Obamagate — How Obama administration apparently weaponized intel agencies for political attacks

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There is strong evidence that President Barack Obama’s administration improperly weaponized U.S. intelligence agencies in multiple and shocking ways against Donald Trump and other political enemies.

It appears the Obama administration did this in a number of ways, including: fraudulently obtaining Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to spy on American citizens; promoting the Democratic National Committee-funded dossier assembled by former British spy Christopher Steele that was filled with lies about Trump; politicizing intelligence analysis; leaking intelligence; and spying on political opponents and journalists.

In the period when he was a presidential candidate and president-elect, Trump and his aides seemed to have been the major targets of this misuse of American intelligence for political purposes. But they were not the only targets.

It is imperative to uncover the extent of the Obama administration’s abuse of U.S. intelligence for political purposes. This must include a full list of every American unmasked from intelligence reports – Trump aides, members of Congress, and ordinary Americans – and who made these requests.

It would be irresponsible for the intelligence community and Congress to turn a blind eye to this abuse simply because it happened years ago. Wrongdoing by the Obama administration in this scandal – which President Trump has dubbed “Obamagate” – must be exposed to ensure such actions never take place again.

This week’s revelation that an astounding 39 Obama administration officials – including then-Vice President Joe Biden – made 53 requests to unmask incoming Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s name from National Security Agency phone intercepts between Election Day on Nov. 8, 2016 and Jan. 12, 2017 was a bombshell.

The stunning revelation regarding Obama administration spying on Flynn by secretly recording his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. at the time appears to confirm allegations by President Trump and his supporters of a broad effort by the Obama administration to weaponize intelligence to undermine the Trump presidency shortly before it began.

Flynn was simply carrying out his duties by making contact with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the transition period after Trump was elected president. It is perfectly routine for incoming members of a new presidential administration dealing with foreign affairs to contact foreign officials to introduce themselves before taking office.

Making this worse, the 53 unmasking requests by Obama administration officials are probably the tip of the iceberg of the Obama administration’s abuse of National Security Agency intelligence to target Trump aides.

House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes, R-Calif. confirmed this in a Fox Business interview this week on “Lou Dobbs Tonight” when he said the Flynn unmasking scandal is “even worse than this” because “a whole lot” of other Trump associates were unmasked.

With this in mind, it is frustrating to see former Obama officials, the mainstream media and some former intelligence officials brush off the Flynn unmasking requests by claiming such requests are “normal and routine” and that all relevant rules and laws were complied with.

As a former CIA officer who helped process requests to unmask the names of U.S. citizens from National Security Agency reports, I know that unmasking requests are not normal and routine. And I believe these requests raise serious civil rights and legal issues that have not yet been addressed.

From my 25 years working in U.S. government national security jobs, I know how sensitive and rare unmasking requests are.

Names of U.S. citizens mentioned in U.S. intelligence reports – often National Security Agency communications intercepts – are redacted because under U.S. law, America’s foreign intelligence services are normally not permitted to spy on U.S. citizens.

Although senior U.S. officials are permitted to ask for the identity of a redacted name in an intelligence report (an unmasking request), such requests are unusual and the requestor must have a “need to know” the identity of the U.S. person to understand the foreign intelligence information or assess its importance.

When the request is approved, the unmasked identity is released only to the person who requested it – not to everyone who might have seen the original version of the report.

For example, during my time at the State Department from 2001-2006, Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage made about 100 demasking requests. Then-Under Secretary of State John Bolton only made 10 in four years.

Ironically, Senate Democrats made Bolton’s unmasking requests an issue during his 2005 nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations by falsely claiming these requests were improper and made to intimidate people and gain political advantage.

Then-Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., said at the time that unmasking requests were “rarely requested” and made “infrequently” by “non-career political appointees such as Mr. Bolton.”

An April 14, 2005, New York Times article said this about unmasking requests in connection with the Bolton confirmation hearings: “The identities of American officials whose communications are intercepted are usually closely protected by law, and not included even in classified intelligence reports. Access to the names may be authorized by the N.S.A. only in response to special requests, and these are not common, particularly from policy makers.”

The above statements about the rarity of unmasking requests are consistent with what I witnessed during my government career. In addition, the National Security Agency tightened the rules in 2005 on unmasking because of the controversy over such requests caused by the Bolton hearing.

The Obama administration, however, appeared to weaken the unmasking rules.

The Obama administration expanded access to National Security Agency information in February 2016 and on January 12, 2017. Both changes appeared to allow larger numbers of government officials to have access to unmasked names of Americans in intelligence reporting.

Even more troubling was a major rollback by the Obama administration in rules protecting members of Congress from unmasking requests.

I know from my five years on House Intelligence Committee staff of longstanding sensitivity by lawmakers that U.S. intelligence agencies could be used by the executive branch to spy on a president’s political enemies. For this reason, until 2013 there were strict limits to keep members of Congress out of intelligence reporting and to prevent unmasking their names.

Under a policy in effect in the 1990s, unmasking requests of the names of members of Congress were extremely limited and generally had to be reported to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

According to the Wall Street Journal, these rules were tightened further with “a 2011 NSA directive [that] required direct communications between foreign intelligence targets and members of Congress to be destroyed, but [gave] the NSA director the authority to waive this requirement if he determines the communications contain ‘significant foreign intelligence.””

However, in 2013 the Obama administration significantly weakened rules on unmasking the names of members of Congress from intelligence reports. The requestor’s reason could now merely be “to fully understand the intelligence.”

Rules on notifying Congress also were weakened. National Security Agency officials henceforth would notify Congress when members were unmasked from intelligence reports “as appropriate” and would determine “whether and to what extent congressional notification would take place.”

The Obama administration appeared to take advantage of these rules changes in 2015 when it obtained private conversations from National Security Agency reports of U.S. lawmakers who opposed the Iran nuclear deal in meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The rule changes on unmasking the names of members of Congress have a direct bearing on the Obama administration’s unmasking of Trump aides.

Since there no longer was a prohibition on using U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on members of Congress, Obama officials probably reasoned there was nothing to prevent them from spying on members of a presidential campaign or an incoming presidential administration. This helps explain the hundreds of unmasking requests regarding Trump aides in 2016 and early 2017.

So what should happen now?

In addition to an investigation of spying on American citizens by the Obama administration, all Obama administration rule changes making it easier to unmask the names of members of Congress and ordinary Americans from intelligence reports need to be reversed immediately.

There also should be a requirement in the law restricting when U.S. officials can unmask the names of members of a presidential campaign or incoming administration from intelligence reports or otherwise spy on them. These rules should include a requirement for congressional notification if such spying is deemed necessary in the future.

Finally, I want to know why career intelligence officials cooperated with unmasking Trump campaign and transition officials at the request of the Obama administration.

Since the prohibition on spying on American citizens and keeping the names of U.S citizens out of intelligence reports are cardinal rules of the U.S. intelligence community, how could career intelligence officers agree to process hundreds of these requests? Why did none of them file complaints with their inspector general or the congressional intelligence oversight committees?

The hundreds of unmasking requests of Trump campaign and transition officials made by the Obama administration were in no way routine and necessary. I believe carrying out these unmasking requests was a huge ethical lapse by dozens – maybe hundreds – of U.S. intelligence community employees that must be addressed by the White House and the leaders of our intelligence agencies.

Originally published by Fox News

COLUMN BY

About Fred Fleitz

Fred Fleitz is President and CEO of the Center for Security Policy. He recently served as a Deputy Assistant to President Trump and Chief of Staff to National Security Adviser John Bolton. He previously worked in national security positions for 25 years with CIA, DIA, the Department of State and the House Intelligence Committee staff. Read his complete bio here. Follow Fleitz on Twitter @fredfleitz.

EDITORS NOTE: This Center for Security Policy column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Clinton Resists Court Order to Produce Memo on Process that Led to Her Mass Email Deletions

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Perhaps Hillary Clinton thinks she can run out the clock on our efforts to get to the bottom of her scandalous email schemes. Recall that she is resisting, through an emergency appeal, a court order to us about her emails. (The appellate hearing on her testimony, btw, has been officially set for June 2.)

Now our Judicial Watch attorneys are to file a motion in federal court to compel her to produce a December 2014 after action memorandum created by her personal attorney, Heather Samuelson, that memorializes the search for and processing of Clinton emails in 2014.

It was Samuelson who reviewed Clinton’s State Department emails, and about half of them were deleted.

The filing comes in our FOIA lawsuit that seeks records concerning “talking points or updates on the Benghazi attack” (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:14-cv-01242)). We famously uncovered in 2014 that the “talking points,” which provided the basis for false statements by then-National Security Advisor Susan Rice, were created by the Obama White House. This JW FOIA lawsuit led directly to the disclosure of the Clinton email system in 2015.

In December 2018, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered discovery into whether Clinton’s use of a private email server was intended to stymie FOIA; whether the State Department’s intent to settle this case in late 2014 and early 2015 amounted to bad faith; and whether the State Department has adequately searched for records responsive to Judicial Watch’s request. The court also authorized discovery into whether the Benghazi controversy motivated the cover-up of Clinton’s email. The court ruled that the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”

Clinton is resisting producing even a portion of the “after-action” memo, despite an August 22, 2019, ruling by Judge Lamberth that we may ask for the memorandum in our discovery. Clinton alleges that the memo is fully exempt from disclosure under the “attorney work product doctrine.” In an earlier ruling on a similar issue in this litigation, the Court held that “any contemporaneous documents shedding light on the three narrow discovery topics – even documents evincing attorney impressions, conclusions, opinions, and theories – constitute fact work-product” and should be produced.

We explain to the court: “After repeated attempts to resolve this dispute have proven unsuccessful, [Judicial Watch] respectfully requests an order from the Court to compel Secretary Clinton to produce the document … within short order.”

We point out:

This is a rare Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case in which the Court determined that civil discovery is appropriate. On March 29, 2016, the Court granted [Judicial Watch’s] motion for discovery, holding that “[w] here there is evidence of government wrong-doing and bad faith, as here, limited discovery is appropriate, even though it is exceedingly rare in FOIA cases.”

In our motion we refute Clinton’s claim that the memo is protected by the “attorney work product doctrine.”

Secretary Clinton claims that the after action memo is subject to the attorney work product privilege and exempt from disclosure, but she fails to explain that the memorandum was created in reasonable anticipation of litigation. … She does not assert that it was created due to the litigation here. Neither does she claim that it was created in anticipation of any other specific litigation. Simply put, she does not demonstrate that the after action memo was not created in the normal course of the search and review process …

Second, … the after action memo falls within the category of “contemporaneous documents shedding light on the three narrow discovery topics.” … According to Samuelson’s testimony, the after action memo plainly contains factual information memorializing searches and techniques for retrieving Secretary Clinton’s governmental records.

Clinton’s attorneys also do not explain why her emails were deleted despite the “reasonable anticipation of litigation,” rather than preserved.

In a June 2019 court-ordered deposition to us, Samuelson admitted under oath that she was granted immunity by the U.S. Department of Justice in June 2016. She also revealed that, contrary to what she told the FBI in 2016, she was, in fact, aware that Clinton used a private email account while secretary of state. Samuel’s admission to us that she became aware of Clinton’s non-State.gov emails during her service in the Clinton State Department White House Liaison Office contradicts the notation in the FBI’s May 24, 2016, “302” report on Samuelson’s interview with FBI agents:

Samuelson did not become aware of Clinton’s use of a private email account and server until she was serving as Clinton’s personal attorney.

In 2014, after Clinton left the State Department, Samuelson became Clinton’s personal attorney and was primarily responsible for conducting the review of Clinton emails and sorting out “personal” emails from government emails, which were provided to the State Department under the direction of Cheryl Mills and Clinton lawyer David Kendall.  After the emails were provided to State, Clinton, through her lawyers and Platte River Networks, deleted the rest of the “personal” emails from her server, wiping it clean. Samuelson conducted the review of emails on her laptop, using Clinton server files downloaded from Platte River Networks, which housed the Clinton email server.

Clinton clearly doesn’t want the Court and the American people to know the full truth about her destruction of 33,000 emails. The evidence shows that she knew exactly what she was doing when she hid her emails, took them from the State Department and deleted them. So it is no surprise she is desperate to avoid testifying and turning over what must be a smoking-gun memo on her email deletions.

This is only one facet of our pursuit of the truth about Hillary Clinton’s activities while secretary of state.

