FBI Another Example of Government Total Transformation

What Happened to the FBI?

10/27/2016 - Judge Andrew Napolitano Townhall.com

When FBI Director James Comey announced on July 5 that the Department of Justice would not seek the indictment of Hillary Clinton for failure to safeguard state secrets related to her email use while she was secretary of state, he both jumped the gun and set in motion a series of events that surely he did not intend. Was his hand forced by the behavior of FBI agents who wouldn't take no for an answer? Did he let the FBI become a political tool?

Here is the back story.

The FBI began investigating the Clinton email scandal in the spring of 2015, when The New York Times revealed Clinton's use of a private email address for her official governmental work and the fact that she did not preserve the emails on State Department servers, contrary to federal law. After an initial collection of evidence and a round of interviews, agents and senior managers gathered in the summer of 2015 to discuss how to proceed. It was obvious to all that a prima-facie case could be made for espionage, theft of government property and obstruction of justice charges. The consensus was to proceed with a formal criminal investigation.

Six months later, the senior FBI agent in charge of that investigation resigned from the case and retired from the FBI because he felt the case was going "sideways"; that's law enforcement jargon for "nowhere by design." John Giacalone had been the chief of the New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., field offices of the FBI and, at the time of his "sideways" comment, was the chief of the FBI National Security Branch.

The reason for the "sideways" comment must have been Giacalone's realization that DOJ and FBI senior management had decided that the investigation would not work in tandem with a federal grand jury. That is nearly fatal to any government criminal case. In criminal cases, the FBI and the DOJ cannot issue subpoenas for testimony or for tangible things; only grand juries can.

Giacalone knew that without a grand jury, the FBI would be toothless, as it would have no subpoena power. He also knew that without a grand jury, the FBI would have a hard time persuading any federal judge to issue search warrants. A judge would perceive the need for search warrants to be not acute in such a case because to a judge, the absence of a grand jury can only mean a case is "sideways" and not a serious investigation.

As the investigation dragged on in secret and Donald Trump simultaneously began to rise in the Republican presidential primaries, it became more apparent to Giacalone's successors that the goal of the FBI was to exonerate Clinton, not determine whether there was enough evidence to indict her. In late spring of this year, agents began interviewing the Clinton inner circle.

When Clinton herself was interviewed on July 2 -- for only four hours, during which the interviewers seemed to some in the bureau to lack aggression, passion and determination -- some FBI agents privately came to the same conclusion as their former boss: The case was going sideways.

A few determined agents were frustrated by Clinton's professed lack of memory during her interview and her oblique reference to a recent head injury she had suffered as the probable cause of that. They sought to obtain her medical records to verify the gravity of her injury and to determine whether she had been truthful with them. They prepared the paperwork to obtain the records, only to have their request denied by Director Comey himself on July 4.

Then some agents did the unthinkable; they reached out to colleagues in the intelligence community and asked them to obtain Clinton's medical records so they could show them to Comey. We know that the National Security Agency can access anything that is stored digitally, including medical records. These communications took place late on July 4.

When Comey learned of these efforts, he headed them off the next morning with his now infamous news conference, in which he announced that Clinton would not be indicted because the FBI had determined that her behavior, though extremely careless, was not reckless, which is the legal standard in espionage cases. He then proceeded to recount the evidence against her. He did this, no doubt, to head off the agents who had sought the Clinton medical records, whom he suspected would leak evidence against her.

Three months later -- and just weeks before Clinton will probably be elected president -- we have learned that President Barack Obama regularly communicated with Clinton via her personal email servers about matters that the White House considered classified. That means that he lied when he told CBS News that he learned of the Clinton servers when the rest of us did.

We also learned this week that Andrew McCabe, Giacalone's successor as head of the FBI Washington field office and presently the No. 3 person in the FBI, is married to a woman to whom the Clinton money machine in Virginia funneled about $675,000 in lawful campaign funds for a failed 2015 run for the Virginia Senate. Comey apparently saw no conflict or appearance of impropriety in having the person in charge of the Clinton investigation in such an ethically challenged space.

Why did this case go sideways?

Did President Obama fear being a defense witness at Hillary Clinton's criminal trial? Did he so fear being succeeded in office by Donald Trump that he ordered the FBI to exonerate Clinton, the rule of law be damned? Did the FBI lose its reputation for fidelity to law, bravery under stress and integrity at all times?

