RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-white-house-privately-demanded

Alex Berenson

Biden Administration officials asked Twitter to ban me because of my tweets questioning the Covid vaccines, even as company employees believed I had followed Twitter’s rules, internal Twitter communications reveal.

In a White House meeting in April 2021, four months before Twitter suspended my account, the company faced “one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn’t been kicked off from the platform,” a Twitter employee wrote.

The employee recounted the meeting discussion afterwards on Twitter’s internal Slack messaging system. The message, and others, make clear that top federal officials targeted me specifically, potentially violating my basic First Amendment right to free speech.

The First Amendment does not apply to private companies like Twitter. But if the companies are acting on behalf of the federal government they can become “state actors” that must allow free speech and debate, just as the government does.

Previous efforts to file state action lawsuits against the government and social media companies for working together to ban users have failed. Courts have universally held that people who have been banned have not shown the specific demands from government officials that are necessary to support state action claims.

https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/garland-wray-clam-trump-search-after-information-free-all-ongoing-jan-6-probe

By John Solomon and Natalia Mittelstadt

Stoic like a judge delivering a verdict from the bench, Attorney General Merrick Garland declared Thursday he was playing things by the book and wouldn’t talk about the raid and ongoing investigation of former President Donald Trump.

“The Department of Justice will speak through its court filings and its work,” he said, declining to answer any of the multitude of questions Americans have, except that he approved the Monday raid on the 45th president’s home and doesn’t object to releasing the search warrant.

Garland, however, was hardly as tight-lipped about the other major ongoing investigation that has consumed his department: the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

In testimony, speeches and news interviews he has talked expansively about the nature of the probe, the forced collections of evidence and who and how many are being investigated — even as many defendants have not yet had their day in court.

Usually, it is taboo for federal prosecutors to talk about anything related to grand juries. But in his one-year anniversary speech, Garland gave the total number of grand jury subpoenas and search warrants executed, the amount of video footage collected, and the number of electronic devices seized through warrants and subpoenas. It was a rare moment of transparency in an evidence collection process normally shrouded in the same secrecy as the raid on Trump’s home and office.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/why-arent-our-generals-learning-daniel-greenfield/

A third of the way into his article, “Afghanistan Did Not Have to Turn Out This Way”, David Petraeus, former head of Central Command, who led forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and then headed the CIA, admits the war was never going to end.

“Some senior officials, including me, had cautioned that we would not be able to do in Afghanistan what we had done in Iraq—that though we might be able to drive violence down, we would not be able to ‘flip’ the country, as we had during the surge in Iraq, and provide it a whole new beginning,” he writes.

“When we recognized that we couldn’t ‘win’ the war, we did not even seriously consider that we might just ‘manage’ it,” Petraeus complains.

Managing the war would mean a permanent military presence in Afghanistan.

There was never any serious plan to withdraw from Afghanistan. Nation building, Petraeus argues, “was not just unavoidable; it was essential”. “How else do you help build the forces and capabilities that allow you to hand off crucial tasks—such as denying sanctuary to terrorists, securing the population and infrastructure, and running the country and its myriad institutions?”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/11/fbi-wont-let-facts-get-in-the-way-of-a-good-story/

“We have a saying in my office. Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.”

So said FBI supervisory agent Henrik Impola to one of the FBI informants working the FBI-inspired, organized, and executed scheme to “kidnap” and “assassinate” Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

That comment, made in December 2020, just a few months after several men were arrested for their alleged role in the plot, was repeated by a defense attorney during opening statements Wednesday morning in the retrial of two remaining defendants in the federal case. 

A Grand Rapids jury in April handed the Justice Department a shocking and rare defeat when jurors failed to return a single guilty verdict in what the government considers one of its biggest domestic terror investigations in decades. Two men were acquitted on every count after lawyers convinced the jury the men had been entrapped by the FBI; jurors couldn’t reach a verdict on alleged ringleader Adam Fox and Barry Croft, Jr. Both men now face a new trial.

Impola’s warning should be the FBI’s new motto; he also could be the poster boy for the modern-day FBI. Not only did he handle the main informant in the Whitmer operation, Impola worked out of the Detroit FBI field office when a man named Steven D’Antuono was in charge. The purpose of the caper, one with D’Antuono’s fingerprints all over it, was to produce negative news coverage for Trump while millions of Americans were voting for president in 2020; the president was accused of inspiring “white supremacist right-wing militias” to take out one of his most loathed political adversaries.

One week after the arrests in the Whitmer plot were announced on October 8, 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray invited D’Antuono to take over a plum assignment—head of the FBI field office in Washington, D.C. The promotion gave D’Antuono control of the most powerful FBI office in the country several weeks before the events of January 6.

https://www.city-journal.org/inflation-reduction-act-needless-health-care-provisions

The House of Representatives will soon take up the inaptly named Inflation Reduction Act. The IRA, which cleared the Senate by the barest of margins—51 to 50—through the reconciliation process, will do little to control inflation. More importantly, its health-care provisions will harm Americans in order to fund an expansion of government-run health care that disproportionately benefits the wealthy, leads to inflation, and provides inferior care.

The highly regarded Penn–Wharton Budget Model estimated that the impact of the IRA on inflation over the next ten years would be “statistically indistinguishable from zero.” Inflation might rise slightly in the first few years and decline slightly thereafter. The CBO concurred, finding that the bill would have “negligible effect” on inflation.

The anti-inflationary effect is likely even lower since both assessments were made before the Senate parliamentarian knocked out a provision that purportedly would have saved around $40 billion. Moreover, almost half of the IRA’s projected budgetary savings ($122 billion) results from a budgetary gimmick—repeal of a Trump-era drug-rebate rule that was challenged in court, has been delayed multiple times, has never had any money spent on it, and would likely never have gone into effect. Even Senator Bernie Sanders, before voting yes, labelled the IRA “the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.”

