Joe Digenova Returns: The Grim Reaper Cometh For The DC Swamp

American Thinker 

It started back in 2019 with an article by Thomas Lifson, co-founder of American Thinker. Lifson highlighted stunning revelations from former U.S. Attorney Joe DiGenova (DC District) about RICO and the Russia Hoax. That piece crystallized what so many sensed: powerful players were bending rules, narratives, and investigations to protect themselves while targeting threats to the status quo.

I wrote to Lifson framing it as evidence of a silent coup—a RICO-style criminal enterprise. He encouraged me to explore using RICO against the Clinton Foundation as a criminal enterprise. I did exactly that, and it marked the beginning of my regular writing for American Thinker—connecting street-level misconduct to larger issues of government overreach and Deep State activity during the Obama and Biden years. That spark helped fuel a reckoning with America’s Truth. Now, years later, Joe DiGenova is positioned to act on those very issues.

Paul Sperry penned an excellent summary at Real Clear Investigations about the push to move the grand conspiracy case from DC to the Southern District of Florida (SDFL) and the addition of DiGenova to lead the team. Sworn in as Counselor to the Attorney General and detailed to the Southern District of Florida (SDFL), DiGenova, a veteran prosecutor, brings decades of experience to advancing the “grand conspiracy” investigation.

The probe examines the coordinated actions—from the Russia investigation origins through Crossfire Hurricane, impeachments, and subsequent lawfare—that many view as a sustained effort to undermine a president and the voters who elected him.

Full Circle on Longstanding Accountability Gaps

This moment feels like a full circle. DiGenova and Victoria Toensing were persistent voices on the 2012 Benghazi attacks (the deadly assault on U.S. facilities in Libya that killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens). Serious questions arose about security decisions, response failures, and transparency at the highest levels of the State Department.

A source with knowledge of the process noted that the Accountability Review Board (here) was structured to limit scrutiny of senior officials, including then-Secretary Hillary Clinton, and focused blame lower down the bureaucracy. This fit a long-standing pattern of protecting the powerful. The cynicism was evident in Clinton’s famous “What difference at this point does it make?” response before the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Those protecting the system needed Clinton to win the 2016 election to provide cover for broader activities underway—including diverting massive taxpayer funds through NGOs.

When Clinton lost, panic set in. Just before the election, a circle of Democrats inside the government launched the Russian Collusion narrative and ran it aggressively through Trump’s entire first term. Legacy media dutifully parroted whatever came from the FBI and CIA.

The FBI had already covered for Clinton’s private email server—a clear violation involving mishandling of classified information that many viewed as espionage-related. Comey’s public claim that “intent” was required, combined with the infamous tarmac meeting between Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, only deepened suspicions that a pre-arranged shield was in place.

The pattern continued: two impeachments built on the same foundation, the 51 former intelligence officials’ letter dismissing Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation (spurred by Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan), FISA court lies and omissions by the FBI to spy on Trump, the LTG Mike Flynn entrapment setup (which happened to others, as well), the Mar-a-Lago raid, and withheld intelligence on China’s election involvement.

Admiral Mike Rogers warned Trump at Trump Tower about the spying and refused to play ball with CIA Director John Brennan and DNI Director James Clapper. (See here.) General David Petraeus took the fall after Benghazi because he wouldn’t go along with the dangerous aspects. Seth Rich’s murder remains the persistent wildcard.

The through-line from Benghazi accountability gaps to the present is unmistakable: protection of insiders, the gravy train of diverted funds, and neutralization of threats to the status quo. The SDFL grand conspiracy investigation now has the tools to connect these dots.

Strategic Division: Smart Prosecutorial Craftsmanship

DiGenova is wisely dividing the grand conspiracy into multiple focused parts rather than one unwieldy case. This avoids procedural chaos and builds stronger components that can link via conspiracy principles. Miami operations and the Fort Pierce grand jury under Judge Aileen Cannon provide solid anchors. It’s targeted craftsmanship built for results.