On March 2, 2020, Judge Lamberth granted us additional discovery that includes testimony under oath by Clinton and her former Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills regarding Clinton’s emails and Benghazi attack records. In April, we and the State Department, which is represented by Justice Department lawyers, filed responses opposing Clinton’s and Mills’ Writ of Mandamus request to overturn this court order requiring their testimonies.

Also, on April 10, we served a subpoena on Google LLC, which was authorized by the court, demanding that it produce all emails, including metadata, from a Google account believed to contain former Secretary of State Clinton’s emails. Google just produced data to us this week and I’ll be sure to report back to you as soon as our expert team analyzes it, so stay tuned!

Judicial Watch Sues to Stop Maryland County Giving $5 Million to Illegal Aliens

The Left is using our national health crisis to fulfill its agenda on the sly.

Last month we sued the Governor of California on behalf of two California taxpayers for overstepping his authority and violating federal law when he attempted to go around the California State Legislature by executive action and spend $78 million to provide direct case payments to illegal aliens.

Now we’re taking a similar step in Maryland. We have filed a lawsuit and asked for a temporary restraining order against Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich and Raymond L. Crowel, director of the county’s Department of Health and Human Services, on behalf of two Montgomery County taxpayers, Sharon Bauer and Richard Jurgena.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland set a hearing for Friday, May 15, on our petition.

We have asked the court to stop the county from expending $5 million of taxpayer funds to provide direct cash assistance to unlawfully present aliens (Bauer, et al, v. Elrich, et al. (No. 482061V)).

We argue that the county council overstepped its authority and violated federal law when, without affirmative state legislative approval, it created the “Emergency Assistance Relief Payment Program” (EARP) to provide cash payments to people who otherwise are ineligible for unemployment insurance due to their unlawful presence in the United States.

On April 15, 2020, County Executive Elrich referred to a soon-to-be-announced initiative to provide at least $5 million in cash payments to illegal aliens. On April 27, Montgomery County announced in a press statement that “[a]pproximately $2.5 million will be disbursed to residents [by the Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS)] and another $2.5 million will be targeted to individuals and families served by nonprofit organizations in the community.”

On April 30, the County Council released a press statement that the program would be paid for out of the Montgomery County General Fund, which, according the County Operating Budget, is comprised entirely of taxpayer monies. The DHHS website specifies that the payments would consist of $500 for single adults, and up to $1,450 per family.

In our complaint we argue:

Under federal law [8 U.S.C. § 1621(a)], unlawfully present aliens generally are ineligible for State or local public benefits.

***

However, a “State may provide that an alien who is not lawfully present in the United States is eligible for any State or local public benefit … only through the enactment of a State law … which affirmatively provides for such eligibility” [Emphasis added]

***

…The Maryland General Assembly has not enacted a State law affirmatively granting [Montgomery County officials] the authority to provide cash payments to unlawfully present aliens.

The program targets the payments to illegal aliens:

The Montgomery County DHHS has stated that unlawfully present aliens are ‘eligible to apply for and receive cash payments,’ [and] based on the narrow set of eligibility criteria, unlawfully present aliens will be the primary – if not exclusive – recipients of EARP’s cash payments.

In arguing for a temporary restraining order, we point out:

Based on the face of the Complaint as well as the facts identified above, it is likely [Judicial Watch’s clients] will prevail on the merits. The Maryland General Assembly has not affirmatively enacted a law authorizing Defendants [Montgomery County officials] to provide cash benefits to unlawfully present aliens as part of EARP, as required under 8 U.S.C. § 1621. Nonetheless, Defendants intend to provide such benefits to unlawfully present aliens starting in May 2020. Plaintiffs also can demonstrate that they and all Montgomery County taxpayers will suffer immediate, substantial, and irreparable pecuniary harm as soon as Defendants illegally spend the $5 million of taxpayer monies.

Montgomery County Executive Elrich and the Montgomery County Council have no legal authority on their own to spend taxpayer money for cash payments to illegal aliens. The coronavirus challenge doesn’t give politicians a pass to violate the law. If they want to give cash payments to illegal aliens, they must be accountable and transparent, and, as federal law requires, pass a state law to do so.

I attended the tele-hearing with the Court the morning.  The Court suggested he would rule on the TRO request by the middle of next week. We’ll be sure to let you know what happens next!

New Judicial Watch Court Action to Block Newsome from Providing Illegal Cash to Illegal Aliens in California

Last week I reported to you that we were seeking a restraining order to keep California Governor Gavin Newsom from handing out $75 million in cash to illegal aliens.

As I noted, that judge issued a bizarre ruling: the governor can go ahead, even though it’s likely illegal.

We’ve taken that to the appeals court in California.

We have filed a petition for Writ of Mandate that would require the trial court to issue a temporary restraining order on Newsom’s plan. Though the lower court said that Judicial Watch taxpayer clients are likely to succeed on the merits (that Governor Newsom has no authority under law to spend the money), there’s more harm to illegal aliens during the coronavirus crisis than there is to California’s 40 million taxpayers and citizens. For those of you interested in the detail, Judicial Watch filed the writ petition in the California Court of Appeal, Second Appellate District, in order to overturn a May 5, 2020 Superior Court of Los Angeles County ruling denying a temporary restraining order sought by Judicial Watch in the case (Crest et al. v. Newsom et al. (No. 20STCV16321)).

Our filing asks the Court of Appeal to command the Superior Court to issue the restraining order against California Governor Gavin Newsom and his Director of the California Department of Social Services Kim Johnson, enjoining them from making what is now an imminent, May 18, 2020 illegal expenditure of $79.8 million of taxpayers’ funds to illegal aliens pending the final determination of the taxpayer action brought by Judicial Watch in the lower court.

On April 29, we filed a lawsuit in the Superior Court of California for the County of Los Angeles on behalf of two California taxpayers, Robin Crest and Howard Myers, asking the court to stop the state from illegally expending more than $75 million of taxpayer funds as direct cash assistance to unlawfully present aliens (Crest et al. v. Newsom et al. (No. 20STCV16321)).

The lawsuit alleges California Governor Gavin Newsom overstepped his authority and violated federal law when, without affirmative state legislative approval, he took executive action to create the “Disaster Relief Assistance for Immigrants Project” and to provide cash benefits to illegal aliens who otherwise are ineligible for state or federal insurance or other benefits due to their unlawful presence in the United States. On May 5, we filed an application for a temporary restraining order in the case to prevent Newsom and Johnson from unlawfully spending any of the $75 million slated for direct cash benefits or the $4.8 million earmarked for the administrative costs of having community based organizations distribute the money to unlawfully present aliens under guarantees of privacy and state secrecy.

It is astonishing that any court would allow government officials to ignore the law and spend tax money with no legal authority. The lower court essentially acknowledged Governor Newsom has no legal authority to spend state taxpayer money for cash payments to illegal aliens. And the circumstances are very troubling. The Court of Appeal should overturn the lower court’s manifest error.

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How We Get to the Bottom of the Obama White House’s Domestic Spying

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Michael Flynn did not seem to be the best choice President-elect Donald Trump could have made for his first national security adviser.

My own publication, The Daily Caller, broke the story of Flynn writing an op-ed praising Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan just before Trump’s election. The op-ed was a clear break from Flynn’s past comments criticizing Turkey for its policies toward the ISIS terrorist group.

The most troubling part was Flynn’s failure to disclose the fact that his private-sector intelligence consulting firm had just signed a lucrative contract with a company closely aligned with Erdogan before the op-ed was published. The whole thing looked a lot like a paid foreign influence campaign.

Short of some sort of crime, though, Trump could have picked anyone he wanted to be his national security adviser. Trump won the presidential election. In doing so, he won the right to put together his White House team.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

A peaceful transition of power and respect for the will of the voters are fundamental to our system of government. New revelations are increasingly calling into question whether the Obama team abused this basic precept in the wake of Trump’s election. It’s now clear that numerous top Obama officials were spying on Flynn.

In the intelligence world, the government has a system in place to spy on foreigners using less than the normal due process needed to spy on Americans.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorizes the government to collect information on foreign powers and agents of foreign powers. Using this law, the Obama administration was spying on Russia’s ambassador to the United States. Good for them. That’s their job.

In monitoring the Russian ambassador, they picked up conversations he was having with Flynn, Trump’s incoming national security adviser.

Finding American communications in foreign intelligence in this way is referred to as “incidental collection.” When this happens, we have “minimization” rules, which mandate that any American communications caught up in foreign surveillance be redacted to protect the American citizens involved. These redactions can be overturned, however, through a process called “unmasking.”

We have now learned, thanks to a recent release by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, that a stunning 39 different Obama administration officials requested the unmasking of Flynn’s communications in the time period between Trump’s election and his inauguration.

Those making the request included numerous ambassadors, Treasury Department officials, and White House political staff, including the chief of staff and, just one week before Trump’s inauguration, Vice President Joe Biden. Not surprisingly, in the wake of these unmaskings, Flynn’s communications were then leaked to the press.

Such a high number of requests for information related to a rival political party is troubling to any but the most hardened anti-Trump partisan.

As a former heavy consumer of intelligence reporting in my days as assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney for special projects, I can state categorically that top White House staff do not do this as a matter of course. Checking in with former colleagues confirmed that nobody recalls any unmasking related to rival political figures.

Regardless of how anyone on Team Obama may try to spin this, such high levels of unmasking requests from top White House officials related to political rivals is completely and totally unprecedented.

None of this means we know for sure that the Obama requests were political, or even improper. We only know they were highly unusual and highly troubling because they present the distinct possibility of using our national security apparatus for political ends.

There are a number of possibilities as to what was driving these requests. Maybe Flynn was involved with communications that, in the eyes of the Obama staff, raised such serious national security concerns that the unmasking was somehow proper, despite its political appearance.

It’s important to state here that it’s common, and even necessary, for the incoming team during a presidential transition to begin outreach to those they will be working with, including foreign government agents. It’s what’s supposed to happen, so absent something more damning, Flynn speaking with the Russian ambassador should not be alarming.

The only way to get to the bottom of this matter is to release to the public the communications and unmasking requests in question and to thoroughly question each official involved.

This transparency is not just advisable but absolutely necessary in order to restore the public’s confidence that one party’s leaders were not abusing the system for political ends.

Intelligence is declassified all the time, and it can be done in a way that doesn’t endanger our intelligence sources or their methods.

In the wake of 9/11, numerous sensitive intelligence reports were declassified to establish what the Bush administration had known ahead of time about any potential attack. A similar process is needed now.

Given what appears to be a violation of some of our most basic liberties—and to ensure that our system was not hijacked for political purposes—the information surrounding these unmaskings must be declassified so the American people can see what is really happening.

Trump has the authority to do this himself. So do numerous members of his team. They should use that authority and set this record straight.

If anyone on the Obama team misused our national security apparatus to spy on their political opponents, it would be the greatest political abuse in our country’s history.

Anyone who asked for an unmasking involving an incoming national security adviser would have known the risks going in. Hopefully, they did it for some legitimate reason. If that’s the case, they should be at the front of the line asking for all this to be made public so everyone can see that there were no abuses at hand.

COPYRIGHT 2020 CREATORS.COM

COMMENTARY BY

Neil Patel

Neil Patel is co-founder and managing director of Bluebird Asset Management, a hedge fund investing in mortgage-backed securities. He previously served in the White House from 2005 to 2009 as the chief policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

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Videomaker Sues Planned Parenthood, Kamala Harris for Suppressing Exposé

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David Daleiden, founder of the Center for Medical Progress, filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Planned Parenthood (PP), the former and current California Attorneys General Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra (respectively), the National Abortion Federation, and others for suppressing his undercover video exposing PP’s trafficking of the body parts of aborted babies.

The complaint “seeks justice for a brazen, unprecedented, and ongoing conspiracy to selectively use California’s video recording laws as a political weapon to silence disfavored speech.”

Daleiden wrote, “The California Attorney General first admitted that they are enforcing the video recording law solely based on how they feel about the message being published, and then further admitted they are not even trying to follow the text of the law as written.”

Breitbart News reports that emails showed Harris’s office collaborated with PP to produce legislation targeting Daleiden, who was accused of 14 felonies related to his damning undercover videos.

Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA)

201 Known Connections

In an undercover video that was made public on July 14, 2015, Dr. Deborah Nucatola, who had been PPFA’s senior director of medical services since February 2009, spoke to investigators posing as buyers from a human biologics company and told them that her organization was selling — for $30 to $100 per specimen — intact fetal body parts that it harvested from abortion procedures. Trafficking in human body parts, however, is a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $500,000.

