What is Adam Schiff Hiding?

Schiff tucked an amendment into the National Defense Authorization Act that would prohibit any evidence collected in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act from being used in investigations. Why?

by Julie Kelly for American Greatness

Jeffrey Rosen had a secret on January 6, 2021.

The then-acting attorney general—Rosen was appointed on December 24, 2020 to replace departing Attorney General William Barr—had assembled a team of elite and highly skilled government agents at Quantico, a nexus point between the FBI and U.S. military, the weekend before Congress met to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. At the same time he was rejecting President Donald Trump’s last-minute appeals to investigate election fraud, Rosen was managing a hush-hush operation in advance of planned rallies and protests in Washington on January 6.

“Rosen made a unilateral decision to take the preparatory steps to deploy Justice Department and so-called ‘national’ forces,” Newsweek reporter William M. Arkin disclosed in a bombshell report earlier this year. “There was no formal request from the U.S. Capitol Police, the Secret Service, or the Metropolitan Police Department—in fact, no external request from any agency. The leadership in Justice and the FBI anticipated the worst and decided to act independently, the special operations forces lurking behind the scenes.”

Those assets, according to Arkin, included “commandos” with shoot-to-kill authority. And among them were members of the military. 

“The presence of these extraordinary forces under the control of the Attorney General—and mostly operating under contingency plans that Congress and the U.S. Capitol Police were not privy to—added an additional layer of highly armed responders,” Arkin writes. “The role that the military played in this highly classified operation is still unknown, though FBI sources tell Newsweek that military operators seconded to the FBI, and those on alert as part of the National Mission Force, were present in the metropolitan area.”

Little else is known about Rosen’s secret mission. His testimony to the House Oversight Committee in May 2021 was just as obscure. Rosen, who publicly bragged to the January 6 select committee about his attempts to deter Team Trump from pursuing vote fraud days before the Capitol protest, said the FBI opened a multi-agency operation center, which included the Department of Defense, at FBI headquarters on January 5. “Each of these federal agencies supplied personnel to staff the [center] 24/7 beginning on January 5 and 6, and continuing for a period thereafter,” he said.

To avoid “interfering” in ongoing investigations, Rosen then declined to answer any questions from lawmakers at the time.

But if the military engaged in any civilian law enforcement activity, including surveillance or intelligence collection, before or during January 6, it would represent an egregious violation of the military’s code of conduct and federal law. Under the Posse Comitatus Act, military personnel cannot be used as local cops or investigators: “Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, or the Space Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.” (Certain exclusions, such as the president’s invocation of the Insurrection Act and any use of the National Guard, apply.)

The law is both vague and specific at the same time—which brings us to Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). Irrefutably the least trustworthy member of Congress, Schiff tucked an amendment into the massive National Defense Authorization Act that would prohibit any evidence collected in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act from being used in a number of proceedings, including criminal trials and congressional investigations.

The amendment’s timing, like everything else related to the infamous Russian collusion huckster, evidence forger, and nude photo seeker (to name a few of Schiff’s special talents), is highly suspect. Why would Schiff need to outlaw evidence collected unlawfully? Why is Schiff relying on this relatively arcane statute passed during Reconstruction that is rarely, if ever, enforced? 

“No one has ever been convicted of violating PCA to my knowledge,” Dr. Jeffrey Addicott, a 20-year member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps and director of the Warrior Defense Project at St. Mary’s College, told American Greatness last week.

What is Adam Schiff, on behalf of the Biden regime and Trump foes in the U.S. military, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, trying to hide?

It is not a coincidence that Schiff introduced the amendment just a few months before a predicted Republican landslide in November, which will give control of Congress back to the GOP. House Minority Leader and presumptive Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy is planning to conduct multiple investigations into the Biden regime next year including of the deadly and distrasrous withdrawal from Afghanistan; the Daily Caller reported this week that Republican lawmakers are “flooding the Biden administration with ‘hundreds of preservation notices’ asking that relevant documents be preserved.”

