlier this month, however, confirming that she did not disclose the arrest and expungement and alleging that Avery domestically abused her.
He denied that he had abused his ex-wife in a statement to The Daily Signal, though he did say that Clarke got a restraining order against him shortly before he moved out of their shared home as they were getting divorced (court records show that Avery and Clarke finalized their contentious divorce in 2009).
Clarke got the order “after an argument,” Avery told The Daily Signal. “It was temporary but I just moved out anyway. She lied in court then too. Bunch of nonsense … but I just got my own place. I was so over it.”
That restraining order was the subject of an inquiry from The Washington Post to AAF’s Jones: On May 19, 2021, The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin reached out to Jones asking about his “allegation regarding Kristen Clarke’s role in domestic abuse.”
Rubin’s press inquiry to Jones included a query about Avery (who says that Rubin never actually reached out to him).
“Do you have any comment on court documents showing she successfully obtained a restraining order against Reginald Avery?” Rubin asked Jones, who replied with a statement “unequivocally” condemning domestic violence and calling for a proper investigation into Clarke’s background.
Rubin did not respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal as to why she ultimately did not write her story.
Ewing, who Avery said is Clarke’s publicist, is a children’s author who previously worked for “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” for former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and for former President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. Ewing also has not responded to requests for comment from The Daily Signal.
The Daily Signal’s reporting on Clarke prompted calls for her to resign from Lee, the New York Post Editorial Board, and more. In early May, a group of conservative leaders called on Clarke to resign from her leadership position in a letter sent to the high-ranking DOJ official.
“The American people have lost trust in your ability to lead the Civil Rights Division,” reads a letter to Clarke, signed by Advancing American Freedom Executive Director Paul Teller, American Accountability Foundation’ Jones, Students for Life President Kristan Hawkins, and CatholicVote President Brian Burch. “We request that you resign immediately.”
That letter repeatedly references The Daily Signal’s reporting and attaches a copy of the original report itself. It also points to Clarke’s enforcement of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act against pro-life activists.
“The American people deserve a Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice led with honesty and integrity,” the letter says. “Since taking over the Civil Rights Division, you have weaponized the Department of Justice by wielding the FACE Act against pro-life Americans in an unprecedented manner—even while standing idly by as churches and pro-life pregnancy centers are vandalized, and Jewish students are unable to attend class on college campuses.”
The DOJ did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
When Jones reached out to Avery as part of his 2021 investigation into Clarke’s background and police records, the two men discussed the July 4, 2006, incident over text messages.
“I was seeing another woman,” Avery shared in the May 2021 text message exchange. “She was angry. Attacked me with a knife. I instinctively grabbed it. As I said earlier, I’m not blameless.”
“That’s the story,” Avery insisted. “That’s what happened. She went to jail.”
Prince George’s County Police Department records show that the department was called on nine different occasions by someone at Avery’s and Clarke’s Upper Marlboro, Maryland, household between May 2003 and December 2007.
Seven of those calls were for a “threat” or some type of domestic violence, but most were cleared without a report. The July 4, 2006, call was made by “Mr. Reginald” (Avery’s first name) and accompanied by a 760 code, according to a mainframe print-out from Prince George’s County computer-aided dispatch system obtained by The Daily Signal.
That 760 code is the department’s clearance code for “arrest,” the Prince George County Police Department confirmed. That call was not cleared for four hours. Avery says it was Clarke who was arrested. Clarke has not addressed the specific incident.
The DOJ official’s ex-husband also shared with Jones that on the night of the incident, he called 911 due to his injury and the “cops came because [his] finger was cut off.” (Avery clarified to The Daily Signal that the finger was sliced to the bone, not cut off.) Police allegedly decided to arrest Clarke, and Avery said he went to the emergency room in Bowie, Maryland, for the injury.
Jones and Avery speculated via 2021 text messages about why Clarke would hide the arrest.
“I assume she just thinks she won’t get caught,” Jones queried, to which Avery responded at the time, “Yes, the arrogance has always been there. But I don’t understand lying on a federal application.”
The post EXCLUSIVE: DOJ’s Kristen Clarke Asked Ex-Husband to Say She Wasn’t an Abuser During Confirmation Process, Ex Alleges appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The White House and its Office of Management and Budget instructed federal agencies to use a “template” for determining the cost of implementing President Joe Biden’s executive order to encourage voter participation, according to government emails obtained by The Daily Signal.