The Right Man at the Right Time—RICO Potential to Slam the Enterprise

DiGenova is the right person at the right time. His background as a battle-tested U.S. Attorney equips him to cut through layers of institutional self-defense with rigor, clarity, and an unflinching commitment to the rule of law. The framework he is helping build opens the door to powerful tools like RICO statutes.

If the evidence demonstrates an “enterprise” of officials, agencies, and enablers engaged in a pattern of racketeering activity—leaks, misleading FISA processes, selective prosecutions, and repeated efforts to hobble a political opponent—RICO allows tying disparate acts into a cohesive case with serious penalties, extended statutes of limitations, and asset forfeiture.

This isn’t about isolated mistakes or policy disagreements. It’s about confronting a sustained enterprise that often used fraud as a tool to undermine constitutional norms, electoral integrity, and public trust. The phrase “slam the coup” captures the necessary scale: not rhetoric, but rigorous application of law to those who treated it as optional.

High-profile indictments should follow wherever the facts and evidence lead. Foundational decisions from the Obama era, the roles played by figures like Hillary Clinton in shaping and amplifying the Russia narrative, and broader coordination across administrations sit at the core. While grand jury proceedings remain properly sealed, the trajectory is unmistakable: sunlight on actions that affected not just one presidency, but the integrity of American self-government itself.

Signs the Shift Is Real—and Momentum Is Building

This Florida effort does not exist in isolation. Parallel momentum is visible elsewhere. In California, a longtime Newsom ally and appointee, Alexis Podesta, served as an FBI cooperator wearing a wire in a public corruption probe tied to the governor’s former chief of staff, Dana Williamson. That case resulted in a guilty plea on federal fraud and tax charges involving the alleged siphoning of campaign funds. The investigation has since broadened, touching elements of Newsom’s inner circle and raising questions about influence, fund flows, and nonprofit operations.

After years of documented institutional hesitation—from Secret Service failures in Butler to lingering unanswered questions around threats and shooters—we are now seeing the FBI and DOJ deploy proven tools (wires, cooperators, financial tracing, and intercepts) with greater consistency and effect.

Seasoned professionals have stepped up, leaving lucrative law practices to serve as patriots rather than risk-averse bureaucrats. Figures like Harmeet Dhillon (Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights) exemplify this commitment. It’s noteworthy that lawyers who represented Trump in the 2020 election, such as John Eastman, faced severe professional repercussions—including disbarment by the California Bar Association and being shunned by elite law firms—highlighting the risks attorneys encounter when they challenge the establishment or represent clients targeted by woke bar associations.

Expect continued developments: additional subpoenas, witness testimony, and charges that test whether the system can finally deliver impartial justice after years of selective blindness. The American people have waited long enough. The grand conspiracy probe, under experienced and determined leadership, is positioned to deliver long-overdue answers.

For more on these patterns, see my prior American Thinker investigative reporting on FISA abuses, the Russia hoax timeline, and related institutional failures.

Truth, as always, will prevail. May God save the republic.

Podcast thread for July 10

 

Zzzzzzzz...

The Return of Socialism and the GOP's Golden Opportunity

Townhall 

The Democrat Party has come a long way since Bill Clinton was president — and not in a good way.

In 1993, the first year of the Clinton presidency, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) introduced legislation to end automatic birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens; today, Democrats routinely call to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement and advocate for illegal alien suffrage. Clinton famously called for abortion to be "safe and legal but rare"; today, Democrats prefer to "shout your abortion" as a perverse badge of honor. On marriage, Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act to define the union under federal law as one man and one woman; today, Democrats struggle to even tell us what a woman is, and polyamory now lurks as the next frontier in social experimentation.

But of all the issues where the Democrat Party has moved sharply to the left since the Clinton era, perhaps none is more notable than economic policy. During his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton famously declared that "the era of big government is over." And he acted on that impulse too: Clinton signed the most transformative welfare reform law in a generation, deregulated Wall Street, slashed taxes on capital gains, and ended his presidency by presiding over consecutive balanced federal budgets. Clinton was greatly assisted by the dot-com boom and a fiscally conservative Congress, but facts are still facts.