This is not your grandfather's FBI -- or your father's. It is the Obama FBI.

Example of An Election in Chaos

An Establishment in Panic

10/21/2016 - Pat Buchanan Townhall.com

Pressed by moderator Chris Wallace as to whether he would accept defeat should Hillary Clinton win the election, Donald Trump replied, "I will tell you at the time. I'll keep you in suspense."

"That's horrifying," said Clinton, setting off a chain reaction on the post-debate panels with talking heads falling all over one another in purple-faced anger, outrage and disbelief. "Disqualifying!" was the cry on Clinton cable.

"Trump Won't Say If He Will Accept Election Results," wailed The New York Times. "Trump Won't Vow to Honor Results," ran the banner in The Washington Post.

But what do these chattering classes and establishment bulletin boards think the Donald is going to do if he falls short of 270 electoral votes?

Lead a Coxey's Army on Washington and burn it down as British General Robert Ross did in August 1814, while "Little Jemmy" Madison fled on horseback out the Brookville Road?

What explains the hysteria of the establishment? In a word, fear.

The establishment is horrified at the Donald's defiance because, deep within its soul, it fears that the people for whom Trump speaks no longer accept its political legitimacy or moral authority.

It may rule and run the country, and may rig the system through mass immigration and a mammoth welfare state so that Middle America is never again able to elect one of its own. But that establishment, disconnected from the people it rules, senses, rightly, that it is unloved and even detested.

Having fixed the future, the establishment finds half of the country looking upon it with the same sullen contempt that our Founding Fathers came to look upon the overlords Parliament sent to rule them.

Establishment panic is traceable to another fear: Its ideology, its political religion, is seen by growing millions as a golden calf, a 20th-century god that has failed.

Trump is "talking down our democracy," said a shocked Clinton.

After having expunged Christianity from our public life and public square, our establishment installed "democracy" as the new deity, at whose altars we should all worship. And so our schools began to teach.

Half a millennia ago, missionaries and explorers set sail from Spain, England and France to bring Christianity to the New World. Today, Clintons, Obamas and Bushes send soldiers and secularist tutors to "establish democracy" among the "lesser breeds without the Law."

Unfortunately, the natives, once democratized, return to their roots and vote for Hezbollah, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, using democratic processes and procedures to re-establish their true God. And Allah is no democrat.

By suggesting he might not accept the results of a "rigged election" Trump is committing an unpardonable sin. But this new cult, this devotion to a new holy trinity of diversity, democracy and equality, is of recent vintage and has shallow roots.

For none of the three -- diversity, equality, democracy -- is to be found in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers or the Pledge of Allegiance. In the pledge, we are a republic.

When Ben Franklin, emerging from the Philadelphia convention, was asked by a woman what kind of government they had created, he answered, "A republic, if you can keep it."

Among many in the silent majority, Clintonian democracy is not an improvement upon the old republic; it is the corruption of it. Consider: Six months ago, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the Clinton bundler, announced that by executive action he would convert 200,000 convicted felons into eligible voters by November. If that is democracy, many will say, to hell with it.

And if felons decide the electoral votes of Virginia, and Virginia decides who is our next U.S. president, are we obligated to honor that election?

In 1824, Gen. Andrew Jackson ran first in popular and electoral votes. But, short of a majority, the matter went to the House. There, Speaker Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams delivered the presidency to Adams -- and Adams made Clay secretary of state, putting him on the path to the presidency that had been taken by Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Adams himself.

Were Jackson's people wrong to regard as a "corrupt bargain" the deal that robbed the general of the presidency?

The establishment also recoiled in horror from Milwaukee Sheriff Dave Clarke's declaration that it is now "torches and pitchforks time."

Yet, some of us recall another time, when Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote in "Points of Rebellion":  "We must realize that today's Establishment is the new George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do not know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution."

Baby-boomer radicals loved it, raising their fists in defiance of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. But now that it is the populist-nationalist right that is moving beyond the niceties of liberal democracy to save the America that they love, elitist enthusiasm for "revolution" seems more constrained.

What goes around comes around.

