California Begins Handouts to Illegal Aliens on Monday, May 17, 2020

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I guess you can argue that California does that all the time, but this is a new monetary handout due to the Chinese virus.

Thanks to reader Nancy for sending me the news.

Some of the usual ‘religious’ nonprofits will be responsible for passing out the payola.

From Cal Matters:

Financial help for California’s undocumented immigrants starts Monday

California’s undocumented immigrants can begin applying Monday for disaster relief payments of up to $1,000 per household under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s coronavirus emergency assistance plan.

Since the announcement was made, many undocumented immigrants have been waiting for information to apply as soon as the application period opened. In April, Newsom announced a one-time, $75-million fund for undocumented adults who are not eligible for other forms of government assistance, such an unemployment benefits and federal stimulus checks. A qualifying undocumented adult can receive $500, with a maximum of $1,000 per household.

California has more than two million undocumented immigrants. Nearly one in ten workers is undocumented.

With the funds spread among so many people, most families will not receive the funding. Applications are approved on a first-come, first-served basis, until the money runs out.

“In the best case scenario, these funds would reach one in 10 people,” said Unai Montes-Irueste, director of communications with United Ways of California.

[….]

Montes-Irueste of United Ways of California — which has helped undocumented immigrants without bank accounts during the pandemic — said it is important for people to know where to get help and avoid being scammed.

Called the Disaster Relief Assistance for Immigrants Project, the $75 million in state funding will be distributed to 12 organizations throughout California.

More here.

See the list of who is passing out the taxpayer dollars. Catholic Charities and Jewish Family Services are on the list.  I’m guessing they get to keep a cut for their ‘administrative’ costs.

Update!  Don’t miss Montgomery County, MD being sued for handing out money to illegal aliens.

EDITORS NOTE: This Frauds, Crooks and Criminals column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

List of Flynn ‘unmaskers’ – here’s what happened and what it means

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Originally published by Fox News

The list released Wednesday by acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell of top Obama officials who asked to “unmask” former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s name from NSA reporting is the latest bombshell in the story of how the Obama administration weaponized intelligence to undermine and destroy the incoming Trump administration.

But it also suggests this conspiracy began earlier and was much broader than previously believed.

By releasing this list, Grenell did a great service to his country to protect the principle of the peaceful transfer of power. But the intelligence community needs to release much more information to get to the bottom of this conspiracy. This should include information on the content of the NSA reports and which officials made unmasking requests of them.

Intelligence officials also need to provide a broader list of all unmasking requests made by senior Obama officials during this time period because it is likely that other Trump campaign and transition officials also were targeted.

Names of U.S. citizens mentioned in U.S. intelligence reports, often NSA communications intercepts, are blacked out (minimized) 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 blacked-out 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.

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.

The most stunning thing about this list is that the vast majority of these requests were dated between Dec. 14 and 16, which was before Flynn’s Dec. 29 phone call to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. An NSA intercept of this phone call was the basis of the Jan. 24, 2017, FBI interview with Flynn when two FBI agents used this intercept to entrap Flynn into lying about the call.

FBI Director James Comey broke protocol by not informing White House lawyers that he planned to send FBI agents to meet with Flynn. The FBI agents discouraged Flynn from having a lawyer present and didn’t read him anything like the Miranda warning.

Flynn was targeted for unmasking at least two weeks before the Dec. 29 phone call. …  This may indicate Flynn and other Trump transition officials were being targeted for unmasking as part of a fishing expedition to find dirt on them to undermine Trump’s presidency.

Flynn did not make any phone calls during this period to Kisylak until Dec. 22, 2016. He did meet with Kislyak on Dec. 1 at Trump Tower in New York. This may mean the unmasked mid-December intelligence that mentioned Flynn could have been a phone conversation by Kislyak with someone else. It also could have involved some matter involving Flynn, possibly with another country.

This means Flynn was targeted for unmasking at least two weeks before the Dec. 29 phone call and the vast majority of these unmasking requests did not include intercepted conversations of Flynn having allegedly inappropriate conversations with Kislyak. This may indicate Flynn and other Trump transition officials were being targeted for unmasking as part of a fishing expedition to find dirt on them to undermine Trump’s presidency.

In addition, there were only seven unmasking requests by seven officials after the Dec. 29 Flynn-Kislyak phone call – by Vice President Biden, then Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Obama Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and other career officials. Since the information in this intercept leaked to the press, these seven officials are suspects for this criminal act.

Other significant observations: U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power made the most unmasking requests for Flynn’s name – seven. Clapper made three. No one else made more than two.  Power, who reportedly made an astounding 260 demasking requests during her time as U.N. ambassador, testified in 2017 that most of these requests were made in her name but she did not request this information. I believe Power and assume someone at the NSC, who was not authorized access to demasking information, made these requests in her name. The intelligence community needs to disclose who this person was.

Also interesting is the cluster of requests to demask Flynn’s name by Biden and others between Jan. 7 and Jan. 12, 2017, and the timing of these requests.

On Jan. 5, Biden, Comey, Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates met with Obama. In the meeting, Obama appeared to direct these officials to withhold Russia-related intelligence from the incoming Trump administration.

The next day, President-elect Trump received a misleading and incomplete briefing on the fraudulent Steele Dossier and Russian meddling in the 2016 election by Clapper, Comey, Brennan, and NSA Director Mike Rogers.

Over the next few days, there were seven high-level requests for Flynn’s name to be unmasked from NSA reporting. My guess is that this was not a coincidence and that a single intelligence official or NSC staff member suggested that these senior officials ask to see this information as part of a larger effort to target Flynn. The intelligence report in question probably concerned Flynn’s Dec. 29 phone call with Kislyak and would be used to entrap Flynn by the FBI on Jan. 24.

The lists of requesters to unmask Flynn’s name from intelligence reports after the 2016 election is not a smoking gun, but it does strongly suggest some coordinated effort by senior Obama officials to get target Flynn and undermine the incoming Trump administration.

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.

RELATED VIDEO: Fleitz: “I would like to see justice for General Flynn”

©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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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!

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

PODCAST: Air Force Veteran Talks Military Service, Marriage, and Feminism

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If “the American dream” describes overcoming the challenges of a difficult childhood; serving in the armed forces; having the financial freedom to support not only yourself, but also your family; making a difference in your community through political engagement; and finding love along the way, then Anna Paulina Luna is living the dream.

Luna joins the “Problematic Women” podcast on the eve of the 78th anniversary of the creation of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps in 1942 formally allowing women to join the armed forces. She shares her journey of growing up in a single-parent home in California as a Hispanic American and finding confidence, success, and a husband through her Air Force service.

Plus, in the wake of Mother’s Day, we take a moment to say “thank you” to all our wonderful mothers and chat with Lauren’s mom, Karla Evans. And as always, we’ll be crowning our problematic woman of the week.

Listen to the podcast below or read the lightly edited transcript. Enjoy the show!

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 >>

Virginia Allen: We are joined by Anna Paulina Luna, a conservative political activist and a retired Air Force veteran. Anna, thanks so much for being here.

Anna Paulina Luna: Thank you for having me on, I’m super excited to be here.

Allen: Tomorrow is the anniversary of women being allowed to serve in different branches of the military, so we’re really excited to talk with you about your military service. But first, I just want us to take a minute to talk more about who you are and learn more about your story.

So, Anna, you are a Hispanic American. You were raised by your mom in Southern California. Could you just take a minute to share a little bit about your childhood with us?

Luna: Yeah. I think it’s always interesting doing the political crossover because I feel like so many people, especially in this really digital age, try to put on this front that they’re just these perfect people. And I find that when you really own who you are, when you own your childhood and your upbringing, it actually allows other people to connect with you.

So I found one of the most powerful things has been for me to really talk about that, to give people a little bit of insight as to why I’m so passionate about what I believe in, and really why I believe in certain policies.

What a lot of people off first glance looking at me might not expect is that I grew up in the welfare system. My mom actually had me at 20, and she chose to keep me over an abortion. It was really us on our own from the beginning.