But one can easily see how Schiff’s amendment could be used as legislative cover to prevent production of any materials from Biden’s Department of Defense. After all, according to a 2018 congressional analysis of Posse Comitatus, “compliance [of the act] is ordinarily the result of military self-restraint.” So, too, is enforcement: “The act is a criminal statute under which there has been but a handful of known prosecutions,” the same report explained.

This is the sort of vehicle that Democrats know how to use and exploit for political advantage. If interpretation and enforcement is totally arbitrary, who decides? Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin? The Justice Department? Biden’s White House lawyers? 

Imagine how Democrats could conceal the use of military personnel related to the events of January 6. Congressional Republicans send a request to Austin seeking all records, documents, and communications pertaining to the military’s involvement before and during the Capitol protest. Austin replies that he has determined the military—under control of President Trump at the time, no less—violated Posse Comitatus and therefore the requested materials cannot be produced under authority of the Schiff amendment.

Republicans can howl and scream but they have no legal remedy. Austin won’t investigate and Attorney General Merrick Garland won’t prosecute.

This scenario could be repeated for every Republican inquiry into Biden’s Defense Department. Does anyone really think this regime will hand over information to GOP investigators and committees without pulling every trick in the book, starting with Schiff’s amendment?

On Thursday afternoon, the House narrowly passed Schiff’s amendment by a vote of 215-213; every Republican and two Democrats voted no. (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi came to the floor to vote in a rare move.) Passage in the Senate is uncertain.

If his amendment fails to advance, Schiff nonetheless has done Republicans a tremendous favor; he’s tipped off the GOP that there’s plenty of digging to be done at the Department of Defense, where a trove of scandals awaits political sunshine.

Republicans would be wise to take his cue—and start with January 6.

X22, On the Fringe, and more- July 15

 

Evening. Here's tonight's news:

Wealth Through Theft

Times are going to be rough, because our government has done a massive damage, an unbelievable amount of stealing and borrowing that we, ultimately, will have to pay for.

by Dan Gelernter for American Greatness

The Spanish Government has announced that the cost of riding certain public trains will be cut from half-fare to zero beginning in September. This follows on the heels of Germany selling monthly public transit passes for just nine Euros ($9). The Guardian and CNN are very excited about these changes because, in the view of the conventional Left, this achieves two things: It saves the environment and it saves money.

It saves the environment by forcing people out of their gas-guzzling cars. Of course, the real thing forcing people out of their cars isn’t cheap train tickets, but rather runaway inflation that has made buying and driving the ordinary family sedan a prohibitive luxury. This is the ideal outcome for a globalist elite who believe that people should all travel together in one big collective mass—with just a few cars and planes set aside for the important people running everything, who actually need to go to particular places and be there on time. 

When the Left talks about saving money, what they really mean is that they are going to borrow money in your name with no intention of paying it back. This means they are either stealing from today’s creditors (you) or from tomorrow’s debtors (your kids). One way or another, though, they need that money and they’re going to take it.

That returns us to the vexed question of saving money by making things cost less. Lefist economics is based on two fundamental principles:

1) There is a fixed amount of wealth in the world.

2) Money has inherent value.

Point one—that there is a fixed amount of wealth—explains everything the Left does on a macro scale. They believe because wealth cannot be created (for example by using one’s labor to transform a lump of wood into a chair) the only way to obtain wealth is to steal it. Under the “my fair share of the pie” or “my bite of the apple” philosophy, anyone who has more than the average amount of wealth has come by it undeservingly, and so the morally correct thing is to confiscate that “surplus” wealth and give it to someone who has less than the average. That way, things will even out and everyone will have the same amount of wealth. Until of course someone starts making chairs while his neighbor just sits around waiting for a welfare check.

Point two—that money has inherent value—is even more childish and more insidious. The intellectual toddlers of the economics community have been trying to make this concept work at least since the French Revolution (and probably since before that). A typical problem: Bread costs too much. The leftist solution: Announce that bread now costs less.

