As President Trump has often said, “They’re not after me. They’re after you.”
Jack Smith has admitted to violating the same law used against 6 January 2021 defendants
The American Thinker points out how Jack Smith not only jacked with the evidence at the center of the classified documents case against President Trump — he also committed Brady violations in the cases against those charged on 6 January 2021.
Special Prosecutor Jack Smith has just admitted that he and other DOJ and FBI minions manipulated documentary evidence underlying the Mar-a-Lago case against Donald Trump. Everybody from Judge Aileen Cannon on down realizes this is bad. Still, I wonder how many people have noticed that Smith has admitted to doing what the J6 defendants are accused and have been convicted of doing: Violating 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2). The statutory charges against the J6 defendants are a specious abuse of the law but they perfectly fit Smith’s admitted conduct.
One of the main tools in the DOJ arsenal against anyone near the Capitol on January 6, 2021, is § 1512(c)(2), which the DOJ claims means imprisonment for a person who “corruptly…obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding…” That is what the DOJ claims happened when ordinary Americans (a) exercised their rights of free speech and (b) usually inadvertently, entered onto Capitol land after masked agitators had removed “no trespassing” signage and fencing and after the Capitol police had opened the building’s doors. The penalty is fines and/or imprisonment, with the latter potentially as long as 20 years.
The Supreme Court, though, is hearing Fischer v. United States, which sees one of the DOJ’s victims contesting the DOJ’s assertion about § 1512(c)(2)’s applicability to the J6. The argument is that § 1512(c)(2) manifestly applies to a very narrow fact set; namely, corruptly interfering with evidence in an official investigation. Heck, it’s in the statute’s title: “Tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant.” Every section of the statute manifestly deals solely with efforts to destroy or otherwise manipulate evidence in a matter intended to lead to a criminal indictment.
Nevertheless, to imprison ordinary Americans, the DOJ came down hard on subsection (c)(2) of the statute because it contains the phrase “official proceeding.”
(c) Whoever corruptly—
[snip]
(2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.But while the DOJ is focusing everyone’s attention on subsection (2), they’re ignoring subsection (1):
(c) Whoever corruptly—
(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding…Does that remind you of anything? It certainly does me.
It reminds me of Smith’s admission to Judge Aileen Cannon about his and his minions’ handling of the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago, documents that then served as the basis for his decision to indict Donald Trump. (Ignore, for now, the fact that Trump, as president of the United States, had plenary power to do as he would with national security information, unhindered either by prior Executive Orders, administrative regulations, or legislation. But back to Smith’s admission:
Prosecutors admitted in a court filing on Friday that “there are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.” The prosecutors had previously told the court that the documents were “in their original, intact form as seized.
As any litigator knows, maintaining documents in the order in which they’re seized or produced is enormously important. That’s because order itself provides important information about the chronology of events or a person’s intent or innocence. It’s also of particular concern in this case because these documents were apparently packed by the General Services Administration, which then told Trump to pick them up.
In addition, it’s now beyond question that the DOJ doctored the crime scene photos it publicized to the world to “prove” that Donald Trump had allegedly violated national security laws. (See my disclaimer above about Trump’s immunity from such a claim.)
Thus, we have two known instances in which the DOJ altered records, documents, and objects. Moreover, the staged Mar-a-Lago photo indicates that this was done to harm President Trump. That strongly implies both corruption and intention, two elements of a criminal cause of action.
(Read the closing argument at the American Thinker)
So, the same regime that will put a serial perjurer on the stand will also put a serial Brady violator in prosecution
Do you see a pattern here? Might this be a pattern of blatant disregard of the law?
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And it does not just involve accusing you of crimes
It also involves the way Joe has gone about minimizing the conservative voice
PJ Media explores something that has kept the proof of Joe Biden’s cheating out of the public conversation: both censorship the the Big Tech giants and additional censorship forced by Joe Biden.
When Presidentish Joe Biden took office — and I do mean “took” — more than three years ago, every reader here knew we were in for bad times.