In the undercover video (filmed by the Center for Medical Progress, or CMP, an anti-abortion group), Nucatola revealed that although “a lot of people want intact hearts these days,” she also had received requests for lungs and “lower extremities.” And while emphasizing that PPFA affiliates “absolutely” wanted to offer such organs, she noted that “[t]hey just want to do it in a way that is not perceived as, ‘The clinic is selling tissue. This clinic is making money off of this.’”

To learn more about Planned Parenthood, click on the profile link here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

PODCAST: A Three-Star Conspiracy. . .

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Was the Michael Flynn saga ever about him? Or was it just another way to get to the president?

Andrew McCarthy has been following the case for three years, and he says there’s no doubt. Find out what Democrats were up to — then and now — in this special sit-down with the former federal prosecutor. Hear about all of the new developments, including one judge’s decision not to drop the case.

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HEROES with 12 Zeroes

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4 Big Unanswered Questions About the ‘Unmasking’ Scandal

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As the “unmasking” scandal unfolds, the Senate Judiciary Committee will delve into the conduct of the Obama administration and the intelligence community in secretly investigating the incoming Trump administration.

Two Senate Republicans released previously secret information Wednesday listing top Obama administration officials who made the same request in early 2017: that the intelligence community disclose to them that retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn was the American whose phone conversation with the Russian ambassador had been intercepted by intelligence officials.

Flynn at the time had been chosen by President-elect Donald Trump as his first national security adviser. Flynn’s “unmasking” at the request of some of outgoing President Barack Obama’s closest advisers set in motion events that led to Flynn’s resignation after only 23 days in office during the new Trump administration.

Sens. Charles Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, both Republicans, released the names of the Obama officials requesting Flynn’s identity as part of information declassified by Richard Grenell, acting director of national intelligence.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., announced Thursday that his committee would hold hearings in June examining issues surrounding the Flynn case and related to the initial FBI investigation of possible ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

In a joint statement, Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the Senate’s chief oversight panel, and Grassley, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said:

Our investigation of these matters has been ongoing for years, and as information finally comes to light, our focus on these issues is even more important now. The records are one step forward in an important effort to get to the bottom of what the Obama administration did during the Russia investigation and to Lt. General Flynn. We will continue to review this information and push for additional relevant disclosures until we are satisfied that the American people know the full truth.

Meanwhile, U.S. Attorney John Durham of Connecticut continues to look into the origins of the Russia investigation, and the Justice Department has said that the Flynn unmasking requests is one part of that probe.

Here are four big unanswered questions as the Senate and the Justice Department scrutinize actions taken by the Obama administration between Trump’s election on Nov. 8, 2016, and his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017.

1. Can Obama Be Compelled to Testify?

It might well be must-see TV, but at this point it seems highly unlikely that Obama himself would be subpoenaed to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Trump made the demand in a tweet Thursday.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1260938381254701060?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1260938381254701060&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailysignal.com%2F2020%2F05%2F14%2F4-big-unanswered-questions-about-the-unmasking-scandal%2F

“If I were a Senator or Congressman, the first person I would call to testify about the biggest political crime and scandal in the history of the USA, by FAR, is former President Obama,” Trump said in the tweet. “He knew EVERYTHING. Do it @LindseyGrahamSC, just do it. No more Mr. Nice Guy. No more talk!”

The previously classified documents released this week show that in the waning days of the Obama administration, these six well-known officials each submitted an unmasking request that would reveal Flynn’s otherwise protected identity under U.S. law: FBI Director James Comey, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, Vice President Joe Biden, United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power, CIA Director John Brennan, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

The Justice Department’s case against Flynn for lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador largely fell apart after other documents recently surfaced. They included notes of a discussion among Comey and two other top FBI officials about whether the goal in questioning Flynn at the White House was to “get him to lie” so that he could be fired or prosecuted.

The Justice Department last week dropped the case against Flynn for misleading the FBI, but a federal judge this week called in outside authorities to dispute that action.

Graham, in a statement Thursday, appeared to be reluctant about Trump’s call for Obama to testify.

“I am greatly concerned about the precedent that would be set by calling a former president for oversight,” Graham said. “No president is above the law. However, the presidency has executive privilege claims against other branches of government.”

Graham continued:

To say we are living in unusual times is an understatement.

We have the sitting president (Trump) accusing the former president (Obama) of being part of a treasonous conspiracy to undermine his presidency. We have the former president suggesting the current president is destroying the rule of law by dismissing the General Flynn case.

All of this is occurring during a major pandemic.

As to the Judiciary Committee, both presidents are welcome to come before the committee and share their concerns about each other. If nothing else it would make for great television. However, I have great doubts about whether it would be wise for the country.

Graham is striking the correct balance, said Charles Stimson, a senior legal fellow for national security at The Heritage Foundation.

“Chairman Graham should go after the facts, and see where that leads. He’s going to hold hearings,” Stimson told The Daily Signal on Thursday. “To take the president up on that suggestion [of calling Obama to testify] would risk looking political and could delegitimize the inquiry.”

2. What Are the Legal Issues?

Graham said the first part of his committee’s comprehensive inquiry would be of the Flynn matter.

“Our first phase will deal with the government’s decision to dismiss the Flynn case as well as an in-depth analysis of the unmasking requests made by Obama Administration officials against General Flynn,” Graham said in his written statement. “We must determine if these requests were legitimate.”

If Obama administration officials engaged in improper conduct, it’s not clear whether a law was broken, or who violated the law if one was broken.

Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, U.S. intelligence agencies may intercept and listen to the telephone calls of foreign citizens, including foreign officials. That would include Flynn’s call with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak on Dec. 29, 2016, roughly three weeks before Trump’s inauguration.

If a foreign citizen is speaking to an American citizen on the intercepted call, the law requires the name of the American citizen to be blacked out, or masked, in documentation.

So unmasking is the process by which authorized federal officials request to see information regarding American citizens mentioned anonymously in classified transcripts of calls or other communications involving foreigners.

However, someone leaked Flynn’s communication with the Russian ambassador to the media shortly after the unmasking requests were made. Leaking classified information is a crime.

Brennan, Clapper, Comey and the others named in the documents released by Grenell were authorized to ask for the unmasking. The question is whether there was a legitimate reason to ask for the unmasking, Stimson said.

Another question is whether the unmasking was an attempt by officials of the outgoing Obama administration to undermine the incoming Trump administration.

“I’m not there yet. I want to see more facts,” Stimson told The Daily Signal.

Stimson added that congressional hearings typically seem political, but could produce further lines of inquiry.

He said he is more focused on the probe by Durham, whose career has been as a “stand-up, just-the-facts-ma’am, Joe Friday type of guy.”

3. How Did FISA System Go ‘Off the Rails’?

Graham said the next phase of the Judiciary Committee’s inquiry will revisit the apparent abuse of the process for obtaining warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, highlighted in a scathing report late last year by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

Horowitz testified to the committee in December about his report’s findings. Among the most startling: The FBI relied almost entirely on the so-called Steele dossier, an opposition research document financed by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, as the basis for a FISA warrant to surveil Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

The inspector general’s report also determined that FBI overreach wasn’t limited to Page, but included other Trump campaign aides such as Flynn, then an adviser; George Papadopoulos, a campaign volunteer; and one-time campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

“Our next area of inquiry, later this summer, will be oversight building upon the Horowitz report about FISA abuses against Carter Page,” Graham said. “My goal is to find out why and how the system got so off the rails.”

4. What Was the Point of the Mueller Probe?

After an investigation lasting nearly two years and costing taxpayers $32 million, special counsel Robert Mueller, Comey’s predecessor as FBI director, determined that the Trump campaign did not conspire with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.

The problem, critics of the Mueller probe say, is that prior to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s appointing him as special counsel, no evidence existed to suggest a Trump-Russia conspiracy.

Thus, the Judiciary Committee will look into the predicate of initiating a special counsel probe, Graham said.

“Finally, we will look at whether Robert Mueller should have ever been appointed as Special Counsel,” he said. “Was there legitimate reason to conclude the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russians?”

Mueller secured grand jury indictments against some two dozen Russian operatives—none of whom is expected ever to stand trial because they are in Russia.

The special counsel’s team also scored a conviction of Manafort for financial crimes unrelated to the presidential campaign.

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Flynn Judge Disagrees With Own Rulings by Letting Outsiders Fight Dropping Charges

Biden, Comey, Brennan Submitted Flynn ‘Unmasking’ Requests

With That Revelation, There’s No Reason Why the Flynn Case Shouldn’t Be Tossed

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Deep State Judge Denies Relief to Lieutenant General Flynn

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“Look at the orators in our republics; as long as they are poor, both state and people can only praise their uprightness; but once they are fattened on the public funds, they conceive a hatred for justice, plan intrigues against the people and attack the democracy.”–  Aristophanes

“Every time we turn our heads the other way when we see the law flouted, when we tolerate what we know to be wrong, when we close our eyes and ears to the corrupt because we are too busy or too frightened, when we fail to speak up and speak out, we strike a blow against freedom and decency and justice.” – Robert Kennedy

“When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.”  – Proverbs 29:2

Relief was short lived for Lt. General Michael T. Flynn.  The federal judge in his case has signaled he won’t immediately dismiss the Flynn case despite the DOJ dismissal of same.

Judge Emmet Sullivan said he’ll receive written arguments that are likely to oppose the DOJ’s bid to dismiss General Flynn’s prosecution.  The Judge’s decision to allow third parties (only those he deems worthy) to submit friend-of-the-court briefs is absolutely egregious.  Attorney Sidney Powell has argued that it should not be allowed.  She has already proven the General’s innocence with her efforts to get Brady exculpatory evidence from the FBI.

Judge Sullivan himself acknowledged that the local criminal procedure rules do not provide for third parties to file amicus briefs in criminal matters, but he claimed that the local rules governing civil cases — which do allow for amicus briefs — “govern all proceedings in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.”

“The proposed amicus brief has no place in this Court,” Powell and other attorneys for Flynn wrote, objecting to an amicus brief that a group identifying itself as “Watergate Prosecutors” had said on May 11th that it intended to submit.

The former Watergate special prosecutors this week resurrected the Ghost of Watergate Past in a last-ditch effort to keep alive the federal court case against former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

Sidney Powell pointed out, “This Court has consistently, on 24 previous occasions, summarily refused to permit any third party to inject themselves or their views into this case.”

The exculpatory documents brought forth by Attorney General Barr’s appointee, U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Jensen, prove that Michael Flynn is innocent of the charges and was set-up and railroaded by Obama and his FBI minions.

Watergate Prosecutors

Sixteen of the former prosecutors in the Watergate case have told Judge Sullivan they believe he has the authority to sentence Michael Flynn to prison despite the fact that the DOJ dismissed the case.

These sixteen are part of the Democratic Deep State who wish to see Donald Trump’s associates and supporters punished for helping him in the 2016 election

They have laid out their legal documents which state that they believe Judge Sullivan has to reject the dismissal request and sentence Flynn who had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.  They never mention that Robert Mueller’s gang of thugs including Andrew Weissman used the same old modus operandi of threatening family members, in this case the General’s son, Michael, to elicit a guilty plea from the General.

These Watergate prosecutors compared the current situation at the DOJ to Watergate which is an atrocity in itself.

Director Wray

It was FBI Director Wray who was refusing exculpatory Brady evidence to the Flynn defense despite Judge Sullivan’s directive. Now that we have those documents, the General’s attorneys still must fight this judge for the righteous total dismissal of this case.

Christopher Wray has been the Director of the FBI for nearly three years and has defied Congress by refusing to produce documents exposing the dishonest acts of his predecessor, James Comey and the rest of his corrupt comrades.  It is Wray who held back and suppressed documents that proved General Michael T. Flynn’s innocence.

It took AG Barr’s appointed U.S. Attorney and former FBI agent, Jeffrey Jensen to successfully attain the Brady evidence.

DNI Rick Grenell

Richard Allen Grenell, acting Director of National Intelligence who replaced VP Pence’s transition-chosen Indiana friend, Dan Coates, made the decision to declassify information about Obama administration officials who were involved in the “unmasking” of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn whose calls with the former Russian ambassador during the presidential transition were picked up in surveillance and later leaked.

The list of Obama officials doing the unmasking was declassified in recent days by Grenell and then sent to GOP Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, who made the documents public.

The roster features top-ranking figures including then-Vice President Joe Biden, a detail already being raised by the Trump campaign in the 2020 presidential race where Biden is now the Democrats’ presumptive nominee.

The list also includes former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and Obama’s former chief of staff Denis McDonough.  Read the Documents.