My entire family, not just on my mom’s side, but my father struggled with a very severe drug addiction that really took him away from me a lot of the time.

So not only did I have this kind of chaotic upbringing, but I knew that I really did want to make a change, and I thought at the time that I was going to do that through medicine.

I overheard that the military would pay for medical school, or pay for school in general. So, without telling my mom, I went and talked to a recruiter and I enlisted. I told her about a month before I was supposed to leave that I would be joining the military.

It was really the military that kind of launched me into what I say [is] success as an adult. It gave me that structure that I really didn’t have in a family life.

It was through the military that I was able to excel. And I tell people even to this day, “I will always support the military for that reason.” It was a huge factor in setting me up for success and really enabling me to help my family as well. But you don’t always have to have that victim mentality, you can accomplish anything you set your mind to.

It was through my hard work and dedication to my family and to myself that I was really able to change the outcome, I think, of my own life, my family’s life, and future generations.

So that’s why I’m very passionate and that’s why I share my stories, because I think that more stories like that need to get out there. And through my work with Prager, we’re hoping to really connect with people on that deep personal level and really stand up some great voices to help save this country.

Lauren Evans: What was going on in your head when you were 19 and joined the military? I think a lot of American youth are kind of in this arrested development and they feel like 19 is a really young age, but that was a really big commitment to make.

Luna: It was a super big commitment. And because it was really just my mom, me, my brother, my sister, we didn’t know of anyone in our immediate family that had been in the military. It actually wasn’t until I got out that I found out some of our extended family had either gone to Normandy or had been in Vietnam.

But at the time, I went and talked to a recruiter. I’d actually went and talked to the Army recruiter first, and I was supposed to join the Army as a medic.

And then I went over to the Air Force recruiter prior to me going to MEPS, which is where you do your in-processing before you leave. And the Air Force recruiter is like, “I think I can get a better gig, let me tell you about what jobs we have available.”

But when you’re so young, and you don’t really have a lot of that guidance that I think some people have, you really don’t, I think, understand the magnitude of what you’re about to do, especially when you join the military.

So for me, I went from being in LA, kind of a different lifestyle, to really joining the military, and then that was it, I was gone, I wasn’t at home around my family, I wasn’t at home around where I grew up, I was in a completely different world.

For me, changing that, taking me out of a place of comfort, and putting me somewhere new where I had to excel on my own if I wanted to make it, that really builds character, and that was, I think, where I really started to grow as an adult, was during those early years in the military.

Really, today, it’s weird, but I only got out of the military two years ago. So I really still do have a close tie to the military community because so many of my friends are still actively serving.

Allen: Wow. So amazing. Anna, we want to play just a short clip of an interview you did with PragerU, talking about your time in the military. Let’s take a listen for just a moment.

Luna: The military is one of the best things that, a lot of times, people can do to get out of really bad situations. And it deeply almost angers me when I hear people say that the military targets minorities, and that it’s not a good thing, because not only was I able to help myself, and really, as an adult, get the guidance and the structure that I needed to really excel, but I was able to also help my family.

And I think that for someone like myself, I mean, what other place in the world can a young woman join the military and then help their family to the point of really making changes that impact future generations? And I think that that was something that I will forever be grateful for the military for.

And when I still talk to younger kids, even kids from rougher areas, I’m like, “Hey, look, you should consider joining, because for me, it was life-changing and I don’t regret that decision.”

Allen: So, Anna, let’s unpack for a minute just a little bit of what you say in this clip. You mention that your service changed not only your life, but also really empowered you to be able to affect the lives of your family members. Can you just explain a little bit more about what you mean by that?

Luna: Yeah. So my mom, again, going back, she was a young single mom. … We were in the welfare system. She was very much so, I think, dependent on different loans and sometimes government assistance. But when I joined the military, I was able to not only send money back home, but in an instance, I think I talked about it earlier, but I was able to help out my dad.

What a lot of people don’t know is that my dad was homeless for a little bit. And it was, again, the military giving me a job, a stable form of income, taking care of me completely that I was actually able to move my father out to Florida, and was really, I think, one of the first times in his life that he truly stayed clean, and that he still is.

So had I not done that, had I not been able to send money back home that would help pay for my sister’s art lessons—and then later on she was accepted into one of the best art schools, not even just in the world, but in the country.

All of these things—people don’t realize, but sometimes you never know who’s going to be the one to reach back and really help out and make changes.

But it was that team effort to where I was able to kind of provide the air support for my family that we needed that’s really impacted and made changes.

Frankly, my sister, she didn’t just go on to attend this incredible art school—I mean, she’s there on scholarship—and it was because I was able to hep my mom out, help send her to those lessons. My dad is now sober because I was able to move him from a place that he was in, a very dark area, to an area where he could focus on his life, get his life together.

And I don’t have a perfect family. And I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that through hard work and dedication you can make those changes.

Sometimes you don’t realize how much something as small as me going into a recruiter’s office would help change the next 10 years, the next 20 years in outcomes of your family. But here I am. And it’s really resonated with a lot of people. And I’m not just the only one.

So you meet a lot of people in the military that are from all walks of life. They’re from sometimes the inner city of Chicago, sometimes they’re from well-to-do families.

But the one thing that brings you together is your sense of purpose to serve the country, your uniform, the fact that you are away from home, and that the military, your sergeants become your parents, your younger enlisted members become your brothers and sisters. You spend holidays together. And that deep form of bonding can really help, especially people like myself who didn’t necessarily always have that.

So I still, to this day, I know this is going to sound like a military recruiting ad, but I’m a huge fan of the military. And to tie this to politics, I feel like you have so many politicians that say they want to help out veterans, but they don’t. And they know that veterans are great for photos, but then don’t genuinely have that passion and drive to really help represent veterans, focus on veterans’ issues, and take care of our service members.

I hope to help other leaders stand up, so that we can be advocates for the vet community.

Evans: What are some of those ways that we can be advocating for the veteran community?

Luna: I’d say right now, especially in regard to how many people are now coming back, you have less than 1%, I believe the number is, of the U.S. population now having served. And I think when we’re talking on issues, and this is something that’s even in the military community considered really taboo, but the topics of post traumatic stress disorder.

You have so many people that that word in itself, that term “disorder,” they don’t want to be branded with that, they don’t want to be labeled with that, and they don’t want the stigma that comes along with it.

So sometimes people won’t get the help that they need because of the fact that they don’t want to be in that category. But what ends up happening is, these people become isolated, and because of that, that’s when you have the higher instances of even suicide with post-traumatic stress disorder.

So … let’s say you’re the owner of a company, if there’s a way that you can give back to veterans organizations, do it. If there’s a way that you can hire veterans, do it.

But also, if you’re friends with a veteran, ask them how they’re doing, ask them about their service. A lot of people don’t realize that sometimes just having a simple conversation to take the time and say, “Hey, how are you doing?” I know this is a busy world, everyone is on their phones all the time, but having that intimate conversation, that does make a difference.

And even now, here where I live, I work with different veterans organizations. And even though I’m still doing the political circuit, I reach back, and I try to lift those around me that I know are going to help further veterans’ causes.

But I’d say right now, one of my biggest goals is to really help change the stigma nationally of what post-traumatic stress disorder is. And then also ensure that people are making sure that veterans’ rights aren’t being thrown onto the chopping block in policy.

I love what The Heritage Foundation is doing with veterans. I think it’s incredible. And I think that we need to be the voices sometimes for those that might not want to speak up on these issues. So that’s what I talk about. Sometimes I talk about the uncomfortable, and I think that that’s needed right now.

Allen: It is needed. … We all need to be made a little bit uncomfortable sometimes.

But, Anna, one of my favorite things is just to sit and listen and hear the stories of veterans, veterans like yourself that have served their country, have sacrificed.

Are there any stories that you want to share today that are just really reminiscent for you of your time in the Air Force and what it means to you to serve your country?

Luna: There is a ton. But I’d have to say, one of the things I’m never going to forget is my first sergeant.