It used to be when we lost an election, we had to suffer through four or (Lord help us) eight years of bad policy — inflation, overspending, overregulation, and maybe a small war or two. Now, we get four years or (seriously, Lord, we could use some help here) eight years of chipping away at the foundations of the Republic.
New details have emerged that the Biden administration planted dynamite in the hole created by Barack Obama.
Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released an 800-page report that reads like Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”
Take a look:
- In March 2021, an Amazon employee emailed others within the company about the reason for the Amazon bookstore’s new content moderation policy change: “[T]he impetus for this request is criticism from the Biden Administration about sensitive books we’re giving prominent placement to.”
- In March 2021, just one day prior to a scheduled call with the White House, an Amazon employee explained how changes to Amazon’s bookstore policies were being applied “due to criticism from the Biden people.”
- In July 2021, when Facebook executive Nick Clegg asked a Facebook employee why the company censored the man-made theory of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the employee responded: “Because we were under pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more. . . . We shouldn’t have done it.”
YouTube “shared with the Biden White House a new ‘policy proposal’ to censor more content criticizing the safety and efficacy of vaccines, asking for ‘any feedback’ the White House could provide before the policy had been finalized.” Someone at the Biden White House got back to YouTube with, “at first blush, seems like a great step.”
One Facebook executive’s email revealed that the company was brainstorming “additional policy levers we can pull to be more aggressive against . . . misinformation. This is stemming from the continued criticism of our approach from the [Biden] administration.”
Facebook’s internal communications also revealed that “The Surgeon General wants us to remove true information about [COVID vaccine] side effects,” and, of course, Facebook eventually complied. Mark Zuckerberg tried to resist at least at one point, emailing that “when we compromise our standards due to an administration in either direction, we’ll often regret it.”
But the White House applied more pressure, and Zuckerberg caved.
There’s a word for using government power to silence debate: censorship. And it’s as American as serfdom, haggis, seppuku.
When I started writing for PJ Media, it was with the hopes of addressing a wider audience. Unofficial censorship from Big Tech — now made into official censorship by the Biden administration — changed that. Instead of broadcasting to a wide audience, we increasingly rely on narrowcasting to a cadre of dedicated VIP subscribers.
(Read more at PJ Media)
In the past, every American had a voice. It wasn’t just the guy in the Oval Office and a few executives of royal seed in various board rooms.
In the past, we had something called the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press. However, that was before social media giants could decide who has a voice and who does not.
Of course, as the term “shadow banning” implies, this type of censorhsip can be done from the shadows and might go hardly noticed by those who get banned (unless they take some effort to see whether their voice has been minimized).
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Neither a barrier against the swamp nor a declared enemy: the swamp sets itself up in the background
The uniparty shows “rare unity” in killing the motion by Marjorie Taylor Green to oust Johnson
The Hill tries to hide its bias as it reports the failure of the motion by Marjorie Taylor Green.
The House voted overwhelmingly to protect Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) from a conservative coup Wednesday, torpedoing an effort by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) to oust the GOP leader from the top job for his willingness to cut deals with Democrats on weighty legislation.
The chamber voted 359-43-7 on a motion to table, or dismiss, Greene’s motion-to-vacate resolution, preventing the removal proposal from being considered.
In an extraordinary move in the deeply divided House, 163 Democrats — more than three-quarters of their caucus — voted to keep Johnson in power. And in a demonstration of the GOP’s support for Johnson, only 11 conservative Republicans voted to send Greene’s motion to the floor. The chamber erupted in boos on both sides of the aisle when Greene began reading her resolution.
(Read more at The Hill)
Why would Democrats come to the aid of Mike Johnson?
While I am no supporter or detractor of Mike Johnson, let me list the reasons why Democrats might support the current speakership of Mike Johnson:
- As long as the speakership remains vacant, no spending bills (even continuing resolutions) can be passed in the House
- As stated above, nothing gets through the House. Therefore, the recent tactic of passing a bill through the Senate and then rushing it through the House would not work.
- With the House shut down, more focus would fall on the failings of the Senate and the President (both under Democrat control).
- By saving Johnson now, a surprise turnover of the House as the November elections near would allow the Democrats and the allies in the press to conceal their actions.
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