Lawlessness Leads to More Lawlessness

Our Lawless Ruling Elites

10/11/2016 - Robert Knight Townhall.com

Corruption and abuses of power by America’s ruling class are becoming such everyday occurrences that they leave one wondering if there is any bottom to it.

No matter how outrageous the power overreach, it just keeps happening without apparent consequences to the guilty.

Several years ago, we learned that the Obama Administration had transformed the Internal Revenue Service into a wrecking ball against the tea parties and other conservative groups.  Congress held hearings, vowing to punish the guilty. 

Nobody was punished. And it’s happening again.  Some tea parties still don’t have their tax-exempt status six years after they applied. 

Meanwhile, President Obama just committed the nation to an international climate change treaty that he did not submit to the Senate for ratification.  As before, he magically transformed a treaty into a one-man executive “agreement.” You know, like a king would issue.   

When he jammed the Iranian nuclear deal for dollars down the country’s throat, he at least threw a fig leaf over it. In a baffling move, the Senate had agreed that it would take a two-thirds majority to reject the pact. But the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote for approval, not rejection.  It’s a far higher bar, for good reason.  This upside-down, get-around-the-Constitution measure was sponsored by a Republican senator from Tennessee. Why?

Lawlessness at the top abounds.  Last week, we learned that Hillary Clinton’s aides, Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, who were among five people given immunity by the Justice Department in the Servergate scandal, were in charge of deciding which emails on Hillary’s compromised server to turn over to the State Department.  Also, they got guarantees that their laptops would not be searched after Jan. 31, 2015.  Now for the kicker, as related by the Wall Street Journal:

“More amazing, Justice agreed to destroy both laptops after examining them. Think about that:  Before the authorities knew what was on the laptops, they agreed to destroy potential evidence in their investigation.”

Do you think for a nanosecond that federal authorities would be this accommodating to you if you ran afoul of one of the tens of thousands of laws to which we’re all subject?

I didn’t think so.

Despite all the talk about “rising inequality” in America, the real gap is not so much income disparity. It’s the neon-bright double standard in terms of laws, lawlessness and cultural values.  The ruling class can do or say anything and go its merry way, while the average American finds himself in the grip of an ever-tightening octopus of official and unofficial sanctions for insufficient fealty to the opinions of our decadent ruling class.

In an essay for the Claremont Review of Books entitled “After the Republic,” Angelo Codevilla makes the case that the ruling elites have been spectacularly successful at minimizing the clout of the nation’s “deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton characterized Trump supporters. They have replaced personal autonomy and traditional values with top-down cultural and political mandates.  The courts in particular have done enormous damage to the idea that Americans still have a say in their own governance, sweeping aside laws and replacing them with edicts based on their own prejudices.

“Decisions and administrative practice have divided Americans into ‘protected classes’—possessed of special privileges and immunities—and everybody else,” Dr. Codevilla writes. “Equality before the law and equality of opportunity are memories.”

He offers telling examples:  “Who, a generation ago, could have guessed that careers and social standing could be ruined by stating the fact that the paramount influence on the earth’s climate is the sun, that its output of energy varies and with it the climate? Who, a decade ago, could have predicted that stating that marriage is the union of a man and a woman would be treated as a culpable sociopathy, or just yesterday that refusing to let certifiably biological men into women’s bathrooms would disqualify you from mainstream society?

“In today’s America, a network of executive, judicial, bureaucratic, and social kinship channels bypasses the sovereignty of citizens.”

Another way to bypass the people is to devalue their votes by making elections more vulnerable to vote fraud. 

Over the past two weeks, thanks to an American Civil Rights Union lawsuit, we learned that thousands of non-citizens are registered to vote in Philadelphia. We also learned that more than a thousand non-citizens were registered to vote in recent elections in a handful of Virginia’s 95 counties and 38 independent cities. 

If you don’t think this matters, bear in mind that Democrat Mark Herring beat Republican Mark Obenshain for the office of Virginia attorney general in 2013 by 165 votes out of 2.2 million cast.

The ruling elites tell us that vote fraud is a myth and that voter photo ID laws, which secure honest elections, are racist.  Of course, the same elites tell us that we’re “deplorables” if we don’t welcome biological males into our daughters’ restrooms and locker rooms or support unlimited immigration and confiscatory taxation.