Critics use the term “Bidenbucks” to refer to the president’s controversial order from 2021, which directs federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture to get involved in elections.
Several members of Congress contend that Biden’s order on turning out the vote for elections could violate the Antideficiency Act, a law that has three parts. It prohibits federal employees from obligating tax dollars not authorized by Congress, prohibits officials from not spending money as appropriated by Congress, and prohibits agencies from accepting voluntary service from individuals.
Biden’s controversial Executive Order 14019 requires federal agencies to participate in voter registration activities and help third-party organizations perform those activities on agency premises.
Potentially, this could involve spending government funds, contracting with third parties for the payment of those funds, or accepting voluntary services by these “approved” third-party organizations such as Demos.
Biden’s order appears to violate at least two provisions of the Antidefieicncy Act, said Stewart Whitson, senior director of federal affairs at the Foundation for Government Accountability, a conservative watchdog group, told The Daily Signal.
But, Whitson added, to determine whether the Biden administration is violating that law, it’s necessary to know where the money is coming from, where it’s going, and what it’s being used for.
Existing pots of money, for example, could be distributed by the Department of Agriculture to state agencies to help carry out voter registration activities, he suggested.
“Even if the Biden administration were to claim that no public funds are spent to carry out EO 14019—a dubious and laughable claim—this effort would still violate the Antideficiency Act because it would mean federal agencies were accepting voluntary services from these third-party organizations to help carry out EO 14019, who also happen to be politically aligned with the current administration,” Whitson said.
Neither the Agriculture Department nor the Office of Management and Budget responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment for this report.
OMB “created a template for budget requests for the Voting EO [executive order] within their equity template in case any funding is needed for implementation,” says a Sept. 23, 2021, email among Department of Agriculture officials.
Biden’s executive order also directed agencies to team with private organizations to boost voting. Chief among those groups is the liberal think tank Demos, which drafted the executive action before Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021.
Akhil Rajan, then an assistant to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsak, sent the September 2021 email message about the OMB’s template to USDA senior adviser Kumar Chandran, now the department’s acting undersecretary. Rajan is now a senior policy adviser to the White House’s deputy chief of staff.
Rajan’s email to Chandran noted, “Contact K. Sabeel Rahman,” apparently meaning he was the one to contact with any questions.
By that fall, Rahman, who was president of Demos when the liberal think tank drafted the executive order on voting, had joined the Biden administration’s OMB as part of its Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. (Rahman is now a professor at Cornell Law School.)
The Daily Signal obtained 73 pages of emails from the Department of Agriculture through a request for public records under the Freedom of Information Act.
The documents were USDA’s second interim response to a request from The Daily Signal regarding Biden’s executive order on encouraging voter registration and voting. Some pages are heavily redacted.
The documents also prominently mention meetings and guidance from Demos, which is based in New York. The left-wing think tank drafted Biden’s executive order to agencies about voter registration in December 2020, the month after Biden defeated Donald Trump before he took office.
Although describing it as “minimal,” USDA acknowledges some budgetary impact from Biden’s order. Any amount, however, could mean obligating tax dollars without congressional authorization, in violation of the Antideficiency Act.
In an email dated Sept. 21, 2021, Anne DeCesaro, chief of staff for the USDA’s Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services, wrote to Chandran about several issues, including “assessment of budgetary impact.”
“For all actions, we expect minimal budgetary impact as providing memos and letters and regular interactions with states are part of our normal business practices,” DeCesaro wrote.
In that same email, DeCesaro explained to Chandran how other agencies within USDA could participate: The National School Lunch Program could promote voter registration in high schools, for example, and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, could register its beneficiaries to vote.
Ten days earlier, on Sept. 10, 2021, Chandran emailed several senior USDA staff about Biden’s executive order on increasing voter participation.
“Thank you for your past work to complete our interim strategic plan for the voting rights executive order,” Chandran wrote in the email. “We are now being asked to submit a final strategic plan, based on what we provided in our interim plan.”
He later added: “The WH [White House] team leading this effort has put together a template for the final strategic plan. This template largely follows the same format as that for the interim [plan], except it also includes instructions for how to flesh out each proposed action.”