Officials in the Obama administration have acknowledged that they moved to unmask some Americans in intelligence reports, but insisted that their reasons were legitimate.  Yeah right…their reasons were to undermine the incoming administration. Those officials include Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice, former ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power and former deputy national security advisor Benjamin Rhodes.

The DOJ said that after reviewing newly disclosed information and other materials, it agreed with Flynn’s lawyers that his Jan. 24, 2017, interview with the FBI should never have taken place because he had not had inappropriate contacts with Russians. The interview, the department said, was “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis.”

Exactly, this entire charade was to destroy both Lt. General Michael T. Flynn, a three-star general with 33 years of service to his country, both in combat and decades in intelligence.  And even more to destroy the General’s ability to help the duly elected President to clean out the corruption from the intelligence community within the DOJ.

Judge Sullivan

Judge Sullivan belongs to the Deep State globalist cabal.  He is doing the bidding of those who wish to destroy truth, justice, and the American way.  Yes, that’s it, I’m not making this up.  This Clinton appointee hates a man who gave his life to his country and who loves America.

There is no prosecutor in the Flynn case; Brandon Van Grack resigned the very day the DOJ dismissed the Flynn case.  Judge Sullivan looks incompetent and complicit with former prosecutors.  The more the DOJ found that Flynn was innocent, the more they went after a smear campaign.

And today we learned that Paul Manafort has been released to serve the rest of his sentence at home.  It took them long enough to release this elderly man so that he wouldn’t contract Covid-19 in prison.  Throughout the country criminals guilty of rape, murder, burglary, etc. were released weeks ago and many have committed the same crimes, including murder and rape.  It took until today to release Paul Manafort who at his age should not be imprisoned and should have had his federal charges pardoned long ago.

The rush to imprison Trump supporters, Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, shows they are targeted by the millions of Marxist-Leninists within our government.

Conclusion

Lt. General Michael T. Flynn was targeted before he even joined the White House administration.  Flynn was chosen by President Trump to restructure the entire intel community.

Fred Fleitz, former Chief of Staff and Executive Secretary of the National Security Council for Donald Trump stated in his Fox News article that the list released today is of 39 top Obama officials who made 53 requests to unmask Lt. Gen. Flynn’s name from intelligence reports between election day (Nov. 8, 2016) and Jan. 31, 2017.  While many of the requesters were Obama political appointees who resigned by Jan. 20, 2017, some were career officers at CIA, the Pentagon and other agencies.

Judge Sullivan should recuse himself from this case. It’s obvious who he is working for and it’s certainly not for true justice.

Three-star General Michael T. Flynn has endured enough at the hands of these demons of the dark state.

©All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: Flynn Judge Faces Ethics Complaints After Shock Move

Dems Ramp Up Impeachment II As Flynn Gets Justice

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It’s taken three painful years for truth to emerge. But we now know that the head of the Democratic Party’s House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, lied to the American people to justify the Mueller Special Counsel investigation into so-called Trump-Russia collusion. He was hardly the only one. Condoning that behavior, or allowing it to go unpunished, will mean the death of America as we know it.

According to Breitbart more than a year ago, Schiff lied to the American people no fewer than fourteen times. He is still lying today.

He no longer has cover for his lies now that the classified information he was privy to has been un-redacted and released by Attorney General Bill Barr’s office. Trey Gowdy recently told FOX News that Congressmen have total immunity for anything said in office. That’s insane. And it allows the lowest of characters, like Schiff, to rise to power.

We know that the Democrats, the DOJ, the FBI, and Mueller, along with his entire team, were aware that there was no evidence to back up the Trump-Russia collusion charges well before the midterm election in 2018. The Washington Examiner reported that “Special counsel prosecutors mostly knew by the end of 2017, and certainly by a few months later, that the evidence would not establish that conspiracy or coordination had taken place.” Think about that.

As President Trump was being falsely accused, the American people were led to believe he and many supporters were guilty of some of the worst crimes against our country. We were put through an agonizing array of confusing messages that now appear almost certainly to have been intentionally planted. If ever there was true election interference, this was it and the evidence is out.

We see waves of evidence today as the DOJ finally dropped the relentless prosecution of decorated war hero, Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn. Incredibly, some Democrats quickly took to the airwaves to condemn the move and call for a re-do. They argue that the Mueller investigation was justified because convictions were ultimately attained. No matter that those convictions came by “fruit of the poisonous tree.” Or that FBI 302 forms had been changed. Too bad if the DOJ withheld exculpatory evidence. It doesn’t matter to them that Flynn only testified that he lied after losing his home, filing bankruptcy in his defense, and having the FBI target his son. Who among us wouldn’t say just about anything having gone through the same — particularly targeting family members?

That is exactly how the left plays the game. Target the man, then fashion the crime. Eventually you’ll find something that will stick. It’s disgraceful.

Chapter 3 of my book, Rules for Deplorables: A Primer for Fighting Radical Socialism (RFD), explores this in Saul Alinsky’s tactic #3, “whenever possible go outside the experience of your enemy.” Democrats and the left created a scenario against Trump that was so unbelievably convoluted that the average American could barely follow. That was intentional. All thirteen of Alinsky’s tactics are being used against America today in an effort to transform our country to socialism. If we don’t get this right, our grandchildren won’t know the meaning of freedom.

“‘Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.’ So said Lavrentiy Beria, the ruthless and longest-serving secret police chief in Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror in Russia and Eastern Europe, bragging that he ‘could prove criminal conduct on anyone, even the innocent’….

“…Beria targeted ‘the man’ first, then proceeded to find or fabricate a crime. Beria’s modus operandi was to presume the man guilty, and fill in the blanks later. By contrast, under the United States Constitution, there’s a presumption of innocence….

You wouldn’t know that if you followed the Trump-Russia collusion special counsel investigation or with the confirmation process of Judge Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court.

“When Saul Alinsky discusses Tactic #3, he claims its intent is to cause confusion, chaos, fear and retreat on the part of one’s opponent.” (RFD,pp. 59-60)

That’s exactly what Adam Schiff intended with his purposely misleading statements throughout the Mueller investigation. He’s the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, after all. Those in his party should be outraged, if they are honest. Likewise, any American who blindly followed their favorite mainstream media source only to now learn they had been lied to for years, should feel betrayed — if they have learned the truth now.

It should be no secret to common sense Americans that the “fake news” media has been infiltrated by puppets who follow the leftist agenda. As more evidence comes out about the phony Trump-Russia collusion witch-hunt (and it will), the survival of the Democratic Party may well depend on how it responds to this new reality.

According to U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes, who has been sounding the alarm about the attempted coup against this President since the beginning, “53 House Intel Committee transcripts will expose more lies made to Congress by the deep state and Radical Dems.” Schiff inexcusably withheld the documents for over two years. America should be grateful to Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell for finally having the courage to make them public. Now that they’ve been un-redacted and released, we’re seeing the extent to which the past administration tried to damage Trump and company.

Obama’s top guns, e.g. James Comey, James Clapper, Sally Yates, Susan Rice, Evelyn Farkas et al, giddily cast suspicions about Trump-Russia collusion to complicit news anchors from the start. The newly released transcripts reveal that every one of them, during testimony under threat of perjury, denied having any evidence whatsoever to back up claims they made on TV. All was done in an attempt to impeach Trump. That is truly treasonous.

Many Americans will feign surprise at these new revelations. They shouldn’t. Nearly everything being exposed today has been known for years to those paying attention. Much of it was revealed in Chapter 3 of my book, written in the fall of 2018. Every word has since held true. In fact, some revelations have not yet hit the mainstream. Isn’t it time to start asking, where has the media been?

How the collusion suspicions began is really quite a spy novel. And, for the sake of our country’s survival, it’s time we all learn the facts because it’s about to happen all over again.

As early “as late 2015 through the summer of 2016, the British spy agency GCHQ (equivalent to our NSA), along with other foreign allied agencies known as the ‘Five Eyes’, began passing highly sensitive information [about Trump et al] to their U.S. counterparts.

“GCHQ supposedly became aware of ‘suspicious interactions’ between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to U.K. intelligence said. Or, did they?

“GCHQ’s then head, Robert Hannigan, passed material in summer 2016 to CIA chief, John Brennan (his long-time buddy.) Brennan used that information to ‘launch a major interagency investigation. … Both U.S. and U.K. intelligence sources acknowledge that GCHQ played an early, prominent role in kick-starting the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, which began in late July 2016.’ But, why?

“Joe DiGenova, former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, reported on a Lou Dobbs Tonight episode of FOX News Business (October 16, 2018), that they did so because it was illegal for American agencies to spy on American citizens. The Obama administration, via his FBI and DOJ asked the U.K. for assistance, and GCHQ complied.” (RFD, pp. 61-62)

And, so it began.

But, Brennan didn’t stop there. And, what follows is key to understanding how the left has gotten away with this and so many other attacks against our Constitutional principles since Obama left the White House. It’s something we ought all be worried about.

Kimberly Strassel, member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, laid out John Brennan’s involvement better than I ever could: “‘In a late August [2016] briefing, [Brennan] told the [Democratic] Senate minority leader [Harry Reid] Russia was trying to help Mr. Trump win the election, and that Trump advisers might be colluding with Russia. [Do you see how they give each other cover?]

“‘…Within a few days of the briefing, Mr. Reid wrote a letter to Mr. Comey, which…immediately became public…[i.e., was leaked.] “The evidence of a direct connection between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign continues to mount,’ wrote Mr. Reid, going on to float Team Clinton’s the-Russians-are-helping-Trump theory. Mr. Reid publicly divulged at least one of the allegations contained in the infamous Steele dossier, insisting that the FBI use ‘every resource available to investigate this matter.’

“‘The Reid letter marked the first official blast of the Brennan-Clinton collusion narrative into the open. Clinton opposition-research firm Fusion GPS followed up by briefing its media allies about the dossier it had dropped off at the FBI. On Sept. 23, Yahoo News’s Michael Isikoff ran the headline: “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin.”…Not only was the collusion narrative out there, but so was evidence that the FBI was investigating.’” (RFD, pp. 66-67)

What makes this information so relevant today is that the same Michael Isikoff is still doing the left’s bidding. And, most probably, Americans are again only paying attention to the headlines. His latest article is entitled “Exclusive: Obama says in private call that ‘rule of law is at risk’ in Michael Flynn case.” It could translate as a direct shout-out, via Isikoff, by the former president to his entrenched, well-coordinated army of agitators. It exemplifies a pattern repeated by the left critical for Americans to recognize. Let’s see how Isikoff’s 2016 article of half-truths played out.

“The Guardian concurs with Strassel’s account, adding further insight: ‘In late August and September 2016, Brennan gave a series of classified briefings to the Gang of Eight, the top-ranking Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate. He told them the agency had evidence the Kremlin might be trying to help Trump to win the presidency….’ At the time, Brennan did not tell the committee who his sources were [hard to believe nobody asked], only that they came from America’s allies. Much later, however, Trump learned that the source was the GCHQ. In fact, Trump blamed them later in his infamous wiretap tweet for secretly surveilling him in Trump Tower. He’s not looking so crazy anymore, is he?

“In mid-2016 (two and a half months after ‘Crossfire’ was launched and just weeks before the election), a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) order was approved to spy on an American for supposed criminal activities with Russia. A large part of the evidence supporting that warrant was based on the “Steele dossier” and the Yahoo article by Michael Isikoff.” (RFD, pp. 66-68)

We now know from the Mueller Report that the complete Steele dossier was based on false, unverified information. Recall that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe admitted under oath that the investigation would never have launched had it not been for the dossier. We also know that the FISA warrants were based on lies. But, it no longer matters. The damage has been done. According to John Solomon, a highly-respected investigative reporter, “circular” investigating is a pattern the left uses often to further its goals. Indeed, we’ve seen it repeated again and again against Trump.

Think about it. First, a crisis is created to which some well-placed, left-wing agents of the Intel Community or Congress respond. Their involvement lends credibility. Someone leaks it to the press. The press reports it as though it’s gospel. Fifty-percent of Americans will believe wherever the headline leads them. The new witch-hunt begins. Now, apparently, it’s being leveled against DOJ Director Bill Barr for ordering the criminal charges against Flynn dropped.

Circular investigations occurred with the attacks against Kavanaugh. And again in the Ukraine whistleblower case leading to Trump’s impeachment trial. The crisis in both cases was manufactured. Congress/Intel responded by feigning outrage. They leaked word to the press. The press reported ad nauseum. Americans believed the headlines. A new hoax was born.

