RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.org/have-the-cheneys-forgotten-the-deep-state-hit-on-scooter-libby/

“I have been ashamed to hear members of my party attacking the integrity of the FBI agents involved with the recent Mar-a-Lago search,” the perversely self-righteous Liz Cheney tweeted on Thursday. “These are sickening comments that put the lives of patriotic public servants at risk.”

Rep. Cheney seems to have forgotten one significant event in her family’s political life: the same weaponized deep state that okayed the raid on Mar-a-Lago convicted her father’s chief-of-staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby on charges that were as manufactured as those leveled against President Trump. If Liz has forgotten, former vice president Dick Cheney surely remembers.

Trump’s pardon should have gladdened Cheney’s heart. It certainly did Scooter Libby’s.

In June 2007, Libby was convicted in a D.C. court of one count of obstruction of justice, two counts of lying under oath, and one count of making false statements. “I believe firmly that Scooter was unjustly accused and prosecuted and deserved a pardon,” Mr. Cheney told CNN’s John King in 2009, adding, “I was clearly not happy that we, in effect, left Scooter sort of hanging in the wind.” By “we” Cheney meant President George W. Bush. Cheney did little to conceal his disgust with Bush for failing to pardon Libby.

The charges against Libby stemmed from an investigation into the leak of the name of the low-level, Langley-based, CIA agent Valerie Plame. The White House was alleged to have leaked her name to punish her husband, Joe Wilson, an international hustler and occasional ambassador. Wilson purported to be a whistleblower. He wasn’t. He was a showboater.

File This Under: Too Ridiculous. 

The IRS is adding 87,000 auditors paid for by an $80 billion appropriation in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. 

However, the IRS isn’t just staffing up…

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found that the IRS purchased of tens of millions of dollars in guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment since 2006. 

In fact, the IRS has stockpiled 5 million rounds of ammunition and 4,500 guns. For example, their gun locker includes 539 long-barrel rifles, 621 shotguns, and 15 sub-machine guns.

Thankfully, the issue is getting more attention, as legislation has been introduced in Congress to ‘Disarm The IRS.”

We broke the news in 2021 – Read It All Here!

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/tulsi-gabbard-blasts-fbi-raid-on-mar-a-lago-says-it-changed-the-country-that-we-grew-up-in/?utm_

Former Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard criticized the FBI’s raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence, saying it “changed the country that we grew up in.”

“Now, whatever your views are on Donald Trump, there is no denying that the unprecedented raid on his Palm Beach home earlier this week has set our country on a dangerous new course, and there’s no turning back. The FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago changed the country that we grew up in,” Gabbard said Friday in an appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight.

Trump was the first person to announce the FBI’s raid on his residence Monday, saying, “These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is under siege, raided and occupied by a large group of FBI agents.”

A federal judge unsealed the search warrant Friday. A list of items taken from Mar-a-Lago shows the FBI recovered eleven sets of classified documents, including some top-secret documents, roughly 20 boxes of items, binders of photos, a handwritten note, the executive grant of clemency for Roger Stone, and information about French president Emanuel Macron.

“We grew up believing that, ‘Hey, our government will apply the law equally to all Americans, whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat.’ We’re seeing more and more that, that country no longer exists. Law enforcement at the highest levels of government, whether it’s the DOJ, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and now even the IRS have been weaponized to target the political opponents of the uni-party, the permanent Washington and the Biden regime,” Gabbard continued.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2022/08/donald-trump-official-enemy-of-the-state/

“The American political establishment — leading Democrats and Republican never-Trumpers alike — is desperately afraid of a Trump political comeback in 2024. They fabricated a Russia collusion hoax, spent two years on a special counsel investigation, impeached Trump twice, jailed Trump supporters for trespassing at the Capitol, held partisan Congressional hearings to broadcast hearsay evidence against the former President without the opportunity for cross-examination, and weaponised the entire federal law enforcement bureaucracy (and some state ones, too) against this one man. And if they can do it to him, they can do it to anyone.”

The Washington Post ran it just above a (news?) article titled “Inside Biden’s Hot Streak, from the Poolside to the Capitol”. Seemingly unsure whether or not they could trust Donald Trump even on this, they went with the headline “FBI Searches Trump safe at Mar-a-Lago Club, Former President Says”. Those final three words are the editors’ hedge: maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t, but no one can deny that he said it.

The Post helpfully explained that Trump has a history of stealing government property from the White House, and has been at loggerheads with the National Archives over presidential records ever since he left office. A previous trawl of Trump plunder yielded “a cocktail napkin, a phone list, charts, slide decks, letters, memos, maps, talking points, a birthday dinner menu, schedules and more”—this, from a confidential source inside the investigation!

The desperation of the American political establishment has come to this: attempting to prosecute a former president for appropriating a White House cocktail napkin. Not even a full-sized linen serviette! They probably don’t have little ‘White House’ monograms in the corner.

Well, Trump always did like monograms.