The second interim response from the USDA to The Daily Signal’s FOIA requests didn’t include the department’s strategic plan or the template provided by the White House or its Office of Management and Budget.
An email dated Aug. 3, 2021, refers to a meeting between USDA officials and Demos executives to discuss Biden’s order on voting.
The Agriculture Department and Demos communicated again about the president’s executive order in November 2021.
“We’d love to reconnect soon to learn about your plans and see how Demos and the ACLU [the American Civil Liberties Union] may be able to support you in their continued development and implementation,” Demos senior policy analyst Lauren Williamson wrote Nov. 5 to senior USDA officials.
“When we met last, we talked about wanting to explore additional programs in more detail to ensure maximal impact of the EO for the communities the USDA serves and we’re eager to continue that conversation,” Williamson said.
Four days later, Rajan, assistant to the secretary of agriculture, wrote to Chandan, saying: “[D]emos has been extremely helpful in thinking about ways to expand opportunities for voting, and the coalition they assembled for our last call was rich in the types of groups that have assembled rigorously-tested best practices. So from that perspective it may be helpful to hear from them but understand that REDACTED.”
Because USDA redacted Rajan’s next words, it is impossible to know what Vilsak’s assistant wanted Chandran to understand.
The post EXCLUSIVE: White House Issued ‘Template’ to Impose Biden’s Voter Mobilization Executive Order appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The following is an updated version of a column originally published in December 2022.
One of the bestselling books of the 1970s was “The Peter Principle,” a business management book by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull.
The book’s premise was that employees get promoted based on their performance in their previous jobs until they are ultimately elevated to a position in which they’re incompetent, since skills and success in one position don’t necessarily ensure success in the next. “In a hierarchy,” Peter explained, “every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
If “The Peter Principle” were published today, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre would be a case study in the phenomenon, now called “failing upward.” In Jean-Pierre’s case, that’s reflected in her work for the short-lived Democratic presidential campaigns of John Edwards in 2004 and Martin O’Malley in 2016, and now as the chief spokeswoman for the Biden administration. On Monday, she will mark her second anniversary in that role.
In recent weeks, however, with the 2024 election campaign shifting into high gear, there have been well-sourced reports that high-ranking figures in the Biden administration are not-so-subtly seeking to push Jean-Pierre out of the role—for which she was never qualified to begin with. Many of the same administration figures reportedly behind those efforts to oust her are, not surprisingly, denying the accuracy of the reports.
The New York Post quoted a source as saying the high-ranking administration figures “‘were trying to find Karine a graceful exit’ because of the ugly optics of removing her against her will,” especially because she thinks she’s doing a good job. (One face-saving exit strategy was to offer her the presidency of EMILY’s List, an abortion rights group.)
But as a textbook example of an affirmative-action hire, Jean-Pierre appears not to be going anywhere. An administration so thoroughly wedded to so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion is, in this case, now finding it difficult to divorce itself from DEI. (More on that below.)
The most glaring evidence that Jean-Pierre, 49, has been promoted to her level of incompetence as White House press secretary is her near-total dependence on a binder full of administration talking points, which she often reads from directly at her daily news briefings to the White House press corps.
It’s so bad that Fox News commentator Jesse Watters has taken to referring to her derisively as “Binder,” and it’s so, well, cringeworthy that other critics deliberately mispronounce “Karine” as “Cringe.”
Just as an aside, recall how 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was ridiculed mercilessly in the liberal media for saying during the second presidential debate that he had “binders full of women.” That was his awkward way of referring to files of résumés of women he would consider for staffing his administration were he to win the election. Many of the talking heads’ “binder” jokes snarkily suggested that the squeaky-clean Romney was engaged in some form of BDSM with those women.
It’s standard operating procedure for a press secretary to have notes for ready reference. It’s quite another thing to stare down at them and read those notes all but verbatim.
As far as we know, none of the talking heads who ridiculed Romney has ever mentioned—much less made fun of—Jean-Pierre’s near-complete dependence on her press-briefing binders. Nor have they satirized her oft-repeated deflection—“I don’t have anything”—when she doesn’t have answers to questions for which she’s unprepared.
Nor have the liberal media (or the late-night TV comics) noted, much less lampooned, how Jean-Pierre has mispronounced or mangled words and phrases in the course of her press briefings.