The first sergeant that I ever had that I really connected with, his name was Sergeant Haywood. And actually, to this day, [I] still keep in contact with him. But this was kind of when I realized, “Wow, the military is showing me something.” I had my adult moment where I realized the military was teaching me some things.

And you have Sergeant Haywood, and he was from Inglewood, which is in California, at the time, a really rough area, and still somewhat is. But he became my sergeant. And you had me, which people a lot of times look at me and they assume a lot. I’m kind of tiny, they probably think I’m just hanging out at the Starbucks with a mocha late and UGG boots on.

But he was from this really rough area. And I would talk to him at work and we would hang out. Then after work, I finally saw him and I realized that I was kind of judging people based on how they dress. And I didn’t realize that Sergeant Haywood was from the opposite side of town as me. But it was the military uniform that brought us together, and it enabled me to look past that.

That was, I think, kind of one of my first growing, mentally growing experiences. But the other thing that really stuck with me was, in 2014, my husband was shot in Afghanistan.

At this point in time, I really didn’t understand, I guess, what the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder was. And the military will constantly give you CBTs, it’s called computer-based testing. … It’s basically PowerPoints where you check in, walking through the training.

So you had a lot of people that would get the CBT, there’d be slight mentions of it. But no one actually who had gone through an experience of what it was like to have a family member go through that or a community go through that. And what’s been really unique is that my husband is an Air Force special operator. So what his job is is combat control.

When he was shot in Afghanistan, I knew that he would be physically OK from where the injury was. But when I got up to Walter Reed Medical Center in Maryland, about a week after he had been shot, to meet him, and I was going through the hospital, and seeing really what happens after war, it wasn’t this glamorous thing that Hollywood makes it out to be.

It wasn’t like in the movie “Pearl Harbor,” where it’s this epic, positive love story. You had a lot of these people that were coming back physically and mentally in pieces.

When it showed me that and I saw what was happening to the community, what these families were going through, what the service members were going through, and then how certain people were really afraid of, I think, reaching out to get help, it really changed my outlook in, what was I doing on social media? What was I doing in my own community as a military member and then later on as a veteran to really help shed light on this issue?

I realized at that point that I needed to be focusing and making this a topic of discussion so that farther down the line I could help people like this that were coming back and dealing with it.

I ended up actually later on writing a book about really what my husband and I went through during that recovery process because so many marriages, so many people just didn’t want to talk about it, it was this private elephant in the room that I think people were going through and didn’t even realize that someone next to them might be having those same experiences.

My husband and I, we got through it. And it wasn’t easy, it was very difficult. But we made it, and we’re stronger because of it. We now talk about it to help, really, other married couples that might be struggling with similar issues, especially in regards to what’s faced in war time.

But that was something that will forever have changed my life, and … forever, I think, changed the objective of what I’m choosing to fight for, especially on veterans’ issues.

Evans: I think that’s what I love about you, Anna, that you always want to take your experiences and really help others with that knowledge. You met your husband while you both were serving, correct?

Luna: Correct. Yeah. I had joined with zero intent of getting … I wanted to just go to school, and like kind of a Beyoncé song, young independent female. And I met him, not even kidding, eight months after I joined. And we got married a month after we started dating. So it was very quick. That was 10 yeas ago.

Evans: Oh, wait, you got married one month after dating?

Luna: We got married one month after dating. So we were friends for a little bit prior, and then we started dating. He always jokes because he busted out of the friend zone. But yeah, it was 10 years ago. And I look back at that, and I was only 20 years old when I got married.

Evans: So what was that like? You were newlyweds and both in the service, which I imagine is a lot. And then you mentioned the major trauma that your relationship went through. Even now that you’ve transitioned to civilian life and he’s still serving, what has [being] married to a service member been like?

Luna: Well, I tease him all the time, especially when it comes time to get water before bed, I’m like, “I went through five combat deployments, or four combat deployments, go get me water.” I tease him about it all the time.

But it’s one of those things that I always tell people it’s really important, especially if you are in a relationship with a service member, to make sure that you’re friends first, because that kept us through all of the deployments, and all the hard times, and the injuries, and training.

My husband was in a unique job, especially as an active-duty member to work. He was not just deploying basically every six months. But then in between the times that he was deploying, he was going through training. So he really wasn’t around a lot.

But I stayed busy with college, and I was able to get my degree done, my bachelor’s in science. And then I was able to continue to move forward and really focus on my family, and just kind of keeping the house, redecorate ever so often. So I stayed busy.

But it is important to have a good network of friends, it is important to be friends [with] another service member before anything else, because that keeps you together through the hard times.

Allen: Such good life advice.

Evans: I still can’t get over you married your husband one month after meeting him, that’s so awesome.

Luna: I know. We didn’t necessarily advertise it either to people. We just knew people would be like, “What?” Especially now. But eventually when we did announce it, we actually ended up going to India, and we “eloped” in India. So we actually had this secret marriage for a little bit. … I’m very vocal on other issues, but I like to keep my relationship kind of private.

So we’ve been very fortunate enough to kind of have a really energetic and traveling spirit with one another. So when it came time to actually say, “Are we going to do a wedding?” … We went to India and had a blast and didn’t have to worry about wedding planning.

Allen: That’s so awesome. Oh, wow, I love that. Love your story. Well, Anna, since you left the military, you have become one of the most prominent Hispanic conservative leaders in our country. What kind of reactions do you get from people when they find out that you’re a Hispanic American and yet you’re very conservative?

Luna: It’s interesting because I get two completely different reactions. From those that are also conservative Hispanics, it’s like, “Finally. I align with you, you’re like me. Thanks God.”

But when it’s from very liberal, most of the time Democrat Hispanics, the first thing they actually bring up is my skin color and really, really racist undertones. I’ve been told, “Oh, you’re too white to be Hispanic.” Or, “You’re only half Hispanic so … you don’t count.”

And now, I know that that just for them is coming from a place of ignorance. So what I always like to say is, Barack Obama was half white and he’s considered the first black president. And with me, you can’t just box, especially the Hispanic community, into just one category. We’re not all short and Speedy Gonzales-like. And I don’t run around with a maraca and a sombrero just to prove how Hispanic I am.

But I can say that, on the back end, you have a lot of people that, I think, have really been programmed to think that being Hispanic is a certain thing. And the fact is that this Hispanic community is very diverse. You have Cubans, you have Mexicans, you have Puerto Ricans, you have Dominicans, you have Colombians, you have Guatemalans.

You have so many people from so many different areas, and the one thing that brings us together, especially in this country, is the fact that we have ideas that align with the Constitution, that we’re conservative, and that we’re Americans.

So, really, when it came time to kind of title the show for Prager, we wanted to really focus on that.

You have so many people coming from so many different backgrounds to talk about what their American story is, and that we don’t agree with identity politics, that we’re here to really bring this discussion to the forefront and say, “You can’t say that because someone is Hispanic that they have to vote a certain type of way.”

And you can’t take a community that’s really faith-based and has conservative values, and try to change that. Because at the end of the day, we all remember where we came from.

So I think in regards to people’s reactions, I mean, my close friends are not surprised. They all say the same thing, they’re like, “Well, we knew you were going to do something great.”

But when it comes to some of the people online that are really empowered by hiding behind their phones, it definitely does, I think, change their level of what they’ll say to you.

And people can just be mean. But I don’t sit there and I don’t dwell on it. I don’t read through every negative comment. If people want to be fine, that’s great; or be mean, that’s great. But I don’t have to sit there and subject myself to abuse. And so I don’t.

If people act like that, then that’s their own thing. But I’m not going to give them the time of day.

So it’s been mixed. From people that are conservative, you get positive, nothing is ever brought up about my skin tone. But when you get a very liberal person who happens to be Hispanic, even maybe sometimes less Hispanic than I am, the first thing that they bring up is my skin color.

And it’s very racially driven, and it’s almost sad, because if you’re focusing on my skin color and not the things that are coming out of my mouth, that’s how you know you’ve been programmed.

Evans: I think it’s Taylor Swift that said, “And the haters are going to hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.” So you just keep doing what you’re doing.

I want to bring it back to the reason why we’re talking today, and that is that tomorrow is the anniversary of women being allowed to serve in different branches of the military.