When it comes to economic policy, today's Democrat Party looks absolutely nothing like its more moderate 1990s-era forebear.

What began as an incipient Barack Obama-era trend toward big government has now, during the post-Joe Biden era, emerged as a strong majority sentiment. A Gallup poll last September found that 42 percent of Democratshave a positive view of capitalism, while a whopping 66 percent hold a positive view of socialism. Leading kingmakers in today's Democratic Party are (literal) Soviet Union-honeymooning communists, like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), or leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). And the singular party top dog right now is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is fond of quoting Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto," speaks of the "warmth of collectivism," and is now implementing city-owned grocery stores across the Big Apple.

That is some serious intellectual whiplash.

Hold aside that communism is the single deadliest ideology in the history of mankind — responsible, historians estimate, for nearly 100 million deaths. Hold aside, as well, that socialism and communism have resulted in horrific resource scarcity and immeasurable immiseration everywhere they have been attempted. At the most basic level, socialism is simply contrary to human nature. Men have a natural right to the fruits of their labor, provided those fruits do not undermine the common good. And it is natural, contrary to the basic tenets of socialism, to value the flourishing of one's family and tribe over that of the polity — let alone the whole world. As Dennis Prager has often noted, socialism violates two of the 10 Commandments: do not steal, and do not covet.

Republicans are presently confused about what exactly they should run on, as they begin to make their case to the American people before this fall's midterm elections. Inflation, while dramatically reduced from its catastrophic Biden-era peak, is still stubbornly higher than it ought to be. The Trump administration is, at least for now, unwilling to finish the campaign it launched against Iran. Republicans have a great story to tell on the issue of crime, but they seem uninterested in telling it. The administration has had tremendous success in stanching illegal immigration, but the GOP's consultant class frets that a focus on immigration would hemorrhage the gains the party has made with Latino voters.

The solution, and the best path the GOP has to defy historical trends and retain both houses of Congress next January, comes in the form of a concerted socialism-centric campaign.

In previous cycles, Republicans might have credibly been accused of fearmongering in running against a "socialist" bogeyman. That is simply not the case anymore — not in a world where third-worldist DSA radicals like Darializa Avila Chevalier and Melat Kiros are knocking off longstanding incumbents in Democratic congressional primaries, and where a vociferous foe of capitalism is the mayor of the nation's commercial center. The threat is here, and the threat is real. Perhaps even more to the point: Latino voters who fled failed socialist hellholes in places like Havana and Caracas don't want that. Middle-class suburban moms concerned about dim job prospects for their children don't want that. And according to Gallup, independents don't want that either.

In an April speech in Austin, Texas, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued that progressivism and American constitutionalism are fundamentally incompatible. He's right. It's also true that socialism — real, genuine socialism — is incompatible with the American way of life as it's been experienced for two and a half centuries. That's a fact — and it's a powerful argument to make in this milestone 250th American birthday year, in particular. Republicans should make that argument passionately and with alacrity.

🎭 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓

 

Welcome to 

The 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓 

Here’s a place to share cartoons, jokes, music, art, nature, 

man-made wonders, and whatever else you can think of. 

No politics or divisive posts on this thread. 

This feature will appear every day at 1pm mountain time. 

‘Judicial Minimalist’ John Roberts Violated Procedures To Write Maximalist Birthplace Citizenship Opinion

The Federalist 

Chief Justice John Roberts has long prided himself on being a judicial minimalist and proceduralist. He wants to preserve the image of the judiciary, and especially the Supreme Court, as an impartial arbiter of cases and controversies.  

Very often, when highly politicized cases connected to Trump have reached the court, Roberts has sought ways to defuse the case without looking like the court picked a side with partisan interest. For example, in the Trump v. U.S. (2024) case about presidential immunity, Roberts led the majority to rule in favor of Trump but tried to make the opinion about the executive as such and not Trump specifically.  

In the recent Learning Resources v. Trump decision from February, Roberts decided against President Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs on the basis, not of constitutional interpretation, but of statutory interpretation. Roberts narrowed the question to the specific statute in question —the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977 — and held the president’s tariffs were not explicitly authorized by the statute. Regardless of the rectitude of this decision, it was the simplest way to rule against Trump and answer the narrowest legal question possible in the case. 