This coming attack by the Dempcrats against our President, by way of Barr, is about to be unleashed. Get ready, America. Using Alinsky tactic #3, they will again make this crisis as confusing and chaotic as possible in hopes that you’ll lose interest. But, if we don’t stand up for the rule of law now, what’s left of it will be worthless within a few short years. The Dems constant accusations against the Trump administration are merely deflections from exactly what they are guilty of doing. Isikoff’s recent headline proves it.

Note the newest whistleblower that has recently come forward. Pay attention as this may become another fake “Ukraine phone call” Trump set-up meant to throw us off. According to The Deplorable Report, the Director of BARDA, Dr. Rick Bright, was reassigned on April 21 for reasons unknown.

“In protest, Bright hit back hard by hiring the same law firm that defended Christine Blasey Ford. That’s no accident.

“Days prior an April 16th Press Release on the Gates-funded Moderna’s website announced ‘a commitment of up to $483 million from BARDA … to accelerate development of the Company’s mRNA vaccine candidate against the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2).’ They also note that no commercial product using mRNA technology has been approved before and ‘the safety and efficacy of mRNA-1273 has not yet been established.’”

Could it be that Dr. Bright was doing the bidding of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s race for a universal COVID-19 vaccine at taxpayer expense? Did Bright approve the large loan against the wishes of the Trump Administration? Could that be why he was reassigned? We simply don’t know. It is awfully coincidental. Yet, the press wants us to believe Trump messed up by relieving a qualified doctor of a powerful position at a desperate time of need. Is that really what happened?

The President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has seemingly been working tirelessly for our country, along with others on the Coronavirus Task Force. Yet, like so many other Trump devotees, he’s been subjected to non-stop insults from the left, and even from some Conservatives. Most recently because Kushner put together a volunteer team of professionals who wanted nothing more than to help our country through this difficult time.

The New York Times ran a story headlined, “How Kushner’s Volunteer Force Led a Fumbling Hunt for Medical Supplies.” Pretty deflating if you happen to be one of the volunteers. In contrast, “[s]enior administration officials defended the efforts of the group of volunteers from consulting and private equity firms in obtaining N95 respirator masks, gloves and other protective equipment, ventilators and testing supplies and questioned the legitimacy of a whistleblower complaint filed last month to the House Oversight Committee.” That those on the front lines were distracted by such gossip is pathetic, especially while Americans are still dying.

If you are still a believer in mainstream media reportage even after what we’ve witnessed over the past three years, consider how the “fake news” media is continuing, even now, to lie. “CBS News has deleted footage from a Grand Rapids, Mich., health clinic for a report on coronavirus testing after Project Veritas revealed that the clinic packed a line of patients waiting for tests.”

Project Veritas films their investigations using undercover reporters. This story is especially troubling. Actual patients were intentionally subjected to longer lines because of the “fake” patients CBS planted in cars waiting to be “tested.” Apparently, this was to give the impression there are a lot more infected people than actually exist, scaring us further into staying home. Is the Democrat’s universal income for all agenda really their goal? We are nearly there, after all.

The Dems are doubling down and digging in. Representative Jerry Nadler said he would investigate the DOJ’s decision to drop charges against Flynn. Schiff is already setting the stage for another Trump impeachment trial over the administration’s supposed mishandling of the pandemic. This should leave no doubt in the minds of the American people that these criminal shenanigans are far from over. It will not end until we stand up and say, enough!

The left is on a mad dash to transform America to socialism. Obama told us as much while campaigning for President in 2007. He very nearly succeeded. Is that what we want?

If not, we need to pay closer attention to where our facts are coming from. It’s no longer enough to read headlines. Not only is the content important but the author’s motives should matter, too. When we’re misled by any one reporter or organization, it’s time to boycott and put them out of business. Support the many independent up-and-comers who are working hard to fill the vacuum with well-sourced reporting. This may mean changing long-held habits, but our country’s survival depends on truth.

As Abraham Lincoln stated on May 19, 1856: ‘Be not deceived. Revolutions do not go backward.’ We would all be wise to keep that in mind with the precious little time we may have left. There will be no second chance. The 2020 election may well be framed between Trump and Socialism and an out-of-control bureaucracy.

COLUMN BY

Cathi Chamberlain 

Cathi Chamberlain, aka The Deplorable Author and founder of The Deplorable Report, is a four-time start-up business owner, published author of a self-help book featured on CNN worldwide and owner of the nation’s first all-female construction company. She is a sought-after political speaker and has been a regular contributor on the Salem Media Radio Network. In her book, “Rules for Deplorables: A Primer for Fighting Radical Socialism,” Cathi heavily references Saul Alinsky’s 1970’s blockbuster book, “Rules for Radicals.” She is currently on her “Florida Deplorable Book Tour.” Contact her for your next speaking event at Cathi@RulesforDeplorablesBook.com.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Is This Why the Judge Presiding Over the Flynn Case Is Allowing Amicus Briefs from Anti-Trump Lawyers?

Exposed: Top Obama Official Caught Lying About Flynn Unmasking Requests

Clown Show: Flynn Was Never Charged With Perjury, But Now Could Be Facing Charges…of Perjury

EDITORS NOTE: This Revolutionary Act column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Hackers linked to Iran target staff at US coronavirus drug-maker Gilead Sciences Inc.

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Yet despite this, the Iranian mullahs, with help from the international media, will continue to claim the moral high ground. That is nothing new, and neither is Iran’s aggression. As The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Iran shows, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been on a war footing against the U.S. since 1979.

“Iran-linked hackers recently targeted US coronavirus drugmaker, say sources,” by Jack Stubbs and Christopher Bing, Reuters, May 9, 2020:

LONDON/WASHINGTON: Hackers linked to Iran have targeted staff at US drugmaker Gilead Sciences Inc in recent weeks, according to publicly-available web archives reviewed by Reuters and three cybersecurity researchers, as the company races to deploy a treatment for the Covid-19 virus.

In one case, a fake email login page designed to steal passwords was sent in April to a top Gilead executive involved in legal and corporate affairs, according to an archived version on a website used to scan for malicious web addresses. Reuters was not able to determine whether the attack was successful.

Ohad Zaidenberg, lead intelligence researcher at Israeli cybersecurity firm ClearSky, who closely tracks Iranian hacking activity and has investigated the attacks, said the attempt was part of an effort by an Iranian group to compromise email accounts of staff at the company using messages that impersonated journalists.

Two other cybersecurity researchers, who were not authorised to speak publicly about their analysis, confirmed that the web domains and hosting servers used in the hacking attempts were linked to Iran.

Iran’s mission to the United Nations denied any involvement in the attacks. “The Iranian government does not engage in cyber warfare,” said spokesman Alireza Miryousefi. “Cyber activities Iran engages in are purely defensive and to protect against further attacks on Iranian infrastructure.”…

Reuters has reported in recent weeks that hackers with links to Iran and other groups have also attempted to break into the World Health Organisation, and that attackers linked to Vietnam targeted the Chinese government over its handling of the coronavirus outbreak.

Britain and the United States warned this week that state-backed hackers are attacking pharmaceutical companies and research institutions working on treatments for the new disease.

The joint statement did not name any of the attacked organisations, but two people familiar with the matter said one of the targets was Gilead, whose antiviral drug remdesivir is the only treatment so far proven to help patients infected with Covid-19.

The hacking infrastructure used in the attempt to compromise the Gilead executive’s email account has previously been used in cyberattacks by a group of suspected Iranian hackers known as “Charming Kitten”, said Priscilla Moriuchi, director of strategic threat development at US cybersecurity firm Recorded Future, who reviewed the web archives identified by Reuters….

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: SUBSTANTIAL EVIDENCE Barack Obama was at the Center of Trump/Flynn Targeting

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WATCH: #Obamagate

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EDITORS NOTE: This Judicial Watch video is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Seattle Police Officer Sacrificed His Job to Speak the Truth on Abuse of Power by Government

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Officer Greg Anderson Courageously Speaks The Truth About Lockdown.

Watch:

Thank you Isaac.

EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog posted by Eeyore is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Fall of Obama’s House of Cards

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Obama’s top officials. Lying through their teeth.

Obama on CBS, 60 Minutes. January 25, 2017:

“I’m proud of the fact that we are the first administration in modern history that hasn’t had a major scandal in the White House.”

Pause for cynical laughter.

What Obama officials have said frequently on TV against President Trump, and later under oath with a potential charge of perjury if caught lying, are divided by the proverbial country mile.

Spread the dirt in the media but deny the lies under oath.

Examples:

James Clapper, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence:

December 18, 2017, CNN. “Vladimir Putin knows how to handle an asset and that’s what he’s doing with the President (Trump).”
Under oath at the House Intelligence Committee. July 17, 2017:

“I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting or conspiring with the Russians to meddle in the election.”

Andrew McCabe, Deputy Director of the FBI:

February 17, 2019. Answering CNN’s Anderson Cooper’s question “Do you think that President Trump could be a Russian asset?”
“I think that’s possible.”

Under oath to the House Intelligence Committee questions in December 2017:

“We have not been able to prove the accuracy of all the information.”

“What is the most damning or important piece of evidence in the dossier. You don’t know if it’s true or not?”
McCabe’s reply, “That’s correct.”

Samantha Power, US Ambassador to the United Nations:

December 11, 2019. Late Show, CBS, laughingly, “I think Putin has received a very high return on his investment (meaning President Trump).”

Samantha Power to House intelligence Committee; “I am not in possession and didn’t read or absorb information that came out of the intelligence community.”

But Samantha Power did request the unmasking of 260 American citizens during 2016 toward the end of the Obama Administration.

Susan Rice, Obama’s National Security Advisor:

July 2018. This Week, ABC; “He (Trump) has taken a number of steps that Vladimir Putin couldn’t have handled more effectively.”

Susan Rice in front of the House Intelligence Committee, September 8, 2017; “I don’t recall intelligence that I would consider evidence to that effect.”

But Susan Rice made requests for the unmasking on American citizens, members of the Trump campaign.

John Brennan, CIA Director:

August 17, 2018. NBC. Meet the Press. “I call his (Trump’s) behavior treasonous…to aid and abet the enemy…and I very much stand by that claim.”

Brennan addressed President Trump in a tweet dated March 20, 2019, “The Special Council will soon further complicate your life, putting your political and financial future in jeopardy.”

Brennan on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, March 26, 2019. “I don’t know if I received bad information, but I think I suspected there was more than there actually was.”

This was the head of Obama’s CIA calling the elected President of the United States a traitor based on information at his fingertips.

Obama’s Attorney-General, Loretta Lynch, in an interesting turn of phrase when pressed at the House Intelligence Hearing, “I don’t recall that being briefed up to me.”

Obama’s Attorney-General couldn’t recall if she had been informed that President Trump had been colluding with Russia!

Interesting statements were made by Evelyn Farkas, Obama’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, who told MSNBC in March, 2017, that she “had to get as much intelligence (on Trump) before Obama leaves the Administration before the Trump staff found out how we knew what we knew.”

Farkas left the Obama Administration in 2015. When questioned by Trey Gowdy how she would have known about information in possession of the Obama administration about Trump-Russian collusion if she didn’t work for the US government any more, Farkas admitted, “I didn’t know anything.”

Gowdy pressed further, “You also didn’t know whether or not anyone in the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia, did you?” Evenly Farkas replied, “I didn’t.”

Here we have a list of Obama top officials feeding the American public an ongoing series of lies but later denying knowledge of any Trump collusion with Russia when put on the spot and under oath where lying to Congress comes with potential prison time.

There is no other way of expressing it. This was a part of a coup attempt to remove a duly elected president and Obama knew what was going on.

It is shown in the August 6, 2016, text message between Peter Strzog and Lisa Page that “The White House is running this.”

This was confirmed in a September 2 reply from Page to Strzok that “POTUS wants to know everything we’re doing.”

What they wrote is obvious. In the United States, counter-intelligence always runs through the Commander-in-Chief. This is the person who sits in the Oval Office. In this case, Barrack Hussein Obama.

President Obama was keeping tabs on anti-Trump activities by his counter intelligence and law enforcement elite.

On January 7, 2017, after Donald Trump had been elected president, but before he took office, outgoing President Obama held a meeting in the Oval Office purportedly about Russian interference in the 2016 election. Attending that meeting were Vice President Joe Biden, John Brennan, James Clapper, Susan Rice, Sally Yates, and James Comey (head of the FBI). After the meeting, Obama asked that Yates and Comey remain behind. This meeting was to discuss General Michael Flynn, who Obama had fired, and Flynn’s brief conversation with the Russian Ambassador as part of his preparation for his national intelligence role under a Trump presidency.

