RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/14/archives-politicization-portends-another-russiagate/

If the Russiagate fiasco proved anything, it is that slimy but clever beats straight but blundering, at least in the political short term. Unfortunately, the oleaginous tactics of the Biden Administration regarding former President Donald Trump’s statutorily protected presidential papers, combined with its politicization of what should be a neutral, nonpartisan National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), follows the temporarily successful Russiagate playbook. And as in the “Russia collusion” hoax, the media feeds the frenzy of its credulous naïf audience, using the shiny object of a few straggling classified documents out of millions, importance unknown.

More significantly, the media is concealing from the public the clear provisions of the Presidential Records Act (PRA), which, if read with critical intelligence, reveals the sickening politicization of the Archives which, like the FBI, is tasked to be neutral and nonpartisan. 

For two hundred years, until Richard Nixon sought to destroy unflattering White House tapes, former presidents owned their presidential papers, classified and unclassified, after leaving office, willing them to their heirs or putting them in trust.

The 1978 PRA attempted to keep the status quo, with the exception that the government now owned the documents, with the Archives serving as a faithful librarian.

A former president has unfettered access to his documents for up to 12 years, while the sitting president and Congress have no access, unless the incumbent can show, per section 2205 (B) (2), that “such records contain information that is needed for the conduct of current business of the incumbent President’s office and that is not otherwise available.” 

But whether or not the incumbent president can see these documents, the former president is assured by the PRA of access to all his papers: “The presidential records of a former President shall be available to such former President or the former President’s designated representatives.”

Those two simple statements are at the heart of the case that the Archives has been politicized and that the Biden Administration has weaponized this politicization. Both have acted shamefully, but our vaunted “investigative” media, of course, has not noticed. Don’t we have swarms of wannabe Woodwards and Bernsteins? 

It is the duty of the Archives not to provide such access unless the requisite showing has been made. Because this exception requires a showing that the sitting president cannot get the information elsewhere and that it is needed for the current (i.e., already existing) business of the incumbent’s office, this should pose a high burden.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/foaming_at_the_mouth_the_media_tries_to_run_cover_for_j6_charade.html

It should come as no surprise that The Wall Street Journal, in an October 14 editorial, gave credence to the rogue, irresponsible, illegitimate, and unconstitutional “Jan. 6” House Select Committee comprised of nine Trump-despisers, two of which are rabidly anti-Trump Republicans, soon to leave Congress after monumental defeats at the August ballot box. The title read, “What the Jan. 6 Hearings Accomplished”. The Journal, by that title, showed its Trump-loathing hand for what it was: it was no inquiry, it was an inquisition.

The Journal’s anti-Trump editorial also gave credence to the unconstitutional subpoena for the former (and future?) President Donald J. Trump.

Noting the 9-0 vote in favor of the Trump subpoena, the Journal said: “If he wants to avoid the hot seat, Mr. Trump only needs to find a way to resist the subpoena….”

Immediately following that, the next paragraph began:

Rep. Liz Cheney justified an extraordinary subpoena to a former President by saying that ‘more than 30 witnesses in our investigation have invoked their Fifth Amendment right to self-incrimination.’

Let’s stop there for a personal, relevant note. Chalk it up to my age and lifelong interest in politics, but as soon as I learned of the Trump subpoena, I recalled a political event that occurred in November 1953, when I was 13-and-a-half years old. I remembered that former President Truman (a Democrat) had been served with a subpoena by House Republicans (then in the majority) and rejected the subpoena as violating the Constitution’s separation of powers principle. Having that memory, I then went to the internet for confirmation. The fruit of that search appears here.

Paul A. Gigot, editor of the Journal’s editorial page where this article appeared, could not have had a memory of Mr. Truman’s rejection of the House subpoena as he was not born until 1955, a year-and-a-half after the Truman subpoena. But a separation of powers problem should have  occurred to Mr. Gigot — or did his apparent loathing for Mr. Trump blind him to major constitutional details? How else can one explain the editorial’s claim that “Rep. Liz Cheney justified an extraordinary subpoena to a former President….”?