By decreeing a maximum price for bread (le maximum) the French Revolutionaries were under the impression they were taking a major step for the common people that their evil king just hadn’t thought of. They were then caught completely off-guard when the bakers stopped baking bread on the flimsy excuse that the ingredients now cost them more than they were receiving from the finished product. It was an amazing, Bastille-Day miracle: the French had managed to make labor remove value.

Even in the most rigorously-controlled, state-planned economies, a unit of currency is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it. And even soviet-style governments (such as our own) implicitly acknowledge this when they take action on the direct supply-and-demand principle by increasing the money supply: In their heart of hearts (or the void where such objects would reside) they know that they can’t simply make a dollar worth a certain amount by decree. Added to which is the problem of all these dollars they’ve borrowed from the future with no intent of repaying. The obvious supply-and-demand solution is to create more supply, by simply printing a huge amount of new dollars.

How huge? The U.S. government has printed 80 percent of all dollars in existence today since 2020. They’re trying to conceal the implications by keeping interest rates artificially low. But anyone who has tried to buy a car or gasoline or water or food or clothes or indeed anything at all can see just the beginning of the effects. Inflation isn’t just at 7 percent or 11 percent—the real figure is much, much higher. When this finally balances out, and it may take a year or two, your dollars are going to be worth 20 percent of what they were a few years back, because the government has again confused (I think deliberately) the concepts of money and value. 

We are headed for major economic collapse, and it will happen just as soon as the Republicans get back into office, because that will be the signal the Fed can give up on pretending the economy isn’t dying (it has significantly less trouble raising interest rates when Republicans are in charge). Times are going to be rough, because our government has done a massive damage, an unbelievable amount of stealing and borrowing that we, ultimately, will have to pay for.

The only way out the other end of this total disaster is less government—and I mean dramatically less government. Reduce the size of government by 95 percent, close almost every department, get rid of tax withholding, and reduce the tax rate to what the founding fathers would have found acceptable—which is to say no income tax at all, and some sales taxes to pay for the government’s few necessary functions.

Because wealth is created through labor, creativity, and industry. Why, then, should we tolerate the people who believe only in wealth through theft?

Professor Decries Climate Change as the 'White Colonization of the Atmosphere'

Alex Parker reporting for RedState 

For those imagining the open air as a place to fly free from whiteness, a college professor has wing-clipping news.

Writing for The Conversation, University of Melbourne Professor Erin Fitz-Henry shoots your hopes like skeet.

The Deputy Coordinator for U of M’s Anthropology, Development Studies & Social Theory department doesn’t mince words.

According to Erin:

Climate change is white colonization of the atmosphere.

She wants you to recognize what’s been recognized:

“Climate change is racist”. So reads the title of a recent book by British journalist Jeremy Williams. While this title might seem provocative, it’s long been recognized that people of color suffer disproportionate harms under climate change – and this is likely to worsen in the coming decades.

Rich, white countries, however, are “doing precious little to properly address this inequity.”

And the impact is egregious:

[T]fhey sentence millions of people to premature death, disability or unnecessary hardship. This includes in Australia, where climate change compounds historical wrongs against First Nations communities in many ways.

Erin pegs the “injustice” as “a type of ‘atmospheric colonization.'”

[It] is a form of deeply entrenched colonial racism that arguably represents the most pressing global equity issue of our time.

To be sure, climate change’s effects are “not borne equally between everyone on the planet, and this problem will only worsen.”

Particular victims: black people. Also: black people and other people who aren’t white. Additionally: indigenous people (who are not white):

Black people, people of color and Indigenous people often face the most dire consequences in a warming world.

Erin blames “global warming” for the future tragedy of undernourishment among “half of Africa’s population, due to reduced agricultural production.” This is especially unfair, she explains, since the continent has “contributed relatively little to greenhouse gas emissions.”