The Wall Street Journal — a News Corp outlet but editorially independent — reported that “Former President Donald Trump said FBI agents ‘raided’ his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida on Monday” (their scare quotes, not mine). In its full explainer article, the paper exulted that:

Officials can face up to five years in prison for removing classified materials to an unauthorized location. The penalties for breaking other laws related to the removal of official records also include disqualification from holding federal office—including the presidency.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/clean-house-fbi-justice-department/

The two most striking features of the FBI’s unprecedented raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home are its bold intrusiveness and the public’s mistrust of the Bureau’s honesty and integrity. The Department of Justice could have used low-profile subpoenas to force Trump to turn over any documents, including the most sensitive ones. It didn’t. Instead, it sent carloads of federal agents to search the former president’s house. That raid was also unusual in a second sense. Although mishandling federal documents is a felony, it happens with some frequency, alas, and is almost never subject to full-scale raids.

The blowback has been a Category 5 storm. The damage has grown because the FBI and Department of Justice remained silent for three days, refusing to explain their actions.

Now, the FBI or DoJ are busy leaking their justification, alleging (anonymously) that Trump took highly-classified nuclear secrets when he left office. That would be a grave matter, if true, but it raises several obvious questions. One is whether he really did wrongly remove such materials. The second is whether less-invasive means could have been used to retrieve them. The third is whether the real purpose of the raid was to collect materials for other investigations, such as January 6 and Trump’s efforts to delay Joe Biden’s certification as president. Seized materials can be used in other investigations, but it is illegal to get warrants for one purpose when your real purpose is something else. The fourth is public skepticism about the government’s explanations.

The blowback and public mistrust are nothing new. The past few years have been hurricane season for the FBI. The Bureau and, to a lesser extent, the Department of Justice have destroyed their reputations and undermined the public trust essential for law enforcement in a democracy.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/13/a-token-of-the-managerial-age-bewails-trumps-surge/

I was chatting with a politically mature friend today who, in the course of some delighted words about Attorney General Merrick Garland, reminded me that in his famous “evil empire” speech of 1983, Ronald Reagan quoted a few choice lines from the preface of C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters. “The greatest evil,” Lewis wrote, is not now done in any Dickensian “dens of iniquity” or even in “concentration camps and labor camps.” Such brutish moral cesspools, Lewis says, are rather “the final result” of the encompassing evil evoked in his awesome (in the old sense) satire. 

On the contrary, the evil he has in mind is “conceived and ordered . . . in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.” Men, that is to say, like Merrick Garland, a lugubrious embodiment of the “Managerial Age,” the “world of ‘Admin’” that Lewis so abhorred. Here, he suggested, is the home office of Hell, “something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business con­cern.”

The reason, by the way, my friend’s words about Merrick Garland were “delighted” was because of the huge, if inadvertent, boost the attorney general has just given to Donald Trump’s political prospects. 

Monday’s FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach residence, was probably the single biggest boon to his stature among voters since he left office in January 2021, bigger even than the partisan witch hunt over which future CNN hostess, Liz Cheney, has been presiding with such ostentatious zeal.

This is obviously a concern among the beautiful, well-pressed people with white collars and clean fingernails who hate Trump. Employing a ju-ju they recognize but do not understand, Trump has time and again demonstrated an uncanny ability to goad his would-be attackers into contortions of self-immolation. 

https://www.city-journal.org/the-elite-panic-of-2022

On April 18, U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle struck down the federal requirement for wearing surgical masks on airplanes, in airports, and while riding mass transit. Online videos showed passengers and airline staff ripping off their masks and celebrating in mid-flight. Given the accumulated frustration of two years of pandemic travel, the reaction was understandable.

Far more remarkable was the vehemence of those opposed to the ruling. Judge Mizelle was unfit for office, they said. She was too young, at 35; she was unelected; she was a single, unrepresentative voice. Worst of all, she was an “activist Trump judge” and thus branded with the mark of the beast. Rescinding government policy—the kind of thing that American judges engage in with abandon, and usually to progressive cheers—in this instance was condemned as a usurpation of the powers of the executive branch.

Judge Mizelle had crashed an exclusive party reserved for people of higher caste. “The CDC has the capability, through a large number of trained epidemiologists, scientists, to be able to make projections and make recommendations,” said Anthony Fauci, bureaucratic czar of all things Covid-19. “Far more than a judge with no experience in public health.”

That was the heart of the matter. Fauci embodied a bureaucracy and political class that, with the active support of the media, had converted the public’s fear of infection into a principle of elite authority. Under this principle, only trained scientists can make projections and recommendations. The writ of government stretched as far as the boundaries of scientific truth—and those boundaries were, of course, determined by government agencies. It wasn’t just a question of specific policies like lockdowns and vaccine mandates. At stake was the restoration of the public’s habit of obedience that had gone missing during the Trump years.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/fbi-rubicon-donald-trump-mar-a-lago-raid/?utm_source=Spectator+World+Signup&utm_campaign=15c8b91727-

Everyone knows that in January 49 BC Julius Caesar, about to lead part of his army across the Rubicon river, said “Alea iacta est,” “the die is cast.” Except that, according to Plutarch, what he really said was “Ἀνερρίφθω κύβος,” “let the die be cast,” and he did not so much say it as quote it, since the already-proverbial line came from the Greek playwright Menander. Anyway, in bringing an army across the stream that separated cis-Alpine Gaul from Italy proper, Caesar had committed treason. In crossing the Rubicon he had crossed a line, sparking the civil war that engulfed Rome and formalized the end of the Republic that had, as Caesar himself noted, been dead in all-but-name-only for decades.