Briefly stated, there can be no justification of a subpoena “to a former President” — unless the server has no respect for the separation of powers principle — much less this observation in Federalist Paper no. 47 attributed to James Madison:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-durham-and-the-presss-battle-with-truth-collusion-hoax-fbi-media-lying-steele-dossier-analyst-sources-trial-11665776889?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Members of the press are rooting for the failure of the latest John Durham prosecution, because they think it absolves them of their roles in the collusion hoax.

Nor are the feelings of special counsel Durham hard to guess. They are likely identical to those of a previous exposer of FBI misfeasance, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who could not have failed to be surprised and a little appalled at the media’s indifference to the truths he and his team labored to reveal at taxpayer expense.

It was Mr. Durham himself, in his initial and expansive indictment of Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann, who dwelled and dwelled on every reason for believing the FBI had not been fooled by the lie Mr. Durham charged the lawyer with telling in the collusion hoax.

The message is even clearer in this week’s prosecution of Steele dossier principal “researcher” Igor Danchenko, who has also pleaded not guilty to lying to the FBI. The world now knows, thanks to Mr. Durham, that the FBI put Mr. Danchenko on its payroll for 3½ years and kept him there as late as October 2020, long after it knew the dossier was a package of lies. One effect of this arrangement was to discourage the analyst-about-town Mr. Danchenko from telling the press or other investigators the truth about the dossier’s fraudulence while the FBI was still suggesting to the public and courts it was “credible.”

As a news story, alas, all this runs into the blinkeredness, not to mention giant helpings of personal cowardice, of many reporters covering it.

Telling is a Washington Post scene-setter on the Danchenko trial that began by misrepresenting the three-year-old words of the Justice Department’s Mr. Horowitz, who said he found no “documentary or testimonial evidence” of improper motivation in the Clinton email and Trump collusion investigations.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/benbartee/2022/10/01/gullible-corporate-media-falls-for-race-hoax-after-race-hoax-learns-nothing-2-n1633835

You might be forgiven for mistakenly believing race hoaxes couldn’t possibly get more brazen, or morally depraved, than actor Jussie Smollet’s theatrical rendition of a midnight MAGA lynching in sub-zero downtown Chicago.

That fateful 2019 winter eve, Smollet hired his two Nigerian bodyguards to play the roles of white supremacists, who allegedly attacked Smollett while on his way to Subway in the middle of the night.

The white supremacists, wearing ski masks, allegedly yelled “f****t Empire n*****r, this is MAGA country” from across the street, then crossed the street to grab Smollett.

They proceeded to pour bleach on him (which was somehow still liquid in freezing temperatures), beat him up, wrapped a noose around his neck, and mysteriously disappeared into the night nearly as quickly as they came.

(Smollett undoubtedly got the bleach idea from the iconic scene in the 1997 film American History X in which neo-Nazis, led by Edward Norton, pour milk over a Latina grocery store clerk.)

Everyone knows the white man can’t help but go around slipping nooses on black people everywhere he goes, like Johnny Appleseed.

“You hadn’t noticed it before?” Roberts interjects (the hardest question, by the way, she asks the whole time, despite the palpable absurdity of Smollett’s fantastical account).

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-flood-of-political-violence-the-press-refuses-to-cover/

If we were to listen to the lectures from the media, we are on the cusp of an outbreak of violence set to explode from the right side of the political spectrum. President Biden has enthusiastically pushed this agenda, positioning MAGA Nation as a violent faction orchestrating an uprising of democracy-threatening actions any day now. At Biden’s direction, “fascist” has become the left’s new knee-jerk accusation since “racist” has become a played-out charge.

There is one disqualifier; the actual acts that we have recently seen that fall under this heading are emanating from the left. There have been numerous incidents of leftist political violence over the past year, yet – despite typifying the very promised outbreak of outrage – these are somehow not classified as dangerous, get explained away, or are outright ignored by the press.

The following examples perfectly display the very promised violence they say will arrive any day now from the conservative right, and their willingness to not address these incidents exposes the effort to demonize and criminalize only one side of the political arena.