On Dec. 13, 2022, Jean-Pierre touted “bicarmel” support in Congress for the so-called Respect for Marriage Act. “Bicarmel, bipartisan support was had for this piece of legislation,” she said.
But this was no one-off slip of the tongue: She used the term “bicarmel” three times to describe it in the course of the half-hour press briefing. It should have been “bicameral,” of course; meaning, support in both chambers of Congress.
The official White House transcript of the briefing was dishonestly corrected in all three instances to “bicameral” with no indication that it was not an accurate reflection of what was actually said.
On Nov. 28, 2022, in congratulating three Americans who had won Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics, and economics, she mispronounced “Nobel” five times in 40 seconds as “noble.”
Two months to the day earlier, on Sept. 28, Jean-Pierre said that as part of Vice President Kamala Harris’ then-pending trip to South Korea, the veep would visit the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas. Jean-Pierre helpfully noted that it had been “nearly 70 years since the Korean ‘armtis’”—not to be confused with the Korean armistice.
Three weeks before that, on Sept. 6, Jean-Pierre conflated a Russian natural gas pipeline with an upscale American department store chain. She accused Russia of causing an energy crisis in Europe by shutting down its Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which she referred to as the “Nordstrom 1” pipeline.
One can only imagine how former President Donald Trump’s press secretaries, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and later Kayleigh McEnany, would have been pilloried by the liberal White House press corps had they made those sorts of repeated verbal gaffes.
One reason Jean-Pierre still has the high-visibility press secretary’s job, to which she was elevated on May 13, 2022, despite all of the gaffes, is because President Joe Biden is legendary for his own innumerable flubs and miscues.
“White House communications staff has had to correct President Joe Biden’s public remarks at least 148 times since the beginning of 2024, a review of official White House transcripts shows,” the Daily Caller reported April 29. Biden couldn’t very well hold Jean-Pierre to a higher standard, could he?
But the real reason Jean-Pierre remains in her post today is because of the identity politics to which the Biden administration and the Democratic Party have sworn undying allegiance. She is immune from criticism—and from reassignment to a less high-profile post—only because she checks all of the boxes of identity-politics “intersectionality” as the first black, first LGBTQ, and first immigrant White House press secretary.
In the Biden administration, Jean-Pierre demonstrates daily that meritocracy is an afterthought—if it’s thought of at all. The moral of this story: Live by DEI, die by it.
The post Biden Admin in a DEI Bind(er) of Its Own Making, Stuck With Incompetent Jean-Pierre appeared first on The Daily Signal.
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden took the very unusual step of submitting to an interviewer who was an actual journalist (not like Howard Stern or Drew Barrymore). It wouldn’t be long before he started mangling his record—and Donald Trump’s.
CNN reporter Erin Burnett began with how Trump’s promises of new jobs in Wisconsin didn’t come true: “Why should people here believe that you will succeed at creating jobs where Trump failed?” Biden bragged: “He’s never succeeded in creating jobs, and I have never failed. I have created over 15 million jobs since I have been president.” He did it all by himself! He claimed that other than Herbert Hoover, Trump’s “the only other president who lost more jobs than created in his four-year term.”
There’s a massive asterisk; namely, the global COVID-19 pandemic. Trump’s employment record in the first three years of his presidency was strong. The raw number of employed Americans reached records. In October 2018, it had reached more than 156.6 million. The unemployment rate hit record lows across demographics—for women, blacks, Latinos, Asians, and youth.
Obviously, the severe lockdowns during the pandemic—most aggressively pushed by the Democrats and their media allies—drove massive job losses. Nonfarm payroll employment in the United States declined by 9.4 million in 2020. So, Democrats blame that on Trump, and when the pandemic was over, they took credit for the economy climbing out of that hole.
But that wasn’t Biden’s worst mangle. He claimed to CNN that “no president’s had the run we have had, in terms of creating jobs and bringing down inflation. It was 9% when I came to office, 9%.”
That’s ridiculous! It’s a baldfaced lie. Inflation was 1.4%, again, due to the pandemic. Burnett didn’t check his facts, during or after the interview. She pushed him to acknowledge inflation was bad, but she didn’t suggest he was lying.
Fox News contributor Joe Concha tweeted: “And of course, CNN makes sure its pious fact-checker is nowhere to be found afterward.”