What does that mean to you as a female veteran that women, for a long time in our country, couldn’t easily serve in the same capacity that you did?

Luna: Having gone through the military training, and having done my job, and served my country, it’s a weird concept to think at a certain point, women weren’t even allowed to serve. But then you kind of look back at, historically, you had the Women’s Air Corps, the WAC. And then seeing really how women have helped kind of change the service as a whole.

I can say that I’m very, very proud to serve. And there’s just something about joining the military that really has given me, I think, the confidence that I need to now excel in this political arena. …

It’s something that I take great pride in. So to imagine that I wouldn’t have been able to serve is just a weird kind of foreign concept to me because it makes up so much of who I am, even now that I’m no longer in.

My job in particular, I did air field management. It’s called an AFSC, but that’s … kind of your category of learning. So it was “one, Charlie, seven, five, one.” And I actually worked to do flight plans for pilots. So in the sky, you have basically invisible roadways for airplanes. And so you have to work with the [Federal Aviation Administration] to block those out.

Then I did inspections for the airfield, I worked side by side with many pilots, from fighter pilots to gunship pilots, to the stealth bomber. And I also helped do arrivals and departures of some pretty high-level people, to include, at the time, Vice President [Joe] Biden.

I can tell you that, with the military, you always want to make sure that you have an administration that really supports the military. And there is something to be said about the morale now in the military under [President Donald] Trump, which is through the roof, versus at the time, even back in the day, with [President Barack] Obama and Biden.

Having been there when Biden came through, I can tell you that, for sure, I am very excited that President Trump is in office, because when you have people going to fight your wars, you want to make sure that these people are taken care of, and the Trump administration does do that for military members.

Allen: Anna, we’re certainly so thankful for your service and for all of the incredible individuals who have made that sacrifice and that decision to serve their country. There is so much that we are forever indebted to you all for.

But, Anna, last question I want to ask you, this is a question that we love to ask our guests that come on the show because we get so many different answers, do you consider yourself to be a feminist? Yes? No? Why or why not?

Luna: I think the modern-day term for what a feminist is has really changed over time. I support women, I support strong independent women in the workforce, whether it’s the military, or politics, or any other capacity. But the one thing that I think that the modern-day feminist movement has really targeted is men. And I don’t understand that.

You can be a strong independent woman for pro-life causes, for women empowerment, but you don’t have to hate men in the process. And I love my husband, I respect him; I love my father, I respect him, even though he’s not perfect. But I feel like that that’s really been hijacked.

So when people ask me that question, I think in the true, what initially feminism started out as, yes, I would be considered a feminist in that sense. But what it’s been hijacked, and what it’s become today, I wouldn’t consider myself that type of feminist, the type of feminist that really targets men.

So I say that I still will promote what I believe in, I will still fight for women in any capacity and really for being, I think, a good role model for the younger generations. But I don’t think you have to hate men in the process.

Evans: Anna, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been a pleasure talking with you.

Luna: Thank you so much, you guys.

PODCAST BY

Virginia Allen

Virginia Allen is a news producer for The Daily Signal. She is the co-host of The Daily Signal Podcast and Problematic Women. Send an email to Virginia. Twitter: @Virginia_Allen5.

Lauren Evans

Lauren Evans is the multimedia manager for The Daily Signal and The Heritage Foundation. Send an email to Lauren. Twitter: @laurenelizevans.

A Note for our Readers:

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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.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Revolutionary Act 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.

Stop Forcing People to Wear Masks Over COVID-19 Fears

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Whether masks actually prevent the spread of respiratory infection remains a subject of debate. As recently as March, the US Surgeon General was saying face coverings could actually increase one’s risk of infection.

There’s a famous scene in the movie Fight Club where Tyler Durden is on an airplane thumbing through one of those safety manuals in emergency exit rows.

“An exit door procedure at 30,000 feet,” says Durden (Brad Pitt). “The illusion of safety.”

It’s a memorable scene because it touches on the strange things humans do to make ourselves feel secure in frightening situations. Which brings me to America’s latest fad: wearing masks in public.

Polls show that more than half of Americans are now choosing to wear masks when they go out, presumably to prevent catching or spreading the COVID-19 virus. What one chooses to wear is up to them, of course, but the trend is a bit surprising considering government officials spent months telling Americans not to wear protective face coverings.

“We don’t routinely recommend the use of face masks by the public to prevent respiratory illness,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the Center for the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases said on January 31. “And we certainly are not recommending that at this time for this new virus.”

Throughout February and into March, similar statements were made by numerous other top government officials and agencies.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said “the average American does not need a N95 mask. These are really more for health care providers.” He was echoed by Robert Redfield, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that there “is no role for these masks in the community.” In February, the US Surgeon General chimed in on Twitter, “STOP BUYING MASKS.”

Despite these warnings, the popularity of masks grew. “Maskies”—selfies of people wearing masks—are the latest trend on Instagram, Fast Company reports. They’ve become a symbol and form of expression, a way to show social solidarity and empowerment.

“When everyone is wearing masks, I feel respected,” one woman recently told National Geographic. “The message is: I’m protecting you, you’re protecting me, I can feel safe.”

Feel safe. That’s the key word. Whether masks actually prevent the spread of respiratory infection remains a subject of debate.

There’s a reason public officials made the statements above. An abundance of research shows masks offer little or no protection against infection from respiratory viruses, and some masks can actually increase one’s risk of infection.

A 2011 randomized clinical trial found that medical masks offered no protection at all. A 2015 study concluded rates of infection were especially high in cloth masks, finding particle penetration in nearly 97 percent of them. A 2016 paper that analyzed six clinical studies found that N95 respirator masks fared no better than medical masks in preventing respiratory infection.

As recently as April 7, a paper analyzing data from 15 randomized trials concluded that “compared to no masks there was no reduction of influenza-like illness cases for influenza for masks in the general population, nor in healthcare workers.” Despite the lack of hard empirical evidence, however, the study’s authors recommended the use of masks based on “observational evidence from the previous SARS epidemic.”

Perhaps similar reasoning guided the CDC’s about-face in April when it issued guidance recommending the use of cloth face coverings for healthy individuals (though the World Health Organization still advises against them).

Recommended is the key word here. We’re now in May, a mere two months after federal authorities were imploring Americans to not wear or buy masks, and many people are finding themselves forced to wear masks to do their shopping or even go for a walk.

This month the megastore Costco began demanding that customers wear masks to do their shopping. As a private company, Costco has such a right. But many states in mid April began taking things further, demanding that citizens wear masks to leave their homes. The latest state to join the bandwagon is Massachusetts. The new order requires anyone over the age of two to wear a mask or face covering in public places, even if they are outdoors.

In the span of just two months, we’ve gone from urging people to not buy or wear masks (and warning face coverings could increase the risk of infection) to threatening to fine and jail those who don’t wear them. Americans, understandably, are confused. And it’s not helping.

This week in Michigan, a Family Dollar security guard was killed after refusing to allow a woman’s daughter into the store because she wasn’t wearing a mask. The guard was enforcing an executive order Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed two weeks earlier.

While only those people directly involved in the guard’s death are responsible, such confrontations could be avoided if state governors exercised a little humility and acknowledged that CDC recommendations are not gospel and the department’s conclusions (clearly) are not infallible.

Good ideas generally don’t require force. And the truth is, based on an abundance of medical research and the federal government’s own statements and reports, it’s unclear how effective masks are as a preventive measure against COVID-19 transmission.

Public health aside, there’s no disputing the psychological impact masks have.

“The coronavirus is coming, and we feel rather helpless,” Dr. William Schaffner, Professor of Preventive Medicine at Vanderbilt University, told CNN in March. “By getting masks and wearing them, we move the locus of control somewhat to ourselves.”

In a sense, the mask craze is largely about managing our fears. As my colleague Sean Malone recently observed, when people are afraid they’re much more willing to accept anything they believe might make them a little safer. Even really bad policies and ideas.

The illusion of safety. It’s a powerful thing. For both humans and governments, it would seem.