And yet, “[R]ich white countries continue to distance themselves from all language of compensation or reparation for both historic and contemporary emissions.”

Of course, particularly purported purveyors of climate calamity are India and China; perhaps they are white as well.

Either way, Erin contends that white countries’ lax attitude “continues long histories of European racism, including the deeply racialized processes of large-scale extraction that fueled and sustained the Industrial Revolution from the outset.”

You can trace it back to slavery:

Sugar plantations throughout the Caribbean were worked for generations by Africans who were enslaved, generating massive profits for Europeans that were then invested and reinvested in energy-intensive industrial infrastructure. This infrastructure helped fuel the global emissions that remain in the atmosphere today.

Amid her climate claims, Erin manages a land acknowledgment:

British industrialization would simply not have been possible without the stolen land and uncompensated labour acquired through colonization and slavery. Compensation for this plunder was never provided.

White-wrought racism has certainly been implicated in a tremendous number of wrongs. Atmos- is only one of many invaded spheres. And everyone’s trying to defeat the devil differently:

Law Professor Denounces the Constitution’s ‘White Supremacy,’ Calls for an ‘Antiracist’ Replacement

CRT Symposium Speaker Calls Diversity of Thought ‘White Supremacist’ Excrement

In Order to Fight White Supremacy, an Actress Vows Not to Star in Cop Shows

Professor Razes the Evil of Writing Rules, Whacks White Supremacy by Gonging Grades

Ohio State Student Government Rep Says Whites Are Taught They’re Superior, but Black People Actually Are

UC Berkeley Professor Told Students Abolishing Whiteness Means Wiping out White People

Erin’s not the first person to wring white supremacy for environmental ills. In 2019, Democratic presidential hopeful Julián Castro decried the racism of weather:

Erin notes that some “European states have begun to take responsibility and provide redress for colonial theft, violence and displacement.” Those actions “are laudable.”

However, “there’s an urgent need to focus this sentiment on climate change — and in particular, to supercharge demands for climate reparations.”

Will such reparations ever occur? Will only white people be forced to pay them, though the “rich” countries have citizens of all shades? After all, governments don’t have money; citizens do.

Such questions remain unanswered.

“Going into [the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference] in November,” Erin says, “negotiators from the US, the EU and Australia must prioritize loss-and-damage finance. Failing to do so will only further solidify climate injustice.”

In the meantime, it seems not only has the climate changed, but words and their meanings as well: Things caused by places that are predominantly white…are racist.

Sanity From Across the Pond on Race Relations

Sarah Lee reporting for RedState 

“What we are against is the teaching of contested political ideas as if they are accepted fact.”

That brilliant quote comes from one Kemi Badenoch, a conservative member of UK Parliment, who was recently highlighted on anti-CRT activist and Manhattan Institute Fellow Chris Rufo’s twitter feed.

“I want to speak about a dangerous trend in race relations that has come far too close to home in my life, and that’s the promotion of critical race theory, that sees my blackness as victimhood and whiteness as oppression… .”

Perhaps more importantly, in this clip, Badenoch speaks about the “statutory duty” of schools in the UK to remain politically neutral but then choosing to support the overtly political, international, “anti-capitalist” Black Lives Matter group.

“Black lives matter, of course they do. But we know that the Black Lives Matter, capital BLM, is political,” Badenoch says.

Apparently the UK, like the U.S., has seen a share of white liberal BLM activists calling black citizens who do not share their support for the Marxist-aligned group the always objectionable n-word.

Badenoch, who has recently seen a rise in popularity within the Tory Party, has a chance to replace Boris Johnson using the culture war as part of her platform. But, reading her leadership plans, American conservatives may see much more of what they support as well. Badenoch sounds postively Thatcherish, albeit updated for a digital age.

Former equalities minister Kemi Badenoch has put herself forward as a candidate to become the new prime minister, promising “limited government” and “a focus on the essentials”.

The MP for Saffron Walden said she supported lower taxes “to boost growth and productivity, and accompanied by tight spending discipline”.