Whatever happened at that Oval Office meeting, Michael Flynn became a prime target for Comey’s FBI which forced the general to accept a plea bargain with Special Council, Robert Mueller, by pleading guilty to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements.”

Flynn was innocent. He was exonerated of all charges.

Flynn had fallen into an FBI entrapment operation. Recent damning documents clearly show the ones who were willfully and knowingly making false, fictitious and fraudulent statements were top FBI personnel, including James Comey.

They now nervously await the Attorney-General, William Barr, and Special Prosecutor, John Durham, axe to fall. An axe which is likely to incriminate them in criminal behavior.

Trump had picked Flynn to be his National Intelligence Chief and Flynn knew where the bodies of the previous administration were buried.

When Obama met with Trump during the White House transition, the outgoing president told Trump to be wary of two people – North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un, and Michael Flynn. That was how nervous Obama was about the general.

He had to be removed or turned against Trump. The plot nearly succeeded.

We now know that the FBI targeted Flynn in an effort to break him and make him turn against President Trump as proven in the shocking revelation of a hand-written instruction to the FBI team to entrap Flynn at a White House meeting.

The note written by Bill Priestap, Obama’s FBI head of counter-intelligence, ordered them to “get him to lie so we can prosecute him or get him fired.”

The note dated January 24, 2017, illustrated the corrupt behavior of Obama’s FBI.

This was the final act of President Obama who had bragged about having the most scandal-free White House in American history.

The question that dare not speak its name concerns President Barrack Hussein Obama.

What did he know, and when did he know it?

Don’t expect that question to be asked by the cover-up media, and certainly not by the Democrats in the House and Senate. They are co-conspirators in the tawdry, perhaps criminal, conduct of Obama’s top officials.

The Wall Street Journal, raised the question of Obama’s role in the gross abuse of FBI-DOJ power in their May 11th editorial, after Obama got himself involved by questioning the dropped charges against Flynn. It wrote:

“Barack Obama is a lawyer, so it was stunning to read that he had ventured into the Michael Flynn case…we wonder what he’s really worried about.”

Aren’t we all?

With the impending reports of the Barr-Durham probe, a probe that carries with it serious criminal implications for some, expect more bombshells to fall that could affect the outcome of the US 2020 election, and also the reputation of Obama’s closest aides.
Perhaps Obama himself.

We are witnessing the fall of the Obama House of Cards.

©All rights reserved.

INFOGRAPHIC: Timeline of FBI’s FISA Abuse in Trump Campaign Investigation

VINDICATED! DOJ Exonerates Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn

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“People always find lies more exciting and thrilling than the truth. Lies are like a virus that spreads easily around and contaminates the truth, making it impossible for people to separate actual facts from malicious rumors.”

“Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice.” –  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“The duty of a true patriot is to protect his country from government.” –  Thomas Paine

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.  Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable.” –  H.L. Mencken

Three-star General Michael Flynn never lied to anyone, not VP Pence and certainly not the FBI.  The FBI and Department of Justice misused their authority to try to entrap Flynn during an investigation that was utterly without factual merit or legal justification.  The special counsel pursued Flynn relentlessly, even though he had done nothing wrong.  Why? Because he was feared and hated by Obama and his Deep State minions in the DOJ.

Michael Flynn never misrepresented his phone call to VP Pence.  Pence made the mistake of telling the press something he knew nothing about before talking to Mr. Flynn.  The General took one for the team.

Case Dismissed

The Justice Department announced their decision May 7th to dismiss with prejudice (they cannot revisit it) the criminal case against General Flynn just days after exculpatory documents revealed the FBI tried to get him to lie or get him fired after Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka interviewed him on January 24, 2017 at the behest of former FBI Director, James Comey. Obama holdover and Acting Attorney General Sally Yates put the scheme in motion by sending the agents to the White House to interview Flynn.  The FBI’s corrupt prosecutor, Brandon Van Grack, withdrew from the case the same day it was dismissed.

In February, the New York Times reported that AG Barr had installed a handful of outside prosecutors to broadly review the handling of other politically sensitive national-security cases in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington. One of those prosecutors was U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Jensen.

The dismissal of the Flynn case was recommended by Jeffrey Jensen, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, who was appointed in January by AG Bill Barr to review the Michael Flynn case. Barr long ago could have dismissed this case, but then he would have had to explain the seditious behavior of the entire DOJ, which is still reportedly being investigated by Attorney John Durham.  He also could have demanded that Christopher Wray release the exculpatory evidence requested by Sidney Powell.  He did neither. Bill Barr is a shrewd political strategist, he is not a lawman, he wants to preserve the institutions of the DOJ and FBI.  President Trump, unlike Barr, has no loyalty whatsoever to the intel machine.

“I concluded the proper and just course was to dismiss the case,” Jensen said in a May 7th statement released by the DOJ. “I briefed Attorney General Barr on my findings, advised him on these conclusions, and he agreed.”

The General’s defense team, headed by Sidney Powell, had rightfully argued that officials of the FBI tried to set him up in a 2017 interview.  In a motion to dismiss, the department said it sided with the General’s defense team.

“The Government has concluded that the interview of Mr. Flynn was untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn—a no longer justifiably predicated investigation that the FBI had, in the Bureau’s own words, prepared to close because it had yielded an ‘absence of any derogatory information,’” said Timothy Shea, interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, in his May 6th motion to dismiss.  The FBI had “word-for-word” transcripts of the calls, and there was nothing in them “to indicate an inappropriate relationship between Mr. Flynn and a foreign power,” Shea said.

The DOJ needs to ask federal Judge Emmet Sullivan to vacate the general’s guilty plea in the wake of the document release.  All these materials should be made available either to the Senate Judiciary Committee or to whatever members of Congress are able to get them.

“Crossfire Razor”

The intelligence community’s massive abuse of power against the incoming President and his National Security Advisor came right from the top.  President Obama’s dislike of Gen. Flynn was well known, and for that reason Flynn became a target.  The top echelon of the FBI was involved according to text messages between FBI paramours Lisa Page and Peter Strzok.

The Comey team forced a meeting with Flynn, ignoring protocols and, in Comey’s own words, took advantage of a new, disorganized Trump administration. They had no legal basis for being in Flynn’s office and confronting him.  The politically motivated FBI is a real threat to our nation and to the rule of law.

It was Peter Strzok who kept the Flynn investigation open when it rightfully should have been closed after he and Joe Pientka stated that Michael Flynn had not lied when they deceptively interviewed him.

A handwritten note by FBI counterintelligence head Bill Priestap, in advance of the January 2017 interview with Flynn resulted in the retired general being charged with lying to federal agents: “What is our goal?” Priestap asked, “Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?”  Strzok did the bidding of his superiors to strike the first blow to the Trump administration.

Documents show that Strzok and his paramour, Lisa Page massively edited the 302 reports to make them seem that Michael Flynn had lied.  Attorney Sidney Powell still does not have the original 302 reports.

We now know that the targeting of General Flynn (dubbed Crossfire Razor) was the beginning of the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” operation against the Trump White House.  Getting rid of General Flynn was the ultimate goal. The Obama holdovers knew that the General would investigate and eliminate the corruption within the intel community.

When Sidney Powell became Flynn’s attorney, she wrote a nine-page letter to Attorney General Barr outlining the entire case and asking for listed Brady/Giglio exculpatory evidence from the FBI, including the original 302 reports from the agents who had interviewed the General.  The requested documents were never forthcoming despite Judge Emmett Sullivan’s February 2018 standing order that they be furnished to defense.

The smug, arrogant and pompous FBI Director Wray was behind the suppression of stunning exculpatory evidence in General Flynn’s case.  The Federalist reported that FBI general counsel Dana Boente was also behind the effort to block the release of the Brady Material.  Boente, along with James Comey and Rod Rosenstein signed off on the flawed FISA warrants.  Quite obviously both Wray and Boente worked together to protect the Deep State swamp within the FBI.

What was most striking and shocking is how many also rejected any claim that the undisclosed evidence, at a minimum, violated Brady, the case requiring the government to turn over exculpatory information.  Mark Zaid, the national security lawyer who was on the Ukraine whistleblower’s legal team, said that the FBI notes showed routine FBI interview tactics. National security lawyer Bradley P. Moss, a partner at Zaid’s firm, said that the FBI’s tactics were “largely consistent” with what’s been going on for the last five decades.

The mainstream media really should go back to 2016 and take another look at James Comey, but doubtful that will ever happen.

Trump Considering Flynn Rehire

Most conservatives see FBI Director Wray as a younger copy of James Comey.  His failure to give Brady materials to Michael Flynn’s defense attorneys was typical of actions similar to disgraced former Director Comey.  Two weeks ago, Ken Matthews was guest hosting for Rush Limbaugh when he brought up the subject of Director Wray.  A caller had mentioned that Wray needed to be replaced and Matthews had a great idea.  He said that President Trump had communicated that he’d indeed “consider” rehiring Michael Flynn if he were exonerated. Now that the DOJ has dropped the case against him, the question about Flynn’s next career move is inescapable.  Matthews mentioned that the best man to clean up the intel agency was none other than three-star General Michael T. Flynn.

This thought has spread like wildfire, and gone viral on twitter.  Additions have included Sidney Powell as the new Attorney General.  With that combination, we’d see the rats scurrying for their holes, retiring to be with their families, and moving out of country.

Of course, that particular scenario may be a pipedream, but it’s one that thrills those of us who love both General Flynn and Sidney Powell.

Conservatives Love Mike

In September of 2018, Phyllis Schlafly’s Gateway-Eagle Council bestowed their very first Major General John K. (Jack) Singlaub Award for Service to America to General Flynn.  Six hundred people were in attendance and about that many conservatives of all ages had their pictures taken with General Mike.  The love for this veteran was so obvious, and I knew it was wonderful for him, his wife Lori, and their son Mike. It buoyed their spirits.

In January of this year, General Singlaub wrote a letter of support for Mike Flynn to AG Barr. It was shortly after this letter, that Bill Barr appointed U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Jensen to take a much closer look at the entire FBI and Mueller case against General Flynn.

Maj. Gen. Singlaub, Lt. Gen. Flynn, and Phyllis Schlafly Eagle President, Ed Martin

Conclusion

General Mike Flynn and his wife Lori, and their entire family have been through the crucible, a horribly difficult trial and test.  And yet, never once did a smile fade from the face of General Mike and his beloved wife Lori.  Not once.  They faced this horror after Mike gave 33 years of his life to his beloved America, including five to actual combat, and the rest to Army intelligence, to being charged with the most vile and incomprehensible evil that could come against a true Christian patriot who loves his country.

Do yourself a favor and read his magnificent book, Field of Fight, available on Amazon where Mike describes how to win the global war against radical Islam and its allies.

Never once did the Flynn family’s faith in God waiver.  They walked the walk; they knew God had them in His Hands and all would be well for those who love the Lord, no matter the outcome.

I want to see compensation, ten-fold for what he lost, but that’s my heart for this man and his wonderful family…a huge family of brothers and sisters who love each other unconditionally.  Mike Flynn will hopefully be rewarded here, but if not, in heaven, and that’s where this man stands far above those who accused him.

He has stood tall throughout this ordeal, with his bride and family beside him…and no matter what, he prevails because of his love and trust in the Lord.  Isaiah 43:2  So does his brilliant attorney, Sidney Powell!

When you can, please help!  https://mikeflynndefensefund.org/

P.S.  The Covid-19 destruction of America’s economy has destroyed so many businesses, I can’t begin to list the numbers who are suffering, but NewsWithViews is one of them.  The cost of maintaining conservative and truth telling websites is astronomical.  We need your help even if it’s only a few dollars in an envelope…to maintain truth coming to America’s readers.  Please help by donating here, and get your friends to sign up for daily emails…in that way, the advertising helps to keep us out of the red.  Thanks again!

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VIDEO: Justice for General Flynn — and Our Country

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We welcome the Justice Department’s decision to dismiss charges against former National Security Adviser, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, an American hero who was victimized by the Obama administration and the Deep State. The targeting of General Flynn was a key part of the Obama/Clinton/Deep State coup against President Trump.

We commend the heroic work of General Flynn’s legal team, led by Sidney Powell, which exposed the criminal conduct by FBI and DOJ officials behind Flynn’s illicit prosecution. This corruption, as we have exposed from the get-go, is the tip of the iceberg. The required next step for justice is the prosecution of the coup cabal who tried to destroy General Flynn and overthrow our president.