COLUMN BY

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has appeared in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, and Fox News.

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

Twitter Rolls Out COVID Misinformation Warning Labels. Will They Target Chinese Officials Who Blame US For Outbreak?

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Twitter will slap warning labels and other messages on coronavirus-related content the company deems harmful but perhaps not harmful enough to warrant removal.

The social media company will begin providing additional context and warning messages on some tweets containing disputed or misleading information about the pandemic, Twitter announced in a blog post Monday.

Twitter’s move came as Chinese officials engage in a concerted coronavirus disinformation campaign on the platform.

“Moving forward, we may use these labels and warning messages to provide additional explanations or clarifications in situations where the risks of harm associated with a Tweet are less severe but where people may still be confused or misled by the content,” Twitter noted in the post.

Moderators will filter such content through three categories: misleading information, disputed claims and unverified claims, the announcement noted. Misleading information will carry a label or be outright removed, depending on the severity of the content, while unverified claims will not have any action taken against them. Disputed claims will contain a label or a warning.

“Our teams are using and improving on internal systems to proactively monitor content related to COVID-19. These systems help ensure we’re not amplifying Tweets with these warnings or labels and detecting the high-visibility content quickly,” Twitter’s blog post notes. The company will also rely on “trusted partners to identify content that is likely to result in offline harm.”

Twitter’s Head of Integrity Yoel Roth explained in a Twitter post Monday that the “labels will apply to anyone sharing misleading information that meets the requirements of our policy, including world leaders.” Company spokeswoman Katie Rosborough told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the labels will apply to anyone. 

Twitter revised some of its policies to “protect the public conversation around COVID-19,” according to a March 4 blog post from the company. Advertisements that “opportunistically use the COVID-19 outbreak to target inappropriate ads” are also banned, the March post added.

The tech company, meanwhile, is still refusing to remove a Chinese official’s tweets suggesting the U.S. Army is responsible for injecting coronavirus into Wuhan, China, where experts believe the virus originated. Coronavirus, or COVID-19, has killed more than 280,000 people worldwide.

“When did Patient Zero appear in the United States? How many people are infected? What is the name of the hospital?” Lijian Zhao, deputy director of China’s Foreign Ministry Information Department, said in a March 12 tweet. “It may be that the US military brought the epidemic to Wuhan.”

Zhao added: “America needs to be transparent! The United States owes us an explanation!” Zhao also falsely stated in the tweet that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield was “arrested” before floating the conspiracy theory to his 317,000 followers.

A spokesman told the DCNF on March 13 that the official’s tweets do not violate company policies.

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Cuomo Refers To Wuhan Coronavirus As The ‘European Virus’

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Watchdog Claims Hundreds of California Voters Mailed Two Ballots Each in May 12 Special Elections

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SANTA CLARITA, CA /PRNewswire/ — Hundreds of voters in California’s May 12 Congressional District 25 and State Senate 28 elections appear to have been mailed two or more ballots each, according to Election Integrity Project, California (EIPCa). These special elections were declared as all vote-by-mail by Governor Newsom due to the pandemic. Unfortunately, state VoteCal data show the voter lists for these districts contain hundreds of voters with multiple registrations in their names.

On May 4, EIPCa alerted California’s Secretary of State, the Registrars of Riverside, Los Angeles, and Ventura counties and informed both candidates in each of these closely contested races. No election official has responded to the following EIPCa findings:

  • In Congressional District 25 (CD25), 773 voters appear to have been mailed two or more ballots each. Five voters, if confirmed, were mailed 3 ballots each. These voters have two or more active registrations under the same names, addresses and birthdates. Those at differing addresses have additional matching factors. Persons mailed more than one ballot can easily vote more than once, since the system has them listed as two different voters. In addition, 82 duplicated voters appear to have moved to a different congressional district, retained their CD25 registrations and were mailed CD25 ballots. Also mailed ballots were 54 people who appear to be 105+ years old.
  • In Senate District 28 (SD28), 805 duplicated registrants were apparently mailed two or more ballots, five of which were mailed three. Additionally, 61 duplicated registrants appear to have moved to a different senate district, retained their SD28 registrations and were mailed SD28 ballots.

EIPCa recently reported over 458,000 registrants statewide who have likely died or moved will be mailed ballots in November. An additional 24,000 have two or more registrations and will be mailed two+ ballots each.

“Our organization has been advocating for clean voter lists for ten years. These two elections are examples of what will happen statewide in November unless California’s list is finally cleared of duplicates, deceased, and voters who have moved away,” said EIPCa President Linda Paine.  “The lack of response from election officials underscores their focus on access over integrity. California voters deserve and must demand both.”

Election Integrity Project, California (EIPCa)

The Election Integrity Project® California (EIPCa) is a non-partisan group of U.S. citizen volunteers seeking to fulfill our duty to actively participate in the governing of our state/country by helping to defend the integrity of the voting process that protects our freedoms and way of life. EIPCa volunteers seek to protect our Republic, a government of, by, and for the people by maintaining an active role in that part of government which empowers citizens with our most fundamental right ~ the right to choose our representatives by fair and honest elections.

©All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: There Now Are 1,285 Proven Cases of Voter Fraud in America

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Ilhan Omar Calls DOJ Dropping Flynn Case ‘White Privilege’

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Somali-born Muslim Rep. Ilhan Omar disgustingly — and yet predictably — reacted to news that the Department of Justice is dropping its case against former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn on Thursday by labeling it “white privilege at work.”

Where was Flynn’s white privilege when he was targeted, framed, investigated, fired, coerced into pleading guilty, and had his reputation smeared by Obama-administration Deep State operatives? The only “privilege” Flynn has benefited from by having his case dropped is called “justice.”

On the contrary, Omar has benefited from her Muslim privilege. She has been the center of controversy for a history of anti-Semitic statements, for her open support for sharia law, for alleged immigration fraud, and for her statements whitewashing Islamic terrorism and condemning America.

And yet the race-mongering Omar remains in office, and benefits from the Muslim privilege of dismissing her critics as “Islamophobic.”

Ilhan Omar

37 Known Connections

On March 7, 2019, former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke praised Omar for her repeated expressions of disdain for Israel and the Jewish people. “By Defiance to Z.O.G. [Zionist Occupation Government]” he tweeted, “Ilhan Omar is NOW the most important Member of the US Congress!”

In March 2019 in Los Angeles, Omar was the keynote speaker at a Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) benefit event titled “Advancing Justice, Empowering Valley Muslims.” Sharing the stage with Omar was CAIR-Florida executive director Hassan Shibly, who rejects the notion that Hezbollah and Hamas are terrorist organizations. At the same event, Omar said: “CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people [the 9/11 terrorists] did something, and that all of us [Muslim civilians] were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.” (In fact, CAIR was founded in 1994, not 2001.)

To learn more about Omar, click on her profile link here.

©All rights reserved.

The woman waging war on Big Porn

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Both countries and companies have taken advantage of the misery of the Covid-19 pandemic, the lockdowns, the loneliness and the misery of millions to burnish their image. China has donated masks and ventilators; companies have offered free stuff like online yoga lessons, audiobooks, museum tours, movies and software. Great PR!

But the most audacious offering must be free porn from Pornhub, a website which gets 42 billion visits every year – 120 million a day. Its premium service, normally US $9.99 a month, was free worldwide in April. “With nearly one billion people in lockdown across the world because of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s important that we lend a hand and provide them with an enjoyable way to pass the time,” Pornhub Vice President’s Corey Price explained.

In its charm offensive, Pornhub has also donated tens of thousands of masks in the United States and Europe. But there’s nothing charming about the world’s best-known site for on-line pornography. MercatorNet interviewed Laila Mickelwait, a activist against sex trafficking, about her campaign to take the site down because of its human rights abuses.

You have been campaigning against PornHub, the world’s largest platform for free pornography for years. How does the site work?

Laila Mickelwait: Pornhub is a tube site where users upload pornographic content, much of which consists of actual sexual crimes against women and children. It is the world’s most popular porn website, and hidden in plain site are the horrific torture, rape, abuse and assault of some of the most vulnerable women and children, all for the profit of Pornhub and the pleasure of its users.