Writing in The Times, she also hit out at “identity politics” and said Boris Johnson was “a symptom of the problems we face, not the cause of them”.

“People are exhausted by platitudes and empty rhetoric. Loving our country, our people or our party is not enough,” she said.

“What’s missing is an intellectual grasp of what is required to run the country in an era of increased polarisation, protectionism and populism amplified by social media.”

She said governing Britain today requires “a nimble centre-right vision” that “can achieve things despite entrenched opposition from a cultural establishment that will not accept that the world has moved on from Blairism”.

Badenoch’s nod toward the problem of schools’ embrace of divisive ideologies such as BLM and CRT should also attract American conservative admiration as that support, as well as a prolonged insistence on COVID lockdown measure for schoolchildren, is largely blamed for what looks to be a tanking of support for the publc school system in the U.S.

Americans’ ​confidence in the US public school system has fallen nearly to the all-time low of 26% recorded in 2014, according to a poll released Thursday that also found the gap between the faith Democrats and Republicans have in the system has expanded.​

Overall, 28% of Americans say they have a “great deal/quite a lot” of confidence in the country’s school systems, barely beating the record low from 2014, a Gallup poll shows.

Trust has been on a downward slide since it hit a high of 62% in 1975 but rebounded slightly to 41% in 2020 at the outset of the coronavirus pandemic.

The rate then plummeted to 32% in 2021 and 28% in 2022.

The survey also indicated the stark political divide between parties — with 43% of Democrats saying they have confidence in the system compared to only 14% of Republicans.

…

The poll suggests the recent controversy over the teaching of critical race theory in public schools — which played a crucial role in Virginia’s gubernatorial election in 2021 — as fueling the divisions.

The poll also indicated that Republicans’ displeasure with the education system has widened dramatically since 2020.

In any event, with the Democrat president’s polling in the toilet, American conservatives hope to make gains in Congress during the 2022 midterm elections and debate has already begun concerning the best candidate to defeat progressives in the 2024 general. Should they succeed, there’s no doubt that having strong conservatives like Badenoch in leadership positions in the UK would be a happy circumstance, indeed.

Glenn Greenwald Ridicules Axios Observation That Democrats 'Are Becoming' Party of Wealthy Elites

Mike Miller reporting for RedState 

Let’s first go bottom-line.

The Democrat Party has, for six decades, done an excellent job building a political model by which wealthy elites (see: George Soros, et al.) manipulate useful idiots (principally, Democrat politicians and liberal media sock puppets) who in turn do whatever is necessary to program (lie their asses off to) low-information voters— many of them willfully so — to support initiatives solely constructed to keep the elites in power.

Lyndon Baines Johnson’s so-called “War on Poverty” — a colossal failure that led far more people into poverty than out of it — illustrates the above two objectives perfectly.

The Democrat elitist goal of not only creating a permanent majority underclass but a majority underclass that would “permanently” vote Democrat was achieved — spectacularly so. The vast majority of black voters have, for sixty years, dutifully gone to the polls and voted straight Democrat tickets.

Perfect example: While black Americans comprise just 13.4 percent of the total U.S. population, in the 2016 presidential election blacks cast 24 percent of Democratic primary votes — the largest share ever. In the general election, an astonishing 89 percent of black voters supported Hillary Clinton.

Finally, here’s the true genius of the Democrat Party model:

Democrat politicians have convinced the strong majority of black voters that, while they (Democrats) haven’t delivered on most of their promises (which they never intend to deliver in the first place), things would be far worse if the Democrats weren’t around to protect them from the “evil” Republicans.

In summary, what we see above is the upper crust of the Democrat Party exploiting low-information voters solely for the purpose of remaining in power.

Enter, Glenn Greenwald.

Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, among the best on the planet, in my not-so-humble opinion, blasted left-“leaning” Axios on Wednesday over the latter’s “shocking revelation” that the Democrat Party is as I described it above. Almost, that is. As Axios put it in a piece titled The Great Realignment, the Democrats are becoming the party of upscale America.