And of course, CNN makes sure its pious fact-checker is nowhere to be found afterward… https://t.co/1lgapFWYgp
— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) May 9, 2024
That would be Daniel Dale, who’s almost entirely deployed on TV to “fact-check” Trump. Since Trump’s Manhattan trial began in mid-April, Dale has appeared nine times to “check” him. He has not appeared to check anyone else. On April 18, Jake Tapper said, “He’s handy to have around at times like this.”
Some of these fact checks are “brag checks.” Trump will say he’s ahead in all the polls, when he’s ahead in most polls. But Dale sounds most exasperated when Trump blames Biden for his legal troubles. On April 18, Dale decried “his false conspiracy theory that essentially that Joe Biden is behind this case, which was brought by a locally elected district attorney.”
Dale can’t even disclose that District Attorney Alvin Bragg is a Democrat. He acknowledged Trump’s lead prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, was a Biden Justice Department official, and then joined Bragg’s team. A “conspiracy theory” between Democrat lawyers looks obvious here and declaring it “false” is a lame spin.
On Tuesday, Dale threw a penalty flag at Trump for saying Bragg is a “Soros-backed” prosecutor—and Trump didn’t say that in the remarks they’d just aired. Dale turned on the spin machine by saying leftist billionaire George Soros is “a frequent target of antisemitic conspiracy theories” and then claimed “at best” the money was indirect: Soros donated to the Color of Change PAC, and then the PAC backed Bragg.
If a conservative DA received big money from a pro-Trump PAC, CNN would call him or her “Trump-backed” without hesitation. CNN deploys Dale not as a “fact-checker” as much as a spin spoiler.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post CNN Fails to Fact-Check Biden’s Falsehood-Filled Interview appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza strip is the most morally clear conflict in modern history.
It pits an actual terrorist group that just engaged in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust against a democratic country that protects citizens—Jewish, Muslim, and Christian. It pits a monstrously evil tentacle of Iran—handed control of the Gaza strip by Israel in 2005 when Israel pulled out of that area and forced 8,000 Jews out of their homes—against a democratic ally of the United States.
It pits an army of atrocity-seeking villains—who are attempting to maximize Palestinian casualties by locating themselves among civilians, stealing humanitarian aid, and literally murdering anyone who gets in their way—against an actual professional army risking the lives of its own soldiers in order to protect Palestinian civilians.
And yet Joe Biden can’t quite make up his mind.
On the one hand, Biden mouths platitudinous support for Israel in its battle against Hamas. On the other, he continues to grant the central premise Hamas promotes, which is that Israel is a human rights violator and indiscriminate killer of Palestinians—even as Hamas holds Americans hostage in Gaza.
Biden has spent the last several weeks pressuring Israel not to go into Rafah, the sole major repository of the Hamas terror apparatus, where some four brigades of terrorists are digging in. Instead, he has deployed his head of the CIA, his secretary of state, and a wide variety of other officials to promote “negotiations” between Israel and Hamas.
In fact, he’s done more than that for Hamas. While fully articulating his understanding that Hamas seeks a permanent end to the conflict in Gaza, which would leave them in control and hand them a victory they could never earn on the battlefield, Biden has pushed just that: a permanent end to the conflict leaving Hamas in place. Biden has not explained just how this would benefit the United States, Israel, the Palestinians themselves, or the region more broadly. He has simply calculated that an end to conflict is an end in and of itself.
To that end, Biden has been slow-walking aid to the Israelis—including ammunition that allows for better targeting, which would minimize civilian casualties. He has deployed his negotiators to play both sides of the table, even going so far as to allow his CIA head, William Burns, to negotiate with Egypt and Qatar a series of terms without submitting them to the Israelis—and then allowing Hamas itself to declare its acceptance of such nonsensical and irrelevant terms, presumably in an effort to humiliate the Israelis into accepting their own quasi-surrender.
Biden has trotted out spokespeople to claim that America continues to back Israel, while simultaneously claiming—falsely—that Israel is engaging in human rights abuses.
The result is the worst of all possible worlds for Biden: a dissatisfied radical base convinced that Biden is behind the war in Gaza; an angry pro-Israel citizenry bewildered by Biden’s inability to call evil by its name; and a stalemate in Gaza, which means that radical protesters will undoubtedly descend on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in order to harass Biden as he receives his renomination.