Similarly, if Roberts can find procedural reasons to not rule directly on the merits of a question but instead push it back to the other branches of government or the lower courts, he is often happy to do so. Consider that the Supreme Court handed down the Trump v. CASA (2025) decision last summer, a case that originated from President Trump’s executive order on birthplace citizenship. However, in that opinion, the Roberts court merely settled the procedural question about whether district court judges can issue universal injunctions as relief — though that rebuke of the lower courts has proven basically worthless since — and the court proceeded to send the case back to the lower courts. It proceeded back up through the lower courts almost immediately, resulting in the Supreme Court’s Trump v. Barbara decision a year later on the actual merits of the case and the question of birthplace citizenship.  

Many similar examples abound. The thrust is that Roberts does not want to make it ever appear like the court is taking a substantive stance for some partisan side, but is simply a neutral arbiter applying the “colorblind” law in an objective fashion. Many on the right would easily see through this façade, but Roberts has spent a good part of his career doing everything possible to maintain it. 

Birthplace Citizenship 

Nevertheless, in the Trump v. Barbara decision on birthplace citizenship, Roberts broke with his own habit to write a maximalist opinion attempting to permanently settle the meaning of the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.  

Dissenting Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch both pointed out that there were significant “threshold impediments” that should have barred the respondents from bringing their challenge before the Supreme Court. The respondents managed to get the district court to certify a “class that includes ‘all current or future persons’ subject to the Order indefinitely into the future,” but the court did not verify that every member of this essentially global class of individuals had standing to sue for relief. Justice Thomas also argued the respondents had no lawful right of action to bring this suit. Lastly, the respondents wanted the courts to invalidate the president’s executive order as unconstitutional on its face, which means there are no circumstances in which it could apply constitutionally. However, this is a very demanding standard, which arguably could not be met here, since there are at least some individuals for whom the order could apply constitutionally (e.g., children born to alien armies or to foreign spies) even with the majority’s interpretation. Thomas explained, “The Court, without considering any of these individual circumstances, holds unconstitutional the application of the Citizenship Order in all of them.”  

For the average non-lawyer readers, the key takeaway is that Roberts chose to ignore all these procedural obstacles and instead move ahead with ruling on the constitutionality of the executive order anyway.  

Roberts could have also deferred to Congress, allowing Congress to interpret the meaning of the citizenship clause instead of asserting that to be the prerogative of the judiciary. In fact, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s short opinion (concurring in the judgment but dissenting in the opinion) argued that Roberts and the majority were wrong to interpret the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as they did. Instead, he argued that President Trump’s executive order violated merely a federal statute 8 U.S.C. §1401(a), but did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause. In short, he did not think the president could issue such an order in contravention of the statute, but he argued that Congress can and should amend the statute to solve the problem of birthright citizenship in our era of mass migration. A minimalist approach could have seen Roberts following the path of Kavanaugh and siding against Trump on statutory grounds instead of constitutional ones.  

Yet this did not happen. Jumping over these hurdles outlined by Thomas, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh, Chief Justice Roberts led the majority (which included the three most liberal justices on the court) in writing a maximalist opinion. Roberts’ opinion claimed to clarify the substantive meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause and held that the clause requires birthplace citizenship for any child born within American territory, even if the parents are illegal aliens, birth tourists, or foreign citizens owing allegiance to another nation. Clearly, Roberts wanted to preclude this question being revisited in future by other branches of government.  

This is also evident in the way he whitewashes the history, evidence, and precedents to make it appear as if his understanding of birthplace citizenship is univocally acknowledged in American legal and political history. Thomas and Alito exposed this in their erudite dissents, making a much fuller and more rigorous study of the evidence from the founding era through the Reconstruction era amendments and into the 20th century. Thomas especially shows that the majority simply lies about the history and presents it as simplistic and one-sided. In fact, Thomas cites far more evidence in favor of his opinion (upholding President Trump’s position) than does the majority in support of theirs. 