AXIOS: “We’re seeing a political realignment in real time.” [sic]

“Dems are becoming the party of upscale voters concerned more about” social issues.

GOP is “quietly building a multiracial coalition of working-class voters.”

Wait— haven’t the Democrats told America for decades that they are the party of the working class? And, by “social issues,” Democrats today primarily refer to on-demand abortion until birth, same-sex marriage, gender, and pronoun self-identification.

Greenwald was just getting started. In reference to a New York Times article titled Republicans Elevate Diverse Recruits in Bide to Win House Majority, he ridiculed the hypocrisy of the “corporate press” for its narrative to the contrary:

While the corporate press pushes the self-serving narrative that the Trump-led GOP is a white supremacist party devoted to implementing a white nationalistic dictatorship, Latino voters are rushing to GOP while GOP has its most diverse class ever in 2022:

The Times article focused in part on Arizona Republican Juan Ciscomani, who is campaigning for a congressional seat with a focus on inflation, border security, and an explicit appeal for unity, in a district evenly populated by Democrat, Republican, and independent voters.

In this respect, Axios was right:

As I reported in December 2021, Hispanic voters are abandoning the Democrat Party in droves. A then-recent poll found that 42 percent of Hispanic Voters have walked away from the Democrats and toward the Republican Party since 2018. That is profound. Warranted as hell, but profound just the same.

In addition, a Rasmussen survey at the time found that 48 percent of Hispanics would support a generic Republican on the ballot if the 2024 presidential election were held “today,” compared to 46 percent for a generic Democrat. Given just three years ago, a yuuge deal indeed.

Translation: The Democrat goal of a permanent majority underclass is not going to happen.

Greenwald correctly noted that the Democrat Party relies on “a slice of well-off socially liberal voters and as such have “a bigger advantage among white college graduates than nonwhite voters” — the exact kind of people who work in national media and hence drive the Democrats’ “false narratives.”

And here’s the key: Without a strong plurality of independent voters and minority voters behind them, the Democrats can push fake news and false narratives to their disingenuous (at best) hearts’ content, and ultimately, freedom-loving Americans will prevail.

The bottom line:

While Axios was correct in its observation that the Republican Party is building a multiracial coalition, like all “good” left-wing “news” outlets, it’s the rest of the story that is newsworthy — which Axios “forgot” to include. Millions of minority voters — including black voters — continue to abandon the Democrats and their decades of hollow promises and bald-faced lies.

Meanwhile, those “upscale voters” appear more concerned with pushing insanity like male menstruation, gender and pronoun self-identification, and on-demand abortion until birth.

Untold numbers of conservatives have shared with me their (fill in the blank) belief, utter frustration, anger, resignation, hopelessness, or realization that America as we know it is lost to the rabid left; that it is too late to save the Ship of State. I get it.

But, while I’m more of a pragmatist — a realist — than a pie-in-the-sky optimist, I reject the notion that it’s too late to save the country we love. While things are likely to worsen before they get better, I believe decent, moral, hard-working America will win out in the end.

Oh, and for starters, let’s not screw up the 2024 presidential election.

Outrage Grows Over Biden Justice Department Using 'Brutish Tactics' Against Trump Supporters

Mike Miller reporting for RedState 

From the beginning — the immediate aftermath, as it were — of the January 6 Capitol riot, charges of law enforcement “mistreatment” of protesters began to swirl on social media and conservative political sites.

Now, according to legal experts, the FBI and the Justice Department continue to violate civil liberties and use “brutish tactics” during politically motivated and highly publicized raids and arrests, against critics of the Biden administration, as reported by Just the News.

Not at all reminiscent of brutal tactics employed by infamous regimes of the past. [sarcasm]

Moreover, as “shockingly” noted by JTN, the targets of these Gestapo-esque tactics appear to have at least one thing in common: support for former President Donald Trump. Who knew?