It’s all stupid.
But it does raise an obvious question: Why?
Why is this so seemingly tough for Joe Biden? Is it all just a misread of the political moment—adherence to a stunningly imbecilic belief that if Biden appeases extremists within his party, he’ll be able to win the 2024 election?
Or is it something deeper—a moral malaise that has taken root in the upper echelons of our politics, in which Western powers, including Israel, are seen as inherently problematic while the West’s enemies, including Hamas, are seen as inherently victimized?
If the tens of thousands of protesters on America’s streets are any indicator, the latter seems more likely than the former. Which spells doom for a West that cannot see the difference between decency and barbarity.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post If You Can’t Tell the Bad Guy in Israel Vs. Hamas, You’re the Problem appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Apart from the taxpayer-funded lawfare being waged against former President Donald Trump by leftist prosecutors in New York, Atlanta, and Washington, there is no clearer proof that the Left has embraced “by any means necessary” as its credo than the politicization of Secret Service protection of President Joe Biden’s presidential rivals.
Not only has Biden’s Department of Homeland Security denied five requests for Secret Service protection from independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the flimsiest of grounds, but now the Democratic congressman from Mississippi who chaired the kangaroo court Jan. 6 committee is proposing to strip Trump of his Secret Service detail if he were convicted in any of the politically motivated trials he’s facing.
Never mind that this brazen legislation, championed by Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., has no chance of being enacted by Congress or that the courts would surely enjoin it as unconstitutional if it were. Its sheer cold-bloodedness is appalling.
Thompson knows full well that if any of Trump’s trials—which the former president calls “witch hunts”—were to end in a prison sentence and he had no Secret Service protection behind bars, he would have a target on his back for attack by other inmates. (Think Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murder in the killing of George Floyd, who barely survived a Nov. 24 stabbing in prison in Arizona.)
Such is the Trump Derangement Syndrome that has suffused the Left. What other possible reason than bloodlust would motivate Thompson to sponsor such sociopathic legislation—even though he surely knows that it reeks of being an unconstitutional bill of attainder?
The Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School states that courts apply a legal test to determine whether legislation violates the ban on bills of attainder under Article 1, Sections 9 and 10 of the Constitution by determining whether the law “targets specific named or identifiable individuals or groups.”
Thompson’s Disgraced Former Protectees Act, introduced April 19, includes only one “identifiable individual”: Donald Trump.
Thompson is the ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, which brings us back to disgraced Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ repeated denial of Secret Service protection for Kennedy since he announced his candidacy just over a year ago.
Given that the independent presidential hopeful’s father and uncle were both assassinated, it’s beyond appalling that Biden and Mayorkas can’t even be shamed into authorizing Secret Service protection for him.
Even many of Kennedy’s own relatives who have inexplicably endorsed Biden’s reelection bid over their own kin have asked for a security detail for him—to no avail.
At an April 18 event in Philadelphia at which Biden was endorsed for reelection by several members of the extended Kennedy clan (including two of RFK Jr.’s own siblings), the president obliquely alluded to the assassinations. “Your family … has endured such violence,” he said.
If they expected authorization of Secret Service protection as a show of presidential gratitude for turning their backs on their own relative, they were sadly mistaken.
Mayorkas asserts that Kennedy doesn’t qualify for Secret Service protection. As recently as March 28, the homeland security chief wrote to the Kennedy campaign: “Based on the facts and the recommendation of the advisory committee, I have determined that Secret Service protection for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not warranted at this time.”
That’s patently false, inasmuch as Mayorkas and the president have wide latitude in authorizing the protection. You could ask then-President Jimmy Carter, who in 1980 extended it to then-Sen. Ted Kennedy, RFK Jr.’s uncle, after he launched an insurgent Democratic primary challenge to Carter.
It’s as if Biden and Mayorkas actually want harm to befall the scion of the legendary political family because they fear his independent candidacy will siphon enough votes away from the incumbent to ensure Trump’s return to the Oval Office next January.
What is that if not “by any means necessary”? One thing is certain: It’s not as if Biden’s spendthrift administration is trying to save federal taxpayer dollars by withholding the protection.
Kennedy rightly characterizes the repeated denial of protection as the “weaponization of government” and “a political scandal.”