I’d like to think the American people have finally had it and are on to the elites’ game.

Somebody pass out the pitchforks.

Illegal Immigration In Every Facet of Our Lives

Will Illegal Foreign Voters Steal the Election?

10/5/2016 - Michelle Malkin Townhall.com

"It could all come down to Colorado."

That's the latest conventional wisdom from presidential poll watchers. But it may not be legal American citizens in my adopted home state who choose the next commander in chief.

Instead, it could very well be foreign noncitizens voting illegally in the Rocky Mountains -- and in other crucial swing states -- who seal our country's fate.

Former Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler identified nearly 5,000 noncitizens in Colorado who voted in the 2010 general election. Gessler's office uncovered upwards of 12,000 noncitizens registered to vote. Liberal groups who oppose stronger election system protections attacked him for trying to verify citizenship status -- because God forbid public officials sworn to uphold the rule of law actually do anything to enhance the integrity of our election system!

Compounding the problem: The militant immigration expansionist group Mi Familia Vota, connected with the Service Employees International Union, has ramped up its efforts in swing states to facilitate naturalization and registration of Latino voters who will promote the open-borders agenda at the polls.

Another rare defender of American sovereignty, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, fought in court for his state's right to require citizenship documents from people who register to vote at motor vehicle offices. Last month, a federal appeals court struck down the Kansas law despite the U.S. Constitution's conferral of responsibility for determining who may vote to states.

In a scene straight out of "Alice in Wonderland," Kobach faced a contempt hearing for battling against those who hold contempt for truly free and fair elections. He was forced to sign an agreement with the ACLU allowing more than 18,000 motor-voter registrants to cast ballots this November while litigation continues.

Last year, undercover investigative journalist James O'Keefe and his Project Veritas team blew the whistle on North Carolina political operatives who encouraged people to vote even if they were noncitizens. Like Kobach, O'Keefe endures attacks on his efforts to ensure clean elections by grievance-mongers screaming about phony voter "disenfranchisement." Never mind that a nonpartisan study in 2014 from Old Dominion University concluded "that 6.4 percent of noncitizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of noncitizens voted in 2010."

Put on your shocked faces: These illegal noncitizen voters overwhelmingly supported Democrats. And their votes were enough to tilt the presidential election results in North Carolina to President Obama, along with handing over "Democratic victories in congressional races including a critical 2008 Senate race (Al Franken's victory in Minnesota) that delivered for Democrats a 60-vote filibuster-proof majority in the Senate."

The ACLU and other left-wing groups sabotaging voter integrity laws see no voter fraud, hear no voter fraud and speak no voter fraud. Thanks to their efforts, voter ID laws have been tossed in Texas, Wisconsin and North Carolina. Committed to flooding the voting rolls with every last potential Democrat constituent, their operational motto is: No unqualified voter left behind.

But J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department election lawyer in the Voting Rights Section, has exposed the systemic assault on the election process at every level by activist groups funded by liberal billionaire George Soros, including:

--Blocking citizenship verification.

--Automatic voter registration of welfare recipients without local verification checks.

--Massive foreign language ballot expansion.

--Obstruction of efforts to include state qualification instructions on voter registration forms.

This past week, the Public Interest Law Foundation uncovered thousands of foreign aliens registered to vote in swing states Virginia and Pennsylvania thanks to the federal Motor Voter law. It's the tip of the iceberg because the studies include just a small sample of counties.

Oh, Virginia voters, you'll be thrilled to know that your top election officials are now trying to cover up the true extent of the scandal. PILF noted that the commissioner of the Virginia Department of Elections issued a written guidance to local election officials instructing them "not to respond to our requests for records pertaining to non-citizen voters."

In Pennsylvania, election officials are so apathetic and incompetent that even when aliens begged to get off the voter rolls because they had never registered to vote in the first place, they were ignored.

Catherine Engelbrecht of election integrity activist group True the Vote is right: "Just voting isn't enough."

Keeping this republic depends on the vigilance of citizens committed to an almost impossible task these days: Making American elections American again.

Pathetic - Outsourcing America's Economic Future

Trump Right on Trade Predators

9/30/2016 - Pat Buchanan Townhall.com

Is America still a serious nation?