‘Now Let Him Enforce It’ 

In sum, in Trump v. Barbara, the chief justice let slip his façade. If he wanted to preserve the legitimacy of the judiciary and find a minimalist path, he could have deferred to Congress or even found ways to dismiss the case upon standing grounds or narrow the holding of the decision. Instead, he showed that he was determined to hear this case regardless of any “threshold impediments,” to side against President Trump, and to permanently settle this question of constitutional interpretation.  

Given the courts are political actors and that they have weighed in to settle this question in a way detrimental to American sovereignty, the appropriate response is for the other political branches — President Trump and the Republican-led Congress — to push back. They need not acquiesce in this interpretation, and they should do is necessary to reassert American sovereignty. The Supreme Court is not the only department of the federal government that can exercise constitutional interpretation, nor should its word be final, especially in cases where its decisions grossly err. This fight is far from over. 

Trump’s DOJ Is The Most Transparent, Shining A Light On Dark Biden-Era Secrets

The Federalist 

Wednesday’s release of the latest bombshell documents exposing the corruption and hypocrisy that defined Joe Biden’s weaponized Department of Justice is another good sign that the Trump DOJ remains committed to transparency and accountability. 

The senator who made the communications public said he couldn’t have done so without the continued cooperation of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and his staff.

‘Violation and Incident’

As The Federalist’s Brianna Lyman reported on Wednesday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley released another round of records suggesting the Biden DOJ mishandled classified documents as Special Counsel Jack Smith — the left’s unlawfully appointed errand boy — pushed his case alleging that then-citizen Donald Trump mishandled classified information. 

Messages from DOJ staff and Smith’s team point to careless handling of top secret documents, disregard for critical procedures, and a flippancy from law enforcement officials itching to knock Trump out of the political arena. 

In a letter to Blanche, Grassley notes concerns that an individual was given access to classified materials without confirming the required “need to know” condition. The Iowa Republican wrote that there was “at least one instance” in which the potential movement of classified materials retrieved by the special counsel’s office was unaccounted for, and a “violation and incident” occurred when a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) “was left open at least overnight and potentially longer.” 

In a series of messages between Carli Rodriguez-Feo, who worked in the Justice Department’s Litigation Security Group, and Smith team member Julie Edelstein, the two chat about a man identified as “Dan” and how he “just moved forward with clearing someone without the need to know confirmation..”

“‘[W]ere there any concerns’ … don’t care if there were!” Rodriguez-Feo wrote in a message dated Oct. 16, 2023. 

Edelstein “became involved in the Trump-related documents case even before Smith was appointed special counsel,” according to ABC News’ 2023 profile piece on Smith’s special counsel team. In 2005-06, while in law school, Edelstein “interned for the House Homeland Security Committee, working with the top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi,” according to the news outlet. 

Grassley said the communications appear to be related to Smith’s investigation into Trump’s confidential documents case. Smith simultaneously led the left-wing vendetta campaign to convict the president of trying to overturn the rigged 2020 presidential election. 

‘To Put Trump in Prison’

In an interview Wednesday on NewsRadio 1040 WHO in Des Moines, Grassley told me that his committee obtained the records from the Department of Justice. Iowa’s eight-term senior senator said he has worked in an oversight capacity with seven presidents and Trump’s DOJ has been the most cooperative. 

“I’ve had so many investigations that fall into this category of not having documents given to us,” Grassley said of other administrations. 

“So I want to compliment Trump and his people for cooperating with me because making this stuff public, transparency brings accountability,” the Judiciary Committee chairman added. “This is history, but if this stuff isn’t made known to the American people it could go on and on and on and get lost in the big bowels of bureaucracy. And we can’t have stuff like this going on — handling classified documents in this way and violating classified document laws just to put president trump in prison.”

In October, the Judiciary Committee released an explosive FBI document that showed the Biden administration’s FBI targeted the personal cell phones’ “tolling data” of several Republican lawmakers, including eight senators, as part of its corrupt Arctic Frost investigation. The Biden FBI tried to bury the records in a Prohibited Access file. Trump’s FBI released the information to Grassley and his committee. 