Alan Dershowitz, noted professor emeritus at Harvard Law School — and a Democrat, mind you — blasted the arrest tactics used against Trump supporters by Christopher Wray’s FBI and Merrick Garland’s DOJ. Dershowitz told Just The News:

Law enforcement seems to be using arrest tactics on Trump supporters that are generally reserved for violent and/or fleeing suspects. They do not seem justified in many of these cases.

Former federal prosecutor John Irving echoed Dershowitz’s legal opinion:

Any sane person should be able to see that the government has been particularly overzealous in exercising its authority in these politically-charged cases. A lack of good judgment damages the credibility of the Justice Department and people’s faith in our institutions.

Incidentally, it should be noted that Irving is the attorney for former Trump White House trade official Peter Navarro. As reported by RedState in early June, Navarro was publicly arrested by FBI agents at Reagan National Airport just outside Washington, D.C., on misdemeanor charges that he acted in contempt of Congress by defying a subpoena from House Democrats’ Jan. 6 committee.

Irving referred to Navarro’s arrest as a perfect example, as transcribed by JTN:

Why would you put a 72-year-old man with no criminal record in leg irons in a public arrest at an airport over a misdemeanor offense, especially when he literally lives across the street from the FBI headquarters building and had been in contact with an FBI agent two days earlier to be cooperative?

This obviously is the kind of case where a defendant would be allowed to voluntarily surrender in court, rather than being the object of a public spectacle.

The tactics used against Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe provided another stark example. As reported by my colleague Jennifer Van Laar in November 2021, FBI agents raided O’Keefe’s home after Project Veritas went public with a report on FBI raids on journalists’ homes. Coincidence?

As noted by JTN, the government was investigating whether Project Veritas stole a diary belonging to then-presidential candidate Biden’s 40-year-old daughter, Ashley Biden. O’Keefe told authorities Biden left behind the diary, along with other belongings, when she moved out of a Delray Beach, Florida, house, which was subsequently occupied by a source who gave the diary to Project Veritas.

Just one problem.

Journalists are generally legally protected by the First Amendment for receiving materials from sources, regardless of how the sources obtained the materials themselves before handing them over to the media.

Christopher Wray and Merrick Garland were unavailable for comment.

Multiple other examples of similar treatment exist, including the pre-dawn raid on the Virginia home of former Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark, as RedState reported in late June. But, let’s ask a larger question:

Given the left’s unbridled hatred of Donald Trump, should anyone be surprised by any of this?

Or should anyone be surprised, given Biden’s stage 4 TDS, and the “track records” of Christopher Wray and Merrick Garland and their respective departments? Consider the following RedState headlines:

Justice Department Targets Americans With New ‘Domestic Terrorism Unit’

Curious How the Department of Justice and FBI Are Trying to Bolster the Failing January 6 Commission, Isn’t It?

There He Goes Again: Merrick Garland’s DOJ Blocks Republican Access to FBI’s Jan. 6 Documents

The bottom line:

More than 750 people have been imprisoned for Jan. 6-related crimes without a trial, noted JTN; the vast majority of whom were not accused of carrying a weapon, assaulting law enforcement, or destroying property. Many didn’t even enter the Capitol building.

Think that through. Does that seem right to you? In America? Regardless of a ridiculous breach of the United States Capitol Building, it wasn’t — and it still isn’t.

Biden Begs The Middle East Nation He Called A ‘Pariah’ To Give Us Oil After He Throttled U.S. Energy

The trip represents an about-face from the president who campaigned in 2019 on making the Saudi state out to be ‘the pariah that they are.’

Tristan Justice reporting for The Federalist

President Joe Biden landed in the Middle East on Wednesday with high hopes for his first visit to the region as commander-in-chief. The agenda included revitalizing a nuclear deal with Iran, pursuing peace in Yemen, and desperately pleading to the Saudis for increased oil production.