Contemplating the recent actions of our secret police, known to some as the FBI, I have often wondered where to locate their Rubicon. Was it when they conducted a dawn raid against Roger Stone, having been careful to alert CNN beforehand so they could be on hand to publicize the attack? Maybe it was when they burst into the apartment of Project Veritas’s James O’Keefe, throwing him out in the hallway in his pajamas, while they ransacked his home looking for a diary kept by Joe Biden’s daughter? Or perhaps it was when they arrested former Trump aide Peter Navarro, throwing him in handcuffs and leg irons before depositing him in jail? Or when they accosted the lawyer John Eastman and confiscated his cell phone? That seems to have become a favorite pastime of the FBI, seizing people’s cell phones. Just a couple of days ago, they took Representative Scott Perry’s phone. “But,” you point out, “Perry is a Republican and Trump ally. He has no property rights.”

Well, there is that. But still, I keep wondering: where is our Rubicon? Where is the line that, once crossed, signals, definitively, the end of one thing and the beginning of something else?

I hesitate to make any predictions about that because I have been wrong about it so often in the past. “Surely,” I have thought, “this is it. The American people will not stand for this.”

But then they do. James Comey was OK. So was Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Kevin Clinesmith and Michael Sussmann. The FBI does something outrageous. There are little eructations of unhappiness. Then people go back to their lattes and put it out their minds.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/12/merrick-garland-doesnt-care-about-the-rule-of-law-just-ask-hunter-biden/

Biden’s Justice Department has done anything but apply the rule of law ‘evenly, without fear or favor.’ Hunter Biden is Exhibit A.

Attorney General Merrick Garland addressed the FBI’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence on Thursday afternoon, three days after the Department of Justice embarked on an unprecedented escalation of its persecution of political opponents.

“Faithful adherence to the rule of law is the bedrock principle of the Justice Department and of our democracy,” Garland said. “Upholding the rule of law means applying the law evenly, without fear or favor. Under my watch, that is precisely what the Justice Department is doing.”

President Joe Biden’s Justice Department, however, has done anything but apply the rule of law “evenly, without fear or favor.” Hunter Biden is Exhibit A.

In September of 2020, Senate investigators published an 87-page report detailing Hunter Biden’s extensive overseas networks with a series of potential conflicts of interest. The investigation included episodes of potentially criminal business activity flagged for the Justice Department such as a six-figure shopping spree financed by Chinese business leaders. The report also unearthed evidence of “organized prostitution and/or human trafficking.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/12/american-stasi/

Monday’s shocking images of police sirens blaring outside Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump’s magnificent Palm Beach, Florida, estate, will not soon be forgotten.

Much has already been said and written about the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago that precipitated those sirens: “outrageous,” “unprecedented,” a “crossing of the Rubicon” moment. Regrettably, all of that is true. The siccing of the national law enforcement apparatus to execute a pre-dawn raid on a top partisan rival—especially when that rival is the head of state’s predecessor and perhaps-likely future opponent—is a contemptible act of raw political bloodlust. It is an act far more befitting a crumbling hellhole like Venezuela, or a third-world country in sub-Saharan Africa, than it is the land that was to be, per Benjamin Franklin’s alleged quip, “a republic, if you can keep it.”

America, it seems, won the Cold War only to see its own federal law enforcement/national security apparatus morph into a version of the old East German Stasi—and barely three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to boot.

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Thursday “press conference,” remarkably defensive and defiant in tone, did not dispel any concerns or assuage any critics. (Those critics, incidentally, include even former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.) The scuttlebutt is that Trump was hoarding deeply secretive, classified information deep in the bowels of Mar-a-Lago, in violation of the Presidential Records Act. But the back-and-forth between the National Archives and Trump’s personal legal team surrounding the boxes of material, entirely routine for an ex-president when it comes to things like establishing a presidential library, was by all accounts unfolding amicably: A subpoena was issued this spring, Trump’s lawyers were cooperative and archivists had already recalled 15 boxes earlier this year.

Furthermore, the Presidential Records Act isn’t even a criminal statute, and probable cause for the violation of a criminal statute is the necessary precondition for a magistrate to sign off on a search warrant. As the case may be, the magistrate who signed off on this particular warrant, Bruce Reinhart, is a Jeffrey Epstein-connected ex-defense attorney who just so happened to donate thousands of dollars in 2008 to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama. Go figure.