A month before, Grassley released records showing how former FBI Director Christopher Wray “sought to place under political investigation” the Democratic Party’s political enemies, including the Republican National Committee, Republican Attorneys General Association and Trump political groups. Nearly 100  Republican targets in total swept up in the Arctic Frost witch hunt, Grassley said. 

Grassley praised Trump FBI Director Kash Patel for correcting whistleblower retaliation and increasing transparency “more than any other FBI Director I’ve seen.”

The accomplice media scoff at such praise for the president and administration they love to hate. Dutifully parroting the Democrats’ talking points, they accuse Trump of weaponizing his DOJ to target his political enemies — precisely what the Biden Justice Department did over four long years. 

‘We Ought to Thank Him for That’

Yes, Trump has an ax to grind. After spending most of the Biden years being harassed, sued, investigated, indicted, arrested, prosecuted, persecuted, ejected from the ballot and shot at, the grinding is understandable. 

He wants accountability for bad actors in the government. So do the American people. Justice for the unjust in the Biden Department of Justice. 

As Grassley noted in his letter to Blanche, Trump watched as Barack Obama’s FBI Director James Comey refused to prosecute 2016 Democrat presidential candidate and wretched shrew Hillary Clinton for clearly mishandling highly classified material. 

“Not only did the Obama Justice Department not prosecute, but — as shown by the records that have since been declassified — the Obama FBI also failed to fully investigate necessary leads,” Grassley wrote. 

Biden’s DOJ refused to prosecute his decades-long mishandling of highly classified records even though the Department determined evidence showed “that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials,” Grassley wrote. Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report found that Biden willfully retained the records (some in his garage) but declined to press criminal charges because Biden would seem to a jury a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Unlike his predecessors, the president isn’t interested in currying favor and playing nice with the monstrous deep state. That has cost him some political bumps and bruises, but it’s also delivered much-need reforms, removal of rotten apples, and, to a small degree, consequences for corrupt lawfare agents.  

“But the fact that he’s been able to bring some transparency to government is a tribute to his independence, a tribute to how he loves America, a tribute to how he wants to keep government within its constitutional bounds and we ought to thank him for that,” Grassley said. 

The senator does have a little advice for Trump: “I wish the president would step in and tell his CIA director, ‘Give Grassley what he needs.'”

His committee has had all kinds of trouble obtaining crucial documents from the intelligence committee, the CIA specifically, Grassley said. He declined to go into specifics. 

“When you deal with the CIA it’s a totally different thing because they’re going to be overly protective of how they do things,” he said. “But this stuff, we know, has no business not being released.” 

Trump’s Immigration Enforcement Really Is Slashing Violent Crime

The Federalist 

Is crime falling? Some conservatives, notably Steve Bannon, argue that Americans should ignore the FBI’s crime statistics showing record drops in violent crime. The murder rate last year fell to the lowest rate ever recorded, and the violent crime rate is clearly at the lowest in many decades. But Bannon recently declared that “nobody believes” FBI crime data or its director, Kash Patel, adding: “I don’t want to hear any more statistics about how crime’s coming down.”

That skepticism overlooks an important distinction.

The FBI has made mistakes in the past, particularly in its active shooter reports and hate crime data. Some police departments have also failed to report complete crime data to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. But those problems do not explain the concerns with the measure of overall crime.

The real issue is understanding what different crime measures actually tell us. Past problems with the FBI’s measure of crimes reported to police do not mean anyone manipulated the data. Nor do they mean that last year’s reported decline in crime — or the declines so far this year — are inaccurate.

The United States has two primary measures of violent crime. The FBI tracks crimes reported to police. The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) estimates both reported and unreported crime. Researchers have known for decades that most crimes never reach the police. Victims report only about 40 percent of violent crimes and roughly 30 percent of property crimes.