What sort of stuff can you see there?

There is a spectrum of sexual crimes that Pornhub profits from and enables on the website– the rape, trafficking and sexual abuse of children; the rape, assault, and trafficking of women; spycam recordings of sex acts and nude girls who don’t know they are being filmed, revenge videos, filmed prostitution, and more.

So who moderates the uploads?

Based on what we know about the egregious crimes on Pornhub, there is a serious question about how Pornhub has enabled this to happen for so long. For example, the Internet Watch Foundation, in only two years investigated and confirmed 118 cases of child sexual abuse on Pornhub, half of which they said were Category A level abuse that includes penetration and/or sadism.

If Pornhub has human moderators, are they viewing the real rape and torture of children and then giving those videos a green light to be uploaded, profited off of, and used as masturbation material for millions upon millions of users?

From what you are saying, the word PornHub is just about synonymous with “exploitation”. Are there any “clean” pornography businesses – without exploitation?

Pornhub is a website that is infested with the real rape and sex trafficking of women and minors. Pornography consumers need to be aware that when they visit Pornhub or any of the other websites that Pornhub’s parent company Mindgeek owns, they are also complicit in these crimes by creating the demand that keeps these websites incredibly profitable for those that own them.

Consumers need to be aware of the role that they play in this mass abuse and they should make the informed choice not to perpetuate these crimes against women and children by visiting Pornhub.

How is your petition going? I understand that hundreds of thousands of people have signed it. What are you attempting to achieve?

I launched the petition on February 10, at the moment we have over 860,000 signatures and counting. The goal is to shut down Pornhub and hold its executives accountable for complicity in the sex trafficking and rape of women and children. (Click here to sign the petition.)

It’s widely believed that watching pornography might be tasteless and embarrassing, but no one gets hurt. Your comments?

We have hard evidence that Pornhub is a website profiting from massive amounts of harm against the most vulnerable in society.

There was recently a 15 year old girl from Florida who was missing for a year and found after 58 videos of her sexual exploitation and rape were found on Pornhub. There was also the story of Rose Kalemba, who at 14 years old was taken at knifepoint, raped for 12 hours and her videos uploaded to Pornhub. Rose says that she begged Pornhub for months to remove the videos of her torture and assault and it wasn’t until she as a teenager posed as a lawyer and threatened legal action, that they finally removed the videos of this child.

Recently a Sunday Times investigation also found “dozens” of illegal exploitation videos on Pornhub within “minutes” including abuse images of a child as young as three years old. Many are deceived into believing that everyone in the videos on Pornhub are “consenting adults” but we know from the evidence that is simply not true.

PornHub seems like a wily antagonist with a powerful legal and public relations department. Do you really think that you can bring it down?

Of course we can shut down Pornhub, because we are strong when we stand up against this giant together.

It is not only myself calling for action. Right now there are almost 1 million other individuals raising their voices with me calling for Pornhub to be shut down and its executives held accountable for enabling and profiting from the rape and trafficking of women and children. We also have 300 of some of the most respected child protection, anti-trafficking and women’s rights organizations around the world endorsing the campaign. Victims are coming forward and politicians in multiple countries are formally demanding federal investigations of Pornhub for complicity in sex trafficking.

This effort to shut down Pornhub and hold its executives accountable is a global movement now, and the tidal wave that is surging will soon gain enough force to accomplish the goal.

How did you get involved in this campaign?

I have spent over a decade combatting sex trafficking and the last eight years investigating the intersection between the pornography industry and sex trafficking. Anyone who researches this issue will end up on Pornhub (on any of the other Mindgeek owned porn-tube sites) because it is the primary way the world is accessing porn today.

What I found out in doing so is that Pornhub is set up for exploitation. Pornhub is a trafficker and pedophile’s paradise and it needs to be shut down.

COLUMN BY

Michael Cook

Michael Cook is the editor of MercatorNet More by Michael Cook.

Laila Mickelwait

Laila Mickelwait is the Director of Abolition for Exodus Cry, the founder of the #Traffickinghub campaign, and the President and Founder of New Reality International. She received her Master of Public… More by Laila Mickelwait.

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

Judicial Watch Sues on Behalf of Daily Caller News Foundation for Dr. Fauci and WHO Communications!

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Washington, DC – Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit on behalf of the Daily Caller News Foundation 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 the World Health Organization (WHO) concerning the novel coronavirus (Daily Caller News Foundation v. U.S. Department Justice (No. 1:20-cv-01149)).

The suit was filed after HHS failed to respond to an 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.

The time period for the request is January 1, 2020 to April 1, 2020.

Additionally, the DCNF requested and was granted expedited processing of its request.

In March 2020, Fauci praised the work of the WHO and their chairman, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, saying: “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, President Trump announced a halt to funding the World Health Organization. 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.

Daily Caller News Foundation Co-Founder and President Neil Patel said: “This virus has killed hundreds of thousands of people and turned the whole world upside down. 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,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “It is of significant public interest to learn what WHO was telling our top medical officials about the coronavirus that originated in China.”

RELATED ARTICLES:

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Watchdog group sues for Fauci, World Health Organization communications Source: The Washington Times

FOIA lawsuit seeks access to documents regarding China and WHO Source: Washington Examiner

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

PODCAST: ‘We Can Protect Lives and Livelihoods,’ Says North Carolina Lt. Gov. Dan Forest

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North Carolina Lt. Gov. Dan Forest thinks his state is ready to reopen. “I believe right now many of our counties could start to open back up and you could start to do that in a safe and healthy way,” Forest, a Republican, says.

The lieutenant governor joins The Daily Signal Podcast to propose how America can begin to reopen at a local level to protect both lives and livelihoods. Plus, he discusses what he experienced traveling through North Carolina the past several weeks, and how he’s been helping those struggling. Listen to the podcast below or read the lightly edited transcript.

We also cover these stories:

  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts coronavirus-related deaths will reach 3,000 per day by June 1.
  • House GOP members are investigating China’s influence on U.S. university research of COVID-19.
  • The Supreme Court broadcasts teleconference arguments, allowing the public to listen in real time for the first time ever.

The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, Apple Podcasts, Pippa, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at letters@dailysignal.com. Enjoy the show!

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 >>

Virginia Allen: I am joined by North Carolina Lt. Gov. Dan Forest. Lieutenant governor, thank you so much for being here.

Lt. Gov. Dan Forest: Virginia, thanks for allowing me to.

Allen: You have made it clear that your greatest concern during CCOVID-19 is helping the people of North Carolina. You’ve personally donated over $200,000 to the people in your state during the pandemic. Can you tell me about some of those people that you’ve helped?

Forest: Well, it was obvious, Virginia, right out of the gate when things started shutting down, that this was going to have devastating effects to people’s livelihoods, to a lot of business owners who, as you well know, and I’m sure you’ve covered them, have poured their life savings and their heart and soul into growing their business, maybe even over decades.

And then you can see how fragile things actually are and how quickly things can turn the wrong direction.

What we decided, really at the beginning, was … we were going to just start spending our time helping people across the state, and that’s what we did.

My wife Alice and I, we’ve spent the last six weeks traveling around the state and just trying to help people where we can.

Sometimes it’s helping a restaurant owner, write him a check, and help them to make their payroll or pay their rent or keep their lights on or even keep their employees fed.

Sometimes their employees have been furloughed and these restaurants are still trying to feed them and their families and it just goes on and on.

I know you’ve heard all the stories, but it’s truly devastating out there. And there’s two sides to this virus, there’s the virus side, which is devastating to a lot of people, and then there’s the economic side, which is devastating.

Allen: Last week you learned about a retired Army officer who is struggling to pay his bills and he was considering selling something very special and valuable to him. Can you tell me a little bit about that Army officer?

Forest: We actually found out about this online and the Bronze Star recipient, he was trying to help his wife keep her business afloat. So he posted online that he wanted to sell his Bronze Star to the highest bidder, which is sad enough in and of itself.

