Author Topic: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State  (Read 347336 times)


ccp

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1101 on: October 22, 2021, 01:29:29 PM »
"Merrick Garland testified -- or testilied, really-- in Congress yesterday."

Eric holder on steroids

to think our chief law enforcements sit there and lie and play dumb
and claim they are not political when obviously they are

and to think this guy was almost a Supreme Court Justice!

he is just a tool of the LEFT just like J'Biden



ccp

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national school board head named to new post
« Reply #1104 on: October 26, 2021, 03:06:32 PM »
or is an additional post?:

https://nypost.com/2021/10/26/viola-garcia-to-sit-on-national-assessment-governing-board/

the usual Leftist middle finger the nation
with wack a mole games

this is not a "club"

it is a *mob"

akin to mafia




G M

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G M

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ccp

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1109 on: November 05, 2021, 04:14:28 PM »
"FBI Raids Project Veritas Reporters' Apartments, Because Someone Offered Them What Might Or Might Not Have Been Joe Biden's Daughter's Diary"

suddenly this is a crime?  worthy of an FBI raid?

after all the left wing leaks to the news media?

sounds like the gestapo to me

G M

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1110 on: November 05, 2021, 04:24:55 PM »
"FBI Raids Project Veritas Reporters' Apartments, Because Someone Offered Them What Might Or Might Not Have Been Joe Biden's Daughter's Diary"

suddenly this is a crime?  worthy of an FBI raid?

after all the left wing leaks to the news media?

sounds like the gestapo to me

At least they arrested all those Antifa and BLM rioters!

Oh wait, they KNEELED to BLM.

Sorry, my mistake.

https://saraacarter.com/blog/2020/06/06/why-the-fbi-shouldnt-take-a-knee-but-did-concerns-mount-over-fbis-role-in-protests/



Crafty_Dog

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1113 on: November 06, 2021, 09:18:47 AM »
People Tied to Project Veritas Scrutinized in Theft of Diary From Biden’s Daughter
The F.B.I. carried out search warrants in New York as part of a Justice Department investigation into how pages from Ashley Biden’s journal came to be published by a right wing website.



James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla., in February.
James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Fla., in February.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Michael S. SchmidtWilliam K. RashbaumPrecious FondrenAdam Goldman
By Michael S. Schmidt, William K. Rashbaum, Precious Fondren and Adam Goldman
Nov. 5, 2021

The Justice Department searched two locations associated with the conservative group Project Veritas as part of an investigation into how a diary stolen from President Biden’s daughter, Ashley, came to be publicly disclosed a week and a half before the 2020 presidential election, according to people briefed on the matter.

Federal agents in New York conducted the court-ordered searches on Thursday — one in New York City and one in suburban Westchester County — targeting people who had worked with the group and its leader, James O’Keefe, according to two of the people briefed on the events. The investigation is being handled by F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors in Manhattan who work on public corruption matters, the people said.

After this article was initially published online on Friday, Mr. O’Keefe put out a video confirming that current and former Project Veritas employees had their homes searched on Thursday.

He said the group had recently received a grand jury subpoena and acknowledged that Project Veritas had been involved in discussions with sources about the diary. But he offered a lengthy defense of his group’s handling of the diary, saying that he and his colleagues had been operating as ethical journalists.


“It appears the Southern District of New York now has journalists in their sights for the supposed crime of doing their jobs lawfully and honestly,” Mr. O’Keefe said, referring to federal prosecutors in Manhattan. “Our efforts were the stuff of responsible, ethical journalism and we are in no doubt that Project Veritas acted properly at each and every step.”

Project Veritas did not publish Ms. Biden’s diary, but dozens of handwritten pages from it were posted on a right wing website on Oct. 24, 2020, at a time when President Donald J. Trump was seeking to undermine Mr. Biden’s credibility by portraying his son, Hunter, as engaging in corrupt business dealings. The posting was largely ignored by other conservative outlets and the mainstream media.


The website said it had obtained the diary from a whistle-blower who worked for a media organization that refused to publish a story about it before the election. It claimed to know where the actual diary was located and that the whistle-blower had an audio recording of Ms. Biden admitting it was hers.

The Trump administration Justice Department, then led by Attorney General William P. Barr, opened an investigation into the matter shortly after a representative of the Biden family reported to federal authorities in October 2020 that several of Ms. Biden’s personal items had been stolen in a burglary, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Mr. O’