The deception doesn’t end with the bill’s title. Despite President Biden’s assurance that no American earning less than $400,000 would pay “a single penny” in additional taxes, the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation found that the IRA would raise taxes on Americans in every income bracket and that people earning less than $400,000 would bear most of the increase. In fact, the IRA appropriates $80 billion for the IRS—more than six times the agency’s annual budget—to boost enforcement and collections. The bill’s authors are counting on tens of thousands of additional tax collectors to find the money to finance the IRA’s increased spending. Their targets will not be limited to Sanders’s “millionaires and billionaires.” They don’t have enough money. Inevitably, working- and middle-class people along with small businesses and sole proprietors will be targeted—that’s where the money is.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/12/defund-the-fbi/

No, that headline’s not a joke. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, once so popular it had its own TV show solely dedicated to its heroics, has become a hyper-politicized, jackbooted bully that no longer serves the American people or the U.S. Constitution, which its employees are sworn to protect. It has become, instead, the intelligence arm and domestic enforcer of the far left.

Did we say defund? Yes. But we don’t mean simply to cut its funding, as leftists have disastrously proposed for police forces across the country. We mean tear down the entire rotting edifice of the FBI and replacing it with a new agency that respects the Constitution and holds itself accountable to all Americans, not just the woke far left.

The raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound may be the breaking point, but it’s only the latest FBI outrage. In recent years, under Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray, the Bureau has acted overtly to aid one political party over the other, demonizing those who oppose the Democrats’ “woke,” “progressive” agenda for America.

To be sure, this has been going on for some time now, starting with the FBI’s feeble investigation of Hillary Clinton’s home-based server, which intelligence sources say was almost certainly hacked by the Russians, the Chinese, or both. It was a clear violation of the law, exposing America’s secrets to our worst enemies.

And the FBI did nothing.

https://news.yahoo.com/irs-deletes-job-posting-seeking-212152157.html

The IRS deleted a job posting Wednesday seeking a Special Agent “willing to use deadly force” for its law enforcement division, Criminal Investigation (CI). The deletion came amid renewed scrutiny of the IRS in response to a Democrat-backed spending bill that would double the size of the agency.

“As a Special Agent you will combine your accounting skills with law enforcement skills to investigate financial crimes,” the job advertisement read.

“No matter what the source, all income earned, both legal and illegal, has the potential of becoming involved in crimes which fall within the investigative jurisdiction of the IRS Criminal Investigation. Because of the expertise required to conduct these complex financial investigations, IRS Special Agents are considered the premier financial investigators for the Federal government,” the job posting continued.

The “Major Duties” listed in the job description included “a level of fitness necessary to effectively respond to life-threatening situations on the job,” and being “willing and able to participate in arrests, execution of search warrants, and other dangerous assignments.”

It also included a requirement of carrying “a firearm and be willing to use deadly force, if necessary.”

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/sanctification-george-soros-district-attorneys-james-kirchick

How the left stopped worrying about Soros the billionaire and learned to love Soros ‘the Jew’.

Two weeks ago, George Soros took to the op-ed pages of the largest paid circulation newspaper in the United States to explain why he has spent tens of millions of dollars backing progressive district attorney candidates across the country. “Americans desperately need a more thoughtful discussion about our response to crime,” the billionaire philanthropist began in a piece for The Wall Street Journal titled, “Why I Support Reform Prosecutors.” Decrying the “demagoguery and divisive partisan attacks that dominate the debate and obscure the issues,” Soros elucidated his reasons for championing prosecutors who support, among other things, abolishing cash bail, reducing prison time for violent offenders, and declining to prosecute whole categories of crime altogether.

The scope of Soros’ efforts has been extensive. Through a combination of direct contributions to candidates, subventions to political action committees, and funding of other third party groups via his Open Society Foundations, Soros has spent upwards of $40 million over the past decade helping to elect some 75 prosecutors in metropolitan areas ranging from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, Manhattan to St. Louis. His pursuit of this agenda has been met with no small amount of controversy, and in some cases active resistance. In San Francisco, the Soros-backed District Attorney Chesa Boudin lost a recall vote earlier this year following a disastrous tenure marked by sharp increases in both violent and petty crime rates. George Gascon, a Soros-backed prosecutor in Los Angeles, will also face a recall. It was no doubt in response to the backlash his public efforts have caused that Soros decided, not unreasonably, to defend his political interventions. “I have done it transparently,” he wrote in the Journal of his massive outlays, “and I have no intention of stopping.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2022/08/10/invasive-feds-pawed-through-melanias-clothes-spent-hours-in-former-presidents-private-office-n1620026

As more details emerge about the shocking federal raid on the Trump family’s private home at Mar-a-Lago, we’re getting a fuller sense of how invasive and offensive the action truly was.

The family had decamped to Trump’s Bedminster, N.J., estate for the summer, leaving Mar-a-Lago closed for the season with only a skeleton staff looking after the 20-acre private golf resort. At 9 a.m. Monday morning, over 30 plainclothes FBI agents arrived at the residence, accompanied by three DOJ attorneys. The DOJ is believed to have coordinated the raid with the U.S. Secret Service, meaning USSS agents would have granted them access to the property.

The DOJ lawyers, whom an eyewitness described as “arrogant,” repeatedly told Trump representatives, “We have full access to everything. We can go everywhere.” Trump’s own lawyers, who hadn’t been advised of the raid, arrived an hour after the FBI.