To see my interview with Lou Dobbs about this story, click here.

Judicial Watch Filed a Lawsuit for Fauci and WHO Records

In March 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, a prominent member of the president’s coronavirus task force, praised the work of the World Health Organization (WHO) and its chairman, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Fauci said: “Tedros is really an outstanding person … I mean, obviously, over the years anyone who says that the WHO has not had problems has not been watching the WHO. But I think under his leadership they’ve done very well.”

In April, however, President Trump announced a halt to U.S. funding of WHO. According to the president, the WHO put “political correctness over lifesaving measures.” Additionally, President Trump said: “The WHO failed in this duty, and must be held accountable,” adding that the WHO ignored “credible information” in December 2019 that the virus could be transmitted from human to human.

We want to have a closer look at the Fauci/WHO connection, so we have filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit on behalf of the Daily Caller News Foundation (DNCF) against the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) for communications and other records of National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci and Deputy Director H. Clifford Lane with and about WHO concerning the novel coronavirus (Daily Caller News Foundation v. U.S. Department Justice (No. 1:20-cv-01149)).

We sued after HHS failed to respond to our April 1, 2020, FOIA request seeking:

  • Communications between Dr. Fauci and Deputy Director Lane and World Health Organization officials concerning the novel coronavirus.
  • Communications of Dr. Fauci and Deputy Director Lane concerning WHO, WHO official Bruce Aylward, WHO Director General Tedros Anhanom, and China.

We are requesting communications from January 1, 2020, to April 1, 2020. The DCNF was granted expedited processing of its request.

“This virus has killed hundreds of thousands of people and turned the whole world upside down,” Daily Caller News Foundation Co-Founder and President Neil Patel said. “We know that China and WHO could have done a lot more to prevent or reduce this catastrophe. We therefore have a legitimate and urgent news purpose for seeking these documents regarding U.S. officials’ communications with WHO and demand that the agencies in question stop stalling and start following the law that entitles us to this vital information.”

It is urgent that the NIH follow transparency law during the coronavirus crisis. It is of significant public interest to learn what WHO was telling our top medical officials about the coronavirus that originated in China.

Court Allows Newsom to Give Cash to Illegal Aliens, But It’s Likely Illegal

Several of our left-leaning governors have used the coronavirus emergency to test the boundaries of emergency powers. As we might have expected, California’s governor is even trying to hand out cash to people in the state and country illegally. No law allows him to do this.

So we asked the court for a temporary restraining order (TRO) against Governor Gavin Newsom and his Director of the California Department of Social Services, Kim Johnson, to restrain them from spending $79.8 million dollars of taxpayers’ money to provide direct cash benefits to unlawfully present aliens (Crest et al. v. Newsom et al. (No. 20STCV16321)).

The court has now issued a bizarre ruling.

Though it found that we were likely to succeed on the merits (that Newsom had no authority under law to spend the money), the court found that there was a public interest in sending tax money to illegal aliens during the coronavirus crisis.

It is astonishing that a court would allow a public official to ignore the law and spend tax money with no legal authority. Simply put, as the court seems to acknowledge, the governor has no independent legal authority to spend state taxpayer money for cash payments to illegal aliens. We will appeal the court’s manifest error.

Newsom announced his executive initiative on April 15, 2020. The initiative plans to spend $75 million to provide direct cash payments to illegal aliens and cost an estimated additional $4.8 million to administer. The Disaster Relief Assistance for Immigrants Project plans to provide one-time cash benefits of $500 per adult / $1,000 per household to 150,000 unlawfully present aliens in California.

These benefits are not to be provided to U.S. citizens or legal aliens residing in the state, according to an April 17 fact sheet issued by the California Department of Social Services, the “Disaster Relief Assistance for Immigrants Fact Sheet,” which reiterates that only unlawfully present aliens are eligible for direct assistance.

Our lawsuit argued that the California State Legislature has not enacted any law that affirmatively provides that unlawfully present aliens are eligible for the $75 million of cash public benefits announced by Newsom.

Well, it is California.

Feds Give $23 Million to ‘Community Organizations’ in Virus Fight

The Obama Administration discovered that it could fund its favorite leftist organizations through all manner of community programs, and the swamp creatures embedded in the DC bureaucracies are at it again. Our Corruption Chronicles blog reports.

Dealing with a devastated economy and the worst unemployment crisis in history, the U.S. government is quietly spending $23 million on “culturally and linguistically diverse” COVID-19 outreach and education in racial and ethnic minority and disadvantaged communities. The goal is to develop a national and statewide network of public and community-based organizations that will help mitigate the virus’s disproportionate impact among that demographic, according to one of the recently published grant announcements. A separate allocation will revive an Obama-era program that gave leftist groups tens of millions of dollars to help poor, minority and indigenous communities attain “environmental justice.” Under that project the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will reopen the State Environmental Justice Cooperative Agreement Program (SEJCA) to help “underserved communities” and “vulnerable populations” deal with COVID-19.
The biggest chunk of money, $22 million, will come from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which just launched a National Infrastructure for Mitigating the Impact of COVID-19 within Racial and Ethnic Minority Communities. The agency’s Office of Minority Health (OMH) will dole out the cash to “community-based organizations” that are considered “trusted and usual information sources for racial and ethnic minority, rural and disadvantaged communities.” The organizations, most likely leftist groups, will use the taxpayer dollars to “disseminate effective response, recovery and resilience strategies and ensure service linkages for racial and ethnic minority, rural and disadvantaged communities hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.” This includes identifying areas with minority and disadvantaged people at substantially greater risk of contracting the virus and adverse outcomes due to prevalence of underlying health conditions such as hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, asthma, and COPD/lung disease as well as structural and systemic barriers to physical distancing and challenges to accessing healthcare and social services. The money will flow for up to three years so the community groups can document and distribute “lessons learned” and other findings.
Here is why HHS, whose mission is to enhance and protect the health and well-being of all Americans, is dedicating tens of millions of dollars to this new venture: “Emerging data suggests racial and ethnic minority populations are experiencing disproportionate impact and worse health outcomes from COVID-19,” according to the grant document. “Past public health crises, like the H1N1 pandemic and Zika epidemic, have demonstrated and amplified the vulnerability of these populations. Specifically, when combined with a greater baseline prevalence of underlying health conditions, a public health crisis like COVID-19 further exacerbates the higher morbidity and mortality for racial and ethnic minority communities. Due to lack of resources and limited capacity to provide healthcare and social services, rural communities are also vulnerable to adverse COVID-19 outcomes in the immediate and long term.”
The EPA will dedicate $1 million to the coronavirus minority cause by bringing back Obama’s wasteful environmental justice initiative that filled the coffers of numerous leftist groups, including those that help illegal immigrants. Under the new project, nonprofits will work with underserved communities to understand, promote and integrate approaches to provide meaningful and measurable improvements to public health. The agency identifies underserved community as those with “environmental justice concerns and/or vulnerable populations, including minority, low income, rural, tribal, indigenous, and homeless populations.” In a document attached to the grant announcement, the EPA goes into tremendous detail about its new initiative to address the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on urban and rural low-income and minority communities.
Examples of eligible projects related to COVID-19 include the development of outreach programs to educate underserved and vulnerable populations about EPA-approved disinfectants and how to properly use them as well as managing trash removal within communities; “Healthy Homes” campaigns to share information about in-home environmental and health hazards that may increase vulnerability due to extended periods indoors resulting from local stay-at-home orders; other activities that educate, raise public knowledge and awareness toward achieving behavioral changes that improve health or prevent environmental pollution. To encourage participation the government will offer childcare, free disinfectants, translation services and material in “appropriate literacy levels for the impacted communities with environmental justice concerns.”

We will be cleaning up after the Obama Administration for years.

Virus Drug Controversy: Was Trump Right?

The legacy media seems unable to give President Trump any credit whatsoever even if the research done by his team could be of benefit to the public. The president and his team have been studying the coronavirus and looking for solutions. But it is doubtful the press will ever be able to convey this in an evenhanded manner.

Micah Morrison, our chief investigative reporter, looks at one example of this in his Investigative Bulletin.

Controversy continues to rage over President Trump’s advocacy of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine (HC) to combat the coronavirus. As we reported last month, Trump critics were shocked, shocked that the president would dare to venture a medical opinion, but based on anecdotal evidence from around the globe, it appeared to us that the president had placed a bold winning bet on HC.
The blowback was fierce. The White House for a time fell silent on HC. On Sunday, Trump jumped back into the fray with a defense of the drug and an attack on his critics at a Fox News Town Hall event.
Response to the Judicial Watch article was swift, particularly after Trump retweeted journalist Paul Sperry’s tweet about the story. We received a lot of email. Many of the comments can’t be repeated in this family-friendly venue. Others were enlightening.
“I’ve been tracking HC treatment and outcomes all over the world,” writes a data analyst. “Long story short, HC-treated patients have a case fatality rate of 0.5% (5 out of 1000) whereas the worldwide rate is 6.9% (69 out of 1000). In other words, current evidence suggests you’re more than 12 times more likely to die if you are diagnosed with COVID 19 and you don’t get HC treatment.”
“I am a Florida physician prescribing HC to patients,” another reader writes. “I do hope it is a winning bet. My take is it helps early and should be used with zinc. Shortened illness. Less lung problems.” Hospitalized patients getting HC should be on heart monitors, this physician warns, a nod to concerns about possible dangerous side effects.
Another reader directed us to an AP story about a Veterans Administration study that showed no benefit and increased deaths from HC. The VA quickly pushed back on the story. VA Secretary Robert Wilkie sent a letter to veterans’ organizations saying the VA study had led to “misinformation” about treatments at VA hospitals. Wilkie said HC was only given to patients at “highest risk” and noted that the Food and Drug Administration had approved HC for emergency use. (The FDA also issued a later warning that HC could lead to dangerous heart rhythm issues.)
In Turkey, the government has thrown HC at everyone with the virus—more than 117,000 cases. 3000 have died, but that’s lower than the global death rate, Turkish officials say. The “relatively low death toll is thanks to treatment protocols in the country, which involve two existing drugs—the controversial anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine touted by President Trump, and Japanese antiviral favipiravir,” CBS News reports.
“Doctors prescribe hydroxychloroquine to everyone who is tested positive for coronavirus,” a Turkish medical official told CBS. “Hospitalized patients may be given favipiravir as well if they encounter breathing problems.” The drug combination seemed to “delay or eliminate the need for intensive care for patients.”
The Turkish effort is not a clinical trial. It’s life in medical wartime. Closer to home, that also appears to be the case at the Yale New Haven Health hospital system, reports the website Medscape. The site is behind a paywall but Yahoo, reporting on the findings, noted that physicians at Yale were prescribing HC “because it had shown potential for success.” Other hospitals also continue to give HC to virus patients, the Yahoo report notes. That’s what Judicial Watch is hearing from front line medical personnel in New York as well.
The bottom line? HC is not without risks, but at hospitals and clinics across the country, it’s life in wartime and increasingly it appears that physicians and medical administrators are deciding that to save lives, HC is a gamble worth taking.
Trump’s bold bet is still looking like a winner.

It’s always a shame when the media seems willing to make health care a political football.

Until next week …

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Judicial overreach — Are the chickens coming home to roost?

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There is a growing sense that the aura of infallibility accorded the Supreme Court, that forms the basis of its almost limitless power, so assiduously (some might say insidiously) cultivated by Chief Justice Aharon Barak, is beginning to dim.

In Israel, the negative impact of the judicialization of politics on the Supreme Court’s legitimacy is already beginning to show its mark. Over the past decade, the public image of the Supreme Court as an autonomous and impartial arbiter has been increasingly eroded… as political arrangements and public policies agreed upon in majoritarian decision-making arenas are likely to be reviewed by an often hostile Supreme Court. As a result, the court and its judges are increasingly viewed by a considerable portion of the Israeli public as pushing forward their own political agenda...– Prof. Ran Hirschl, Towards Juristocracy, Harvard University Press, 2004.

I admit that I have used this citation from Hirschl’s book to introduce several previous articles on Israel’s legal establishment. However, I have little qualms in reusing it here—a s it has lost of none of its past pertinence. If anything, quite the opposite is true.

Testing the limits of judicial overreach?

Last week (March 3 -9) was a momentous—indeed tumultuous—week, with potentially far-reaching ramifications for Israel’s law enforcement establishment in general, and the judiciary, in particular.