So we contacted him and said, “Listen, we will come and purchase your bronze star from you on one condition: that we can give it back to you at the same time.”

So last week … I went to Winston-Salem and met him and his wife and daughter and purchased his Bronze Star, and then turned around and handed it back to him.

Obviously, people that have put their lives on the line for our nation and earned metals shouldn’t have to be selling their metals in a time of crisis, but like a lot of people, they’ve fallen through the cracks on the bailout programs, the stimulus programs, and all those kinds of things, as you well know.

So, again, just trying to do a little part to help people out, to let people know you care. I think that’s [important] during times like this.

Allen: It’s so important. It really is. And those are the stories I think that just are giving all of us hope right now. To be reminding ourselves that, all right, when you turn on the news it might look bleak, but then, on the other hand, we’re seeing so much generosity of individuals.

I do just want to take a few minutes and talk a little bit about that issue of not only protecting lives but also livelihoods, like you mentioned.

You’ve made it very clear that you think North Carolina needs to begin reopening the state once again, and, of course, this is a big concern as well of The Heritage Foundation … we’ve been having those same discussions with the National Coronavirus Recovery Commission.

What plan are you advocating for in North Carolina to begin reopening the economy?

Forest: Well, the president laid out two platforms, one was state by state and the other was the states have the ability to open up county by county.

Our state is very diverse. Obviously, we have several large cities. The impact of the virus has been felt in those cities in particular, but not quite as heavily in many of the other counties. So we still have many counties that don’t have any deaths.

We have many counties who, I would suppose, if we were getting the correct data from our state, that we would find out that the people that have had the virus have recovered from it.

So the approach that I’ve suggested is the one that the president suggested, too, you can go county by county and open up.

We’re the second-most rural state in the United States of America, even though we have 10.5 million people, and we’re the eighth-largest state. So very diverse in nature and geography and so forth.

I believe right now many of our counties could start to open back up and you could start to do that in a safe and healthy way.

And, Virginia, I’ve said it from the beginning, this is the United States of America, we can protect lives and livelihoods at the same time. And you’ve seen governors across the country doing this.

You have these kind of two schools going on. You have governors who really have the perspective of saying we need to get the economy going, and we’re going to protect the most vulnerable. And then you have those governors who say we’ve got to lock everything down until there’s no other case of coronavirus left—and that’s not a reasonable approach for our country.

Allen: In your mind, how can North Carolina really balance both public health and reopening the economy? Is that kind of held within that county-by-county plan?

Forest: I think you just have to look at the facts here. The statistics line up, really, across the world. We know who the people are that are actually at real risk of this virus. It is the people that are the elderly and those that have immune issues already.

So people that are at risk fall into those categories, and so you can protect those people by quarantining them, having them stay at home for extra periods of time, creating shopping hours for those folks that don’t interfere with other people, creating times at restaurants where those people could actually go and get their food without coming into contact. All these kinds of things.

We know the demographics of the people that are hospitalized and the people that are dying. And I think we need to let the healthy folks get back to their livelihoods and allow freedom to reign again in America.

Personal responsibility and freedom is really important, but the government picking winners and losers in the economy based on their own preferences is, I think, a pretty bad thing.

You look at small-town America, a lot of these shops that exist in small towns have just a handful of visitors a day and you’re saying they can’t remain clean and they can’t social distance, but you’re going to close them down because they’re not essential.

I think every business is able to set those rules for themselves, and then if they don’t, then you come in with the stick. But I think the government should offer the carrot first and assume that personal responsibility is going to rule the day in America.

Allen: When the nation shut down about seven weeks ago, there was still a lot that we didn’t know about COVID-19. What have we learned about the coronavirus since the lockdown? And has that information affected your views?

Forest: I think everybody was probably in the same position. A couple months ago people were fearful and the statistics that people were presuming were 2 million people were going to die in the United States and this thing was going to be devastating.

So from a political leader’s perspective, I don’t blame anybody for any of the decisions they made with a lack of information. I think that is kind of the reactionary approach that people take when mayhem is on the line.

I think what you’ve seen is, again, you have seen the statistics start to tell us who the people are that are being hospitalized, and who the people are that are dying from this, and we know what categories they fit into.

So extra measures taken to test those population. Extra measures taken to screen people going in and out of those populations, of things like nursing homes and in places like that. And extra precautions taken by the business class of folks when they start to reopen again to continue to protect that population.

So we know a lot now. The statistics are really starting to show us who the vulnerable are and who the vulnerable are not. And we can go on about life and livelihood while protecting people at the same time.

Allen: How do you think that the president has handled the situation with COVID-19? And have you and the folks of North Carolina been working with the Trump administration on this?

Forest: Well, I have conversations, obviously, separately from our governor. Our governor is a different party. We don’t really communicate much, which is too bad. I wish that was the case, but it’s just not here.

And so yes, I’ve had conversations with the administration. I asked them a lot of questions. I get feedback. They’re very responsive.

I think the president actually has shown amazing restraint through all this. I think the first thing is he and his team had the foresight to close down travel from China as early as they possibly knew about this, while China was doing the opposite and sending people around the world still.

The president said, “Hey, let’s shut that down.” As you well know, and I’m sure you’ve talked about it a lot, he got criticized heavily for doing that, but that was probably a great major step.

Then after that, Virginia, I think he’s really shown amazing restraint. He has allowed federalism to do its job, allowing the governors to make the decisions for their state, and I think that is really the way it should be.

Again, just like I believe there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach for our counties across our state, there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach for the United States of America either.

So he laid out a framework and said, “Here’s a healthy framework for moving forward and you guys go make the choices.”

Allen: Now we are beginning to see different states, like you say, take different actions.

You know North Carolina has about 11,000 cases compared with a state like Georgia that has over 28,000 or Texas that has over 30,000, but the governors of those states and many others have already begun to reopen their economies.

Do you think that this is wisdom? Should many, many states now be reopening specifically across the South?

Forest: I think they should be. I think we’re doing incredibly well compared to other states our size. If you line us up against the top 10 states, we’re at the bottom of the list for cases and deaths and so forth. So we are doing extremely well in that category.

I think we are in a position to pass through the first gates, and we are not receiving the data from the state that we should be receiving that other states are producing.

I’ve been asking for that for a solid six weeks now. We need to know how many people have recovered from this.

Continuing to count the number of cases and watching that hockey stick go up as you test more and more and more, you’re going to continue to have more cases. You’re going to have more cases until you have a reliable vaccine for this thing, in fact.

So how many people are actively infected with this virus right now is a really important number. How many people have recovered, obviously, is an important number.

But also, we’ve asked for the data surrounding people that have been hospitalized. What’s the exact number of people hospitalized? Not the daily number because that’s not as important as how many people.

And then on the people that have been hospitalized or the people that have died, what’s their exact age, not within a broad range category? What’s their exact age and did they have other complications associated with their situation as well?

They’re just basic questions to help give the kind of data that we need to make clear, intelligent choices in our state about how to protect people and how to move forward at the same time.

Allen: Yeah, absolutely. Well, summer’s right around the corner and, of course, many parts of North Carolina and states all across the country really depend on tourism during the summer to fuel a lot of the business. Are you optimistic that we can reopen our economy in time for summer vacations and trips?

Forest: I’m very optimistic. In fact, I think the people of North Carolina are ready for it. I think the people of North Carolina have done a phenomenal job of making great sacrifices to protect their state and to protect their neighbors and do all the right things. And we’ve seen that across our state.

I happened to be down east a couple of days ago, I guess it was on Friday, Saturday, and there were hundreds of boats out in the water. People were out there, the sun was shining, and it was a beautiful day. It was a warm day.

There are so many people that are just eager to get back about life right now, and I don’t think you can really hold them down. That’s why leadership is tough during these things.

It’s very difficult, and you have these two schools of leadership, one that is kind of the police state that’s going to try to tell everybody what to do every second, but the government is here to protect us, but not to run and control our lives. And that’s really, really important.

We have to make sure that when we come through this thing, we learn a lot of lessons.