North Dakota Political Killing

Last week, Shannon Brandt was arrested for using his car to run over and kill an 18-year-old who he declared was a “Republican extremist.” There has been a notable lack of enthusiasm in reporting on this on a national level, and we have been spared numerous news panel discussions, editorials, and think pieces decrying the political divide in this country. Some are even going so far as to say there is no evidence that this was a politically-motivated attack – despite the fact that the suspect, Shannon Brandt, repeatedly stated he did this as a result of the political stance of his victim.

https://www.commonsense.news/p/the-great-canadian-mass-graves-hoax?utm_source=email

Last year, The New York Times dropped a bombshell headline: ‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada. As other outlets picked up the shocking story, marches, protests and riots erupted across Canada. One former Canadian minister called it “Canada’s George Floyd moment.”

But according to veteran journalist Terry Glavin, the shocking story about a mass graves wasn’t true.

And saying that—reporting that—came at a very high cost.

Terry Glavin has been a reporter for over 20 years. In that time, he’s had a particular focus on persecuted minorities. Both in faraway places like China, Afghanistan, Russia and Iraq, but also in his own backyard, where he has reported extensively on the First Nations of Canada and the abuses they have suffered at the hands of the state. So how is it that someone who has spent his career giving voice to the most vulnerable, found himself accused of genocide denial?

That’s what today’s fascinating and provocative conversation on Honestly is about. In the end, it’s about what happens when the truth no longer matters.

https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/how-a-small-conservative-campus-paper?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Last month, Rachel Richardson—the only black starter on the women’s volleyball team at Duke University—leveled a shocking accusation. She said that during her team’s August 26 match against Brigham Young University, fans inside the BYU arena in Provo, Utah inundated her with racist abuse and threats.

After the match, 19-year-old Richardson told her godmother, Lesa Pamplin, about the incident. Pamplin is a criminal defense attorney running for a county judgeship in Texas, and was not at the game—but the next day, she published a tweet that rocketed the story to national attention: “My Goddaughter is the only black starter for Dukes [sic] volleyball team. While playing yesterday, she was called a [n-word] every time she served. She was threatened by a white male that told her to watch her back going to the team bus. A police officer had to be put by their bench.”

The tweet is no longer available, but it racked up 185,000 likes before it was archived. LeBron James himself responded: “you tell your Goddaughter to stand tall, be proud and continue to be BLACK!!! We are a brotherhood and sisterhood!  We have her back. This is not sports.”

Richardson’s story also spread via her father, Marvin Richardson, who is Deputy Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and who spoke with multiple outlets on behalf of his daughter. In an August 27 story about the incident in the New York Times that named him but not his daughter, he described an alarming, potentially violent scene. Despite an onslaught of slurs, he told the Times, his daughter thought the safest choice was “to keep her head down and continue playing.” He said that “as the crowd got more hyped and the epithets kept coming, she wanted to respond back but she told me she was afraid that, if she did, the raucous crowd could very well turn into a mob mentality.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-medias-pathological-commitment-to-dividing-americans-along-racial-lines/

Signs of Rot and Hope in BYU Volleyball Story

When an opportunity arises to publish a story that might make Americans feel as though they’re living in a country just barely more racially harmonious than South Africa under apartheid, much of the mainstream press have long adhered to a compact: Never investigate, and, once the story is proven to be mistaken, never apologize.

Late last month, Rachel Richardson, a member of the Duke University women’s volleyball team, accused fans of the Brigham Young University squad of hurling racial epithets at her during a match at BYU. She further charged BYU officials with having “failed to take the necessary steps to stop the unacceptable behavior and create a safe environment.”

Everyone — including the administration at BYU, who quickly identified and banned a suspect from campus — was rightly horrified by the prospect of such harassment of a black athlete.

Yet at so many outlets, Richardson’s allegations were treated not as a subject of inquiry, but as gospel truth to immediately be atoned for.

“What does it say about the BYU community and culture that this happened?” CNN’S Alisyn Camerota asked BYU’s athletic director. “A Division I volleyball match at Brigham Young University turned really ugly when black players from Duke University endured racial slurs from at least one fan in the crowd,” explained Brianna Keilar, also of CNN.

The New York Times reported that “Marvin Richardson, the father of the Duke volleyball player, said in an interview late Saturday that a slur was repeatedly yelled from the stands as his daughter was serving, making her fear ‘the raucous crowd’ could grow violent.” The Times tacked on that BYU’s “student population is less than 1 percent Black” and “has struggled with creating an inclusive environment for its students of color,” so that readers could understand that BYU is the type of place where racial harassment takes place.