On Sunday and Monday (March 3 & 4), a panel of 11 Supreme Court justices convened for a televised broadcast to rule on petitions to disqualify indicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from being assigned the task of constituting the next government coalition, and to invalidate the Likud/Blue &White agreement as to the future mode of functioning of that joint coalition.

Indeed, although overall, it was conducted in a general atmosphere of restrained respectability, the hearing exuded a discernible aura heralding that perceptible changes in the long-existing societal power structure in Israel, were in the air.

Thus, commenting on the televised proceedings, the vehemently Bibiphobic journalist, Anshel Pfeffer, of the far-Left daily, Haaretz, wrote: “…the judicial bonhomie could barely hide the fact that the justices knew they are fighting for their very legitimacy…”

True, on Wednesday night (May 6), all 11 justices ruled—unanimously—that Netanyahu was in fact eligible to form the next government and, apart from some perfunctory remarks of displeasure on several clauses in the coalition agreement, they elected to refrain from any robust initiatives to mandate far-reaching changes in it. However, despite this, hardly any seasoned observer of the machinations of Israeli politics could fail to detect a palpable sense of growing recognition that the decades of judicial overreach were testing the limits of public patience—and judicial intrusion into the realm of politics is being perceived as increasingly unacceptable. But more on that later.

Subverting the democratic process

Thus, for example, despite the Supreme Court restraint, Gadi Taub, a senior lecturer at Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s School of Public Policy, found that the fact that the court even agreed to discuss the appeal was “outrageous,” “mind-boggling” and an “amazing feat of audacity.”

Thus, according to Taub, “In agreeing to adjudicate this issue in the first place, the court is behaving as if it feels it needs to protect democracy from citizens”.He pointed out: “There is no judiciary in any proper democracy as powerful as Israel’s Supreme Court,”, remarking acerbically that: “In its own opinion, there is no limit to its power; there is nothing it does not believe is judicable, and it has the last word on everything.”

Taub observed that Menachem Mautner, former dean of Tel Aviv University’s left leaning law faculty, wrote in his book, Law and the Culture of Israel, that, as the Left has regularly failed to win at the ballot since 1977, it has decided to exploit the Supreme Court to advance its worldview. Thus, in Taub’s view, the leftist approach has been to subvert the democratic process “by moving political power from elected to appointed institutions—from the parliament to the court.”

The law as a political weapon

Accordingly, the belief that the law is being used (or rather, abused) as a weapon to advance a political doctrine that has failed to win support at the polls, has taken root across diverse segments of Israeli society—as has the view that the Supreme Court has been complicit in helping minority constituencies impose their view on wider portions of the electorate (see Hirschl above).

For in the eyes of the layman—on whose trust the judiciary’s legitimacy is crucially dependent—the Supreme Court has not only regularly prevented the elected government from implementing the policy it was elected to implement, but at times, has coerced the government to implement policies it was elected to ensure were not implemented.

This disconnect between the perspectives of the Supreme Court justices and wide swathes of the general public has led to a precipitous fall in the credibility of the judiciary in general and the Supreme Court in particular. Citing an ongoing study of the credibility of Israel’s judicial system conducted by Haifa University, YNetnews’s Einav Schiff echoed a virtually identical diagnosis to that of Hirschl’s.

Thus, in a piece entitled The Supreme Court is losing the people’s trust, he wrote: “The view of the court as an ivory tower, home to self-appointed gods, is becoming more and more common, and this is reflected in different confidence indexes. Last May, for example, the Rule of Law Index by Prof. Arie Ratner of Haifa University found that 49 percent of Jewish Israeli citizens have confidence in the Supreme Court. In 2000, that rate stood at 80 percent. This isn’t a slip or a drop, it’s a collapse.”

The law as the last refuge of the unscrupulous?

It was in April 1775 that Samuel Johnson (1709 -1784), the celebrated English writer, articulated his well-known dictum, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” His biographer, James Boswell (1740-1795), explained that by “patriotism, Johnson did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many…have made a cloak for self-interest.’‘

In Israel, against the backdrop of the turmoil over the functioning of the Supreme Court, one might well be tempted to formulate a parallel dictum. Thus, not patriotism, but the law, is last refuge of the unscrupulous–where any failed politician, unable to defeat his rivals at the polls, can—draped in “a cloak of self-interest” and driven not by a genuine love of the law, but by a desire to circumvent the will of the voters—enlist the courts to help unseat them. Or, in the previously cited words of Taub, “by moving political power from elected to appointed institutions—from the parliament to the court.”

Of course, none of this would have been possible unless the Supreme Court has not been amenable—indeed, eager—to facilitate such a power shift.

This was particularly true for the period when Prof. Aharon Barak was President of the Supreme Court—from 1995 to 2006.

The Supreme Court as an “alternate government”

One of Israel’s most prominent legal scholars, and Israel Prize laureate for Law, Prof. Amnon Rubinstein, who also served as an MK for the far Left Meretz faction and held several ministerial portfolios on its behalf, characterized, in vivid terms, the judicial metamorphosis Barak introduced. He wrote: “ Barak was a revolutionary…who persuaded his colleagues to follow him and undertake an extraordinary judicial policy. According to this policy, the courts can adjudicate any administrative or legislative act…”

Rubinstein continued: “Thus, a situation arose whereby the Supreme Court could convene and decide on every conceivable issue. In addition, the unreasonableness of an administrative measure became grounds for judicial intervention. This was a total revolution in the judicial thinking which characterized the Supreme Court of previous generations, and this has given it the reputation of the most activist court in the world…”

In fact, in Rubinstein’s view: “In practice, in many respects the Supreme Court under Barak become an alternate government.”

In his book, The Purse and the Sword: The Trials of Israel’s Legal Revolution,  Prof. Daniel Friedmann, former dean of Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law and Justice Minister under Ehud Olmert, sets out a biting critique of Barak’s judicial doctrine. In it, he cites, approvingly, a caustic condemnation (p.333) by the well-know, (self-professed) Left-of Center journalist Ben-Dror Yemini : “It is doubtful whether anyone is more guilty of the decline in the Supreme Court’s position than Chief Justice Barak… According to all the polls, there is no other man who has caused such an ongoing, dramatic decline in public confidence [in the court]…Anyone looking for examples can find them in his megalomaniac declarations that “all is justiciable…”

“A world record for judicial hubris”?

Echoing this sentiment, in his decidedly disapproving review of Barak’s book The Judge in a Democracy, which, significantly, he entitled Enlightened Despot, former U.S. Court of Appeals judge and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, Richard A. Posner writes: I have my differences with Robert Bork, but when he remarked.. that Barak ‘establishes a world record for judicial hubris,’ he came very near the truth.

Widely considered to be one of the most influential legal scholars in the United States, and one of the most cited legal scholars of the 20th century, Posner asserts: “What Barak created out of whole cloth was a degree of judicial power undreamed of even by our most aggressive Supreme Court justices…”

According to Posner “… One is reminded of Napoleon’s taking the crown out of the pope’s hands and putting it on his own head. He [Barak]takes for granted that judges have inherent authority to override statutes. Such an approach can accurately be described as usurpative.”

Others have expressed similar concern as to the excess power of the Supreme Court and its growing intrusion into the realms of other branches of government. Commenting on a March 2010 injunction prohibiting any government dealing with plans for changes in Israel’s zoning laws, Prof. Yoav Dotan, former dean at the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University, wrote: “This is the first time in the history of Israel’s judicial branch that an injunction bars the government from dealing with a matter on its agenda…This decision overturns the existing order ..Not only has the Supreme Court never issued such a decision , but the decision itself constitutes an historic precedent in judicial activism in general. It is doubtful whether a court in any country ever dared to order its government what can and cannot be on its agenda…”

Less and less reason to vote

In his book, Coercing Virtue, the prominent jurist, Robert H. Bork, a former US Court of Appeals judge, who taught constitutional law at Yale Law School and served as Solicitor General and Acting Attorney General of the United States, strongly criticizes judicial activism both in the US and Israel. Indeed, it is Israel that he sees as the county most afflicted by the phenomenon of judicial overreach.

Accordingly, Bork laments: “There would seem to be less and less reason for the Israeli people to bother electing an legislature and executive; the attorney general, with the backing of the Supreme Court can decide almost everything for them…”(p.120).

Indeed today, certainly by any criterion of layman common sense, Israeli Supreme Court violates some laws and invent others merely to impose its own ‏world view on the elected policy makers. It acts as if it is bound neither by the existence of written law nor by the absence of written law.

It overcomes both by brandishing the legalistic Excalibur of “proportionality” and “reasonableness”, criteria which only the knights (or high priests) of the Supreme Court are deemed qualified to determine.

Ignoring existing laws; Invoking nonexistent laws?

Accordingly, the Supreme Court has regularly ridden rough shod over the decisions of the Knesset Central Election Committee to bar dominantly anti-Zionist parties and their candidates from participating in parliamentary elections—flagrantly ignoring that both the parties and numerous candidates thereof, are in stark violation of Clause 7A of the Basic Law: The Knesset. This explicitly states that “if the objects or actions of [a] list or   of [a] person, expressly or by implication, include…negation of the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state” and/or “support of armed struggle, by a hostile state or a terrorist organization, against the State of Israel”, they will be precluded from participation in elections.

Yet despite the fact that the deeds, declaration and documents of these anti-Zionist entities and individuals comprise undisguised and undeniable (indeed, undenied) negation of the Jewish nature of Israel and support for armed struggle by Israel’s enemies against it , the Supreme Court has consistently (and incomprehensibly) ruled in favor of their participation.

Indeed, the Supreme Court has never upheld the preclusion of any anti-Zionist list or individual–despite their glaring violations of the law

By contrast, the Court has frequently instated injunctions prohibiting Jewish (typically Right-wing) candidates based on the Court’s interpretation of their “objects and actions” as constituting “incitement to racism”—despite the defendants denying that this was their intent.

Indeed, in many ways, the very fact that the Supreme Court, with a complement of 11 justices, agreed to hear the petition against Netanyahu being assigned the formation of the next government, despite it being totally devoid of any legal foundation, is in itself an manifestation of its tendency to ascribe itself powers it does not have.

Ignoring laws; Inventing laws (cont.)

After all, Basic Law: The Government determines unequivocally that the Prime Minister may remain in office until a final verdict (i.e. after all appeals have been exhausted) has been handed down, or by a complicated process, involving a vote of 61 MKs (Clause 18(a)-(d))—neither of which apply in Netanyahu’s case; and that the President will assign the task of forming a government on an MK, who has the backing of at least 61 MKs (Clause 10 )—which does apply in Netanyahu’s case.

Indeed, had the Supreme Court not sensed that winds of change were sweeping through Israel society, it might well have handed down a very different verdict.

Indeed, this is vividly reflected by the words of retired Justice Eliyahu Matza, in a recent interview: “In this ruling, the Supreme Court has missed an opportunity—which perhaps will not reoccur—to lay a moral foundation for the institutions of government in Israel…[I would] have certainly ruled in favor of the petitions—and not just me. I am convinced that several of my retired colleagues who, served on the Supreme Court in the past would have also endorsed the petition”.

Ironically, it was the late-Chief Justice Moshe Landau, President the Supreme Court in the pre-Barak era, who cautioned against precisely what Matza suggested—ruling on values rather than law. After all, by substituting their values for the law, the Supreme Court justices are conducting themselves in precisely the manner of which Hirschl cautions in the opening excerpt.

“…the treacherous swamp of opinions & beliefs

Landau warned: “The [High] Court is getting into waters that are too deep. Into a treacherous swamp of political opinions and beliefs. And this is dangerous both for the country and for the Court. It is dangerous for the country because it exacerbates social rifts. And it is dangerous for the Court because the Court is losing the principle foundation on which it must base its standing: The belief in its neutrality of the judicial system in public disputes.”

He added: “..when the Court represents a certain opinion, no matter how progressive, it enrages a significant section of the public…However, I must say that the Court contributes to creating this situation in that it inserts itself into areas where it has no place. It takes upon itself to decide on matters…which should be decided in the Knesset

It is thus difficult not to sense a creeping suspicion that the Supreme Court’s ruling was motivated less by a desire to preserve the law and more by a desire to preserve itself—as Alex Traiman argues.

Indeed, after decades of judicial overreach, there is finally a growing sense that the aura of infallibility accorded the Supreme Court, which forms the basis of its almost limitless power, so assiduously—some might say insidiously—cultivated by Chief Justice Aharon Barak, is beginning to dim.

Perhaps, then, the pigeons have at long last, come home to roost—or are just beginning to.

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