Consider. While U.S. elites were denouncing Donald Trump as unfit to serve for having compared Miss Universe 1996 to "Miss Piggy" of "The Muppets," the World Trade Organization was validating the principal plank of his platform.

America's allies are cheating and robbing her blind on trade. According to the WTO, Britain, France, Spain, Germany and the EU pumped $22 billion in illegal subsidies into Airbus to swindle Boeing out of the sale of 375 commercial jets.      

Subsidies to the A320 caused lost sales of 271 Boeing 737s, writes journalist Alan Boyle. Subsidies for planes in the twin-aisle market cost the sale of 50 Boeing 767s, 777s and 787s. And subsidies to the A380 cost Boeing the sale of 54 747s.      These represent crippling losses for Boeing, a crown jewel of U.S. manufacturing and a critical component of our national defense.       

Earlier, writes Boyle, the WTO ruled that, "without the subsidies, Airbus would not have existed ... and there would be no Airbus aircraft on the market."       

In "The Great Betrayal" in 1998, I noted that in its first 25 years the socialist cartel called Airbus Industrie "sold 770 planes to 102 airlines but did not make a penny of profit."       

Richard Evans of British Aerospace explained: "Airbus is going to attack the Americans, including Boeing, until they bleed and scream." And another executive said, "If Airbus has to give away planes, we will do it."       

When Europe's taxpayers objected to the $26 billion in subsidies Airbus had gotten by 1990, German aerospace coordinator Erich Riedl was dismissive, "We don't care about criticism from small-minded pencil-pushers." This is the voice of economic nationalism. Where is ours?       

After this latest WTO ruling validating Boeing's claims against Airbus, the Financial Times is babbling of the need for "free and fair" trade, warning against a trade war.      

But is "trade war" not a fair description of what our NATO allies have been doing to us by subsidizing the cartel that helped bring down Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas and now seeks to bring down Boeing?

Our companies built the planes that saved Europe in World War II and sheltered her in the Cold War. And Europe has been trying to kill those American companies.       

Yet even as Europeans collude and cheat to capture America's markets in passenger jets, Boeing itself, wrote Eamonn Fingleton in 2014, has been "consciously cooperating in its own demise."       

By Boeing's own figures, writes Fingleton, in the building of its 787 Dreamliner, the world's most advanced commercial jet, the "Japanese account for a stunning 35 percent of the 787's overall manufacture, and that may be an underestimate."       

"Much of the rest of the plane is also made abroad ... in Italy, Germany, South Korea, France, and the United Kingdom."       

The Dreamliner "flies on Mitsubishi wings. These are no ordinary wings: they constitute the first extensive use of carbon fiber in the wings of a full-size passenger plane. In the view of many experts, by outsourcing the wings Boeing has crossed a red line." Mitsubishi, recall, built the Zero, the premier fighter plane in the Pacific in the early years of World War II.      

In a related matter, the U.S. merchandise trade deficit in July and August approached $60 billion each month, heading for a trade deficit in goods in 2016 of another $700 billion.       

For an advanced economy like the United States, such deficits are milestones of national decline. We have been running them now for 40 years. But in the era of U.S. economic supremacy from 1870 to 1970, we always ran an annual trade surplus, selling far more abroad than Americans bought from abroad.      

In the U.S. trade picture, even in the darkest of times, the brightest of categories has been commercial aircraft.       

But to watch how we allow NATO allies we defend and protect getting away with decades of colluding and cheating, and then to watch Boeing transfer technology and outsource critical manufacturing to rivals like Japan, one must conclude that not only is the industrial decline of the United States inevitable, but America's elites do not care.       

As for our corporate chieftains, they seem accepting of what is coming when they are gone, so long as the salary increases, stock prices and options, severance packages, and profits remain high.       

By increasingly relying upon foreign nations for our national needs, and by outsourcing production, we are outsourcing America's future.       

After Munich in 1938, Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax visited Italy to wean Mussolini away from Hitler. The Italian dictator observed his guests closely and remarked to his foreign minister:       

"These men are not made of the same stuff as the Francis Drakes and the other magnificent adventurers who created the empire. These, after all, are the tired sons of a long line of rich men, and they will lose their empire."

If the present regime is not replaced, something like that will be said of this generation of Americans.