While the Biden administration has sought to throw cold water on claims that his first trip to the Arabian Peninsula is an effort to produce more oil, the president himself nearly said as much in The Washington Post. In justifying his upcoming visit with the Saudi crown prince — the same prince the U.S. government says is responsible for the execution of Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi — Biden explained that the nation’s “energy resources are vital for mitigating the impact on global supplies of Russia’s war in Ukraine.”

“This trip comes at a vital time for the region, and it will advance important American interests,” Biden wrote. Presidential pleas to ramp up oil output are an open secret, after repeated calls for increased production were rebuffed by the Arab nation.

The trip also represents an about-face from the president who campaigned in 2019 on making the Saudi state out to be “the pariah that they are” over Khashoggi’s killing the year before. Now Biden writes in the same publication for which Khashoggi worked, “From the start, my aim was to reorient — but not rupture — relations with a country that’s been a strategic partner for 80 years.”

The reality is that Biden is desperate to find global oil reserves ready for market consumption after 18 months spent shutting down American production. From his first day in office, Biden has followed through on his signature campaign pledge to “end fossil fuels.”

Within six months of his inauguration, Biden shut down the Keystone XL Pipeline, killed plans to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and canceled oil and gas projects nationwide with an illegal suspension of new leases on federal lands. Even though the administration has resumed the oil and gas program under the Department of the Interior, the suspension lasted 18 months. Its return featured an 80 percent drop in available acreage and a 50 percent spike in royalty fees, all while White House officials promised to resist new leases.

“President Biden remains absolutely committed to not moving forward with additional drilling on public lands,” assured White House Climate Adviser Gina McCarthy on MSNBC.

As the administration placed blame for rapidly rising oil prices on the Russia-Ukraine war in May, the Interior Department canceled even more drilling projects from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico.

The persistent animosity toward U.S. oil and gas producers has been enough to chill Wall Street investment in the capital- and labor-intensive industry. The suppression of output due to this lack of capital now has Biden begging overseas nations to save the global economy from the entirely self-inflicted crisis of an energy-induced recession. Unsustainably high energy prices are fueling a new era of inflation that’s rising at a 40-year high and growing worse, according to new numbers out from the Department of Labor on Wednesday. A trip to Saudi Arabia, however, is unlikely to do the trick.

Last month, French President Emmanuel Macron tried to warn the president that the major oil-rich Arab countries are already producing at capacity.

“[The] Saudis can increase by 150 [thousand barrels per day] — maybe a little bit more. But they don’t have huge capacities before six months’ time,” Macron said on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Germany.

A Bloomberg analysis published on Sunday confirms Macron’s warning of slim capacity in the Middle East.

“Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the only members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries [OPEC] with significant volumes of unused output. Together they currently have a buffer of about 3 million barrels a day, official data from the countries indicate,” Bloomberg reported. “That’s about 3% of global oil output. … But the margin of emergency supplies could be even narrower than official figures indicate.”

“The obvious thing for Biden to do is massively ramp up oil and gas production in the U.S. both for domestic use and export,” environmental author Michael Shellenberger explained in a Substack post. “It would be a win for American energy firms and workers, as well as for our allies in Europe and Asia.”

Biden, however, has refused and instead opted for a trip to the Middle East after his “unprecedented” releases from the U.S. emergency petroleum reserves have failed to keep gas prices from reaching record highs. Last month, the nationwide average for a gallon of regular unleaded eclipsed $5. American firms, meanwhile, are struggling to cope with high electricity prices as they near new peaks, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Nearly 1 million barrels from the emergency stockpile landed in China after the Biden administration hampered U.S. refining capacity. While shutting down leases for new drilling operations this spring, the president also blocked a permit for a major refinery in the U.S. Virgin Islands in March.

A visit with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia has become an option of last resort for a president desperate to bring down energy prices ahead of the fall midterms. The November elections are already expected to favor Republicans in a cycle that’s historically hostile to the party in the White House, especially in an environment where the president has a 39 percent approval rating.