I think the biggest lesson that we’re going to learn through this is how do we protect our Constitution and our constitutional freedoms as we move out of this and make sure that we don’t move into a police state mentality every time something starts to go down in our country?

So that’s going to be a very tough one to navigate and I’m sure it will play out in the elections coming up in November.

Allen: Absolutely. Well, you’ve been serving as lieutenant governor since 2013. You have certainly witnessed a lot of policy and political changes over the past seven years. From where you sit in a place of leadership, how have you seen America change over the past several years?

Forest: Oh, boy, I think it’s actually been quite drastic. I think that this whole notion of identity politics and dividing people into identity politics subgroups out there and then using fear to divide and separate is a dangerous thing. I think we’ve seen that over the last handful of years especially.

I’m hoping that one of the things that usually happens during a time of disaster, whether it’s a natural disaster or something like this, is people come together and they get unified.

I think that we have a lot of work to do in America to unify people and unite people, and we even see different schools during a pandemic.

You kind of have those that say, “At all costs, stay home and stay locked down.” And they cross all political spectrums and ideologies.

And then you have people that say, “Let’s get back to work, let’s get the economy going.” And they cross all spectrums and ideologies.

So it’s not just a right-versus-left kind of thing. So it’d be very interesting to see how that unity plays out as we go forward.

I think we can have empathy and compassion for both the sides of this challenge that I mentioned earlier. And we should have empathy and compassion for it.

Again, I think protecting our freedoms based on our constitutional ideas is the most important thing we can do going forward.

Allen: Yeah, absolutely. What policy issues do you feel you’ve been most proud to play a role in implementing in North Carolina?

Forest: We do a lot of policy work behind the scenes as lieutenant governor. I preside over the Senate. I don’t have the opportunity to actually put my name on a lot of policy, but we have a lot of friends in the House, a lot of friends in the Senate, and we write a lot of policy. So it’s really across the board.

I spend a lot of my time in education. So I’m really proud of a lot of things we’re doing in education to move to competency-based education.

We’re the first state in the nation to have every single classroom connected to high-speed broadband and providing the kinds of access and technology, especially to people who haven’t had it before across our state, that’s been important to me.

Human trafficking, we’ve spent a lot of time on the human trafficking issue. We were No. 6 in the nation for human trafficking in our country, on the bad side, not on the good side. So we have a lot of work to do there, and we passed some really good bills to help push that forward.

I think that I could go on, but there’s a lot of things that we do at the small level as lieutenant governor that I’m very proud of and we have a great team.

Allen: Lieutenant governor, we certainly thank you for your service to our country and we just really appreciate your time today.

Forest: Thank you, Virginia, for having me on. And thanks to Heritage for all the great work you do to protect freedom in our country.

PODCAST BY

Virginia Allen

Virginia Allen is a news producer for The Daily Signal. She is the co-host of The Daily Signal Podcast and Problematic Women. Send an email to Virginia. Twitter: @Virginia_Allen5.

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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.

The End of ‘Believe All Women’

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Editor’s note: The media’s double standard when it comes to sexual assault allegations is once again in the spotlight. Until very recently, there had been little media attention paid to an accusation of sexual assault against former Vice President Joe Biden. (Biden denies he assaulted Tara Reade, a former aide to Biden.) Just last year, the media similarly was largely quiet about an allegation of sexual assault against another liberal politician, Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax.

But it’s not just the media. In stark contrast to the “believe all women” mantra heard ad nauseam when Justice Brett Kavanaugh faced allegations of sexual assault, liberal icons are now stepping up in support of Biden, effectively admitting they don’t “believe all women.”

So we’re republishing this article from 2019 that looked at the hypocrisy of the left on this topic of sexual assault.

Feminists haven’t been this silent since the Bill Clinton years.

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 >>

Vanessa Tyson came forward Wednesday to accuse Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of sexually assaulting her during the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004, saying in a statement that “What began as consensual kissing quickly turned into a sexual assault.”

Tyson, now a politics professor at Scripps College in California, says she had accompanied Fairfax to his hotel room.

“His hand was holding down my neck, and he was much stronger than me,” she recalls, and he forced her to perform a sexual act.

“I cannot believe, given my obvious state of distress, that Mr. Fairfax thought this forced sexual act was consensual,” Tyson, 42, writes in the statement released by her law firm, Katz, Marshall & Banks, the same firm that represented Christine Blasey Ford amid her accusations against Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation process.

Fairfax, 39, denies any sexual assault occurred—and has hired the same law firm Kavanaugh used, Wilkinson Walsh + Eskovitz.

So far, there’s been an eerie silence.

No sexual assault survivors have confronted lawmakers in elevators. No protesters have waited for lawmakers at airports, and, while filming, tried to talk to them about sexual assault. No women have donned the Pilgrim-esque “Handmaid’s Tale” costumes meant to show lack of sexual autonomy and appeared in the Virginia State Capitol. No protests have occurred, and on social media, there’s a notable absence of cries to “believe all women.”

Apparently, if you accuse a Democrat, “believe all women” doesn’t apply.

Of course, Tyson, who calls herself “a proud Democrat,” just released her statement. And one Democrat freshman congresswoman, Rep. Jennifer Wexton of Virginia, has said she believes her.

But even if the “believe all women” crowd does eventually end up supporting Tyson, the pause is telling—because it reveals that the left never really believed in believing all women.

Because if it did, it wouldn’t need time to weigh Tyson’s accusations vs. Fairfax’s denials. (Or more cynically, time to weigh whether believing Tyson is worth the cost of pushing out the pro-abortion, Planned Parenthood-endorsed Fairfax.)

Like many Americans, I was troubled when Ford accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault. I was glad to see the Senate Judiciary Committee took Ford’s allegations seriously, investigated them, and ultimately gave Ford a hearing with questioning on the Republican side done by an experienced sex-crimes prosecutor. I was likewise glad the Senate Judiciary Committee researched two further claims of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh.

It’s absolutely true that when a woman makes a sexual assault allegation, she should be taken seriously, particularly given that she has put her own name and reputation on the line—as well as come forward knowing that she’ll likely face significant political vitriol from supporters of her alleged attacker.

And I would hope that partisans on both sides would do their best to wait for the evidence, and not base their sentiments on whether the alleged attacker is one of their guys or not.

But “take seriously” is a very different standard from “believe all women.”

“Believe all women” reduces every woman to some kind of inane idiot, unable to lie even if she wanted to. It assumes no woman has ever gotten confused or been mistaken about the exact circumstances surrounding a trauma.

And it’s also certainly not a standard the left applied before Christine Blasey Ford, as Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, and others can attest.

Unfortunately, by politicizing the issue of sexual assault, the left has distracted us from the real work that needs to be done.

What can the U.S. do to help ensure any woman who experiences sexual assault is best equipped to get justice against her perpetrator? Can police officers be better trained to help a traumatized woman when she comes to make a report? Are these cases being prosecuted in the best way, consistently?

Are there steps we as a culture can take to help ensure women aren’t put in vulnerable positions? Given the role of hotel rooms in some of the #MeToo scenarios and now allegedly in the Fairfax case as well, can we make it completely socially and professionally inappropriate for any man to ask a female colleague to come up to a hotel room, no matter the pretext? (Of course, no woman who does go up to a hotel room is in any way to blame for her assault—the only person to blame in any sexual assault is the attacker.)

Do we try to put women on a more equal footing with men by encouraging women who are interested to carry a firearm?

Kimberly Corban, who says she was sexually assaulted while in college, now advocates guns as a way for women to protect themselves. “After [the attack], I started taking my Second Amendment rights very seriously because I knew that that was going to be the only equalizer and the one thing I could train and do for myself,” Corban told The Daily Signal in 2016.

“Believe all women” never made sense as a standard. But the left’s inconsistent application of it makes clear that it’s not women liberals care about, it’s the right to abortion.

COMMENTARY BY

Katrina Trinko

Katrina Trinko is editor-in-chief of The Daily Signal and co-host of The Daily Signal Podcast. Send an email to Katrina. Twitter: .

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden to 14-yo Girl: You’re well-endowed

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.