A day after the most recent denial, his attorney, Aaron Siri, in a letter to Mayorkas, called it “capricious, an abuse of discretion, and clearly politically motivated,” adding:
If any harm befalls Mr. Kennedy or any other member of the public who may be injured or killed in any incident that arises due to lack of Secret Service protection to the candidate and the deterrent it affords, we will seek to hold you accountable.
Translation: The president and his lackey Mayorkas will have blood on their hands.
Originally published by The Washington Times
The post Bloodlust: The Left’s Politicization of Secret Service Protection appeared first on The Daily Signal.
An influential left-of-center donor’s charity has launched an initiative compelling other philanthropies to pour money into voter-mobilization efforts for this fall’s elections.
Democracy Fund, founded and funded by liberal philanthropist Pierre Omidyar, has rallied 174 organizations and individuals pledging to expedite disbursement of grants related to get-out-the-vote operations and other efforts.
The pledge called on signatories either to make the bulk of their election-related donations by the end of April, to “move up” disbursements scheduled for later in the year, or to streamline grant approval processes.
Alex Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the liberal dark money giant Arabella Advisors, Tides, and Democrat megadonor Susan Pritzker are among the major left-of-center philanthropic players to sign the pledge.
Omidyar, who founded eBay and has become a prolific investor, is worth over $10.9 billion, according to Bloomberg. Omidyar gave roughly $1.2 billion through various charitable arms to an array of primarily left-of-center causes between 2004 and 2020, according to a Capital Research Center report.
In 2020, Omidyar gave the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a sprawling Democrat-aligned political outfit, $45 million to support its Civic Action Fund project, a now-defunct voter-turnout initiative that focused on “empower[ing] those typically underrepresented in our democratic process” by ensuring they voted in 2020. The group collaborated with liberal politicians and activists to organize local get-out-the-vote efforts targeting low-propensity voters, according to Influence Watch.
In explaining his donation to Civic Action Fund, Omidyar cited the importance of “supporting local voter outreach and engagement of young people and people of color.” Young people and minority voters favor the Democratic Party by considerable margins, with voters 18 to 29 and all nonwhite constituencies favoring President Joe Biden by double digits in 2020, according to a CNN exit poll.
Civic Action Fund was active in 14 states, including the key states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, during the 2020 election season, according to its website. The group had staffers with ties to notable Democrats such as former President Barack Obama and former Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, according to Influence Watch.
Many of the signatories of Democracy Fund’s “All by April” pledge have clear ideological slants.
Alex Soros, son of influential liberal financier George Soros, has described himself as “more political” than his father.
Arabella manages a network of nonprofits that pours tens of millions into liberal causes every year.
Tides comprises a variety of organizational arms, including one of the largest pass-through organizations for liberal philanthropists. And Pritzker has donated millions to Democratic and otherwise left-of-center political committees.
Arabella’s nonprofit network and the Soros family’s philanthropic ventures have dropped large sums on election spending.
Arabella’s nonprofits spent more than $62 million on voter registration and mobilization efforts during 2022, a midterm election year.
Much of the Arabella network’s spending also focused on getting Democrat-friendly demographics to the polls. New Venture Fund, one of Arabella’s arms, gave millions to the Voter Registration Project, a group “commissioned” by veteran Democratic operative John Podesta that, according to Influence Watch, “targets African-American, Latino, Native American, low-income, and other voter groups likely to lean left-of-center.”
The Soros philanthropic empire also gave millions to the Voter Registration Project between 2016 and 2022. The project’s efforts in 2020 netted Biden between 1 million and 2.7 million votes, according to a Capital Research Center report.
Open Society Policy Center, part of the broader Soros network, gave $1.4 million to the Voto Latino Action Fund in 2022. The organization focuses on registering Latino voters and loosening voting laws, according to its website.
High voter turnout among Latinos was among the reasons Democrats outperformed expectations during the 2022 midterm elections, according to Politico.
“Voter registration nonprofits are nothing more than a cost-effective way to achieve partisan electioneering results for Democrats while keeping the donors totally anonymous and giving them a tax write-off for their troubles,” Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher at Capital Research Center, previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Democracy Fund, Arabella, Tides, and Open Society Foundations did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
The post This Liberal Donor Pushes Left-Leaning Groups to Fund Efforts to Turn Out Voters appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Vaunce News 