The media focuses almost exclusively on FBI crime data. Before 2020, FBI data and the NCVS generally moved in the same direction. During the Biden administration, however, they sharply diverged. While reported violent crime fell by about 8 percent, total felony violent crime measured by the NCVS surged 59 percent — the largest four-year percentage increase since the survey began more than five decades ago.

Several factors explain that gap. Whether victims report crimes depends heavily on whether they believe police will catch and punish offenders. As cities reduced police staffing through budget cuts, retirements, and, in some places, “defund the police” policies, arrest rates declined. Lower arrest rates gave victims less reason to report crimes.

Some police departments also made reporting more difficult. In some jurisdictions, 911 operators asked whether the offender was still at the scene. If the answer was no — as it almost always was — they instructed victims to visit a police station later to file a report. Simply calling 911 does not place a crime in the FBI’s statistics; an officer must complete an official report. When governments make reporting more burdensome, some victims understandably decide it isn’t worth the effort.

Fortunately, many of those policies have been reversed.

Although reported crime has declined, we will not know whether total crime also fell in 2025 until the Bureau of Justice Statistics releases the next NCVS this September.

Even so, there is good reason for optimism.

Reducing crime is not complicated. Governments must make crime riskier by increasing arrests and convictions, imposing longer prison sentences, and allowing law-abiding citizens to defend themselves. The news on each of those fronts has been encouraging.

FBI arrests surged in 2025, rising 184 percent over 2024 levels. Total FBI arrests — a broader category that includes many joint operations with state and local agencies — increased by 197 percent.

Voters also replaced several George Soros-backed prosecutors in jurisdictions such as Los Angeles and San Francisco with district attorneys who prosecute criminals more aggressively and seek tougher sentences. Across the country, President Trump’s U.S. attorneys have also pursued criminals far more aggressively than their predecessors. In Washington, D.C., for example, the Biden administration’s U.S. Attorney declined to prosecute 67 percent of those arrested. Under U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, that figure has fallen to just 4 percent.

Nor is it a coincidence that the record influx of illegal immigrants during the Biden administration coincided with a sharp increase in violent crime. It is equally unsurprising that crime has fallen as deportations have increased. Deportation records show that 70 percent of illegal immigrants deported during the Trump administration had either criminal convictions or pending criminal charges in the United States. Even those who avoid arrest understand that any contact with law enforcement could lead to deportation, giving them a strong incentive to stay off the police’s radar and avoid committing additional crimes.

Finally, the number of adults carrying concealed handguns has risen sharply, with the latest survey data showing a 5-percentage-point increase in concealed carry over the past year and a half.

Americans shouldn’t blindly accept crime statistics, but they need to understand what the different numbers actually measure. The FBI’s numbers show that reported crime has fallen dramatically, while the NCVS will tell us this September whether total violent crime has also declined. Stronger law enforcement, more aggressive prosecution, and greater accountability provide good reasons to expect that the encouraging trend in reported crime reflects a real improvement in public safety.

Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros Says This Is Needed to 'Tackle White Supremacy'

Townhall 

The Democratic Party has pushed for slavery reparations for years. They demand that people who never owned slaves give millions of dollars to people who never were slaves, and they call it fairness and equity. What it really is is a massive wealth transfer from a group they hate — white Americans — to the minority groups they like.

In San Francisco, $5 million per person in cash reparations isn't enough. Leftists issued a laundry list of other demands including debt forgiveness, 250 years of tax abatement, income subsidies, Black banks, a Black land and building acquisition trust, city-paid Black condo fees, and Black-run community centers.

Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros, who is running for Congress in Colorado, said we need reparations to 'tackle white supremacy' and 'quantify racism.'

"One of the things that brought me into starting my PhD program was finally coming to the realization that we were never going to be able to tackle white supremacy in the way that we need to without reparations," Kiros said. "There is no way to truly heal and to progress and move on from acts of such cruel systemic violence against an entire group of people without at the very least acknowledgment of it in a meaningful way."

That's (D)ifferent.

White supremacy isn't a thing.

We'd love to see Kiros answer that question.

This is it. It's all about punishing the groups socialists don't like and taking wealth from us.

Yes. And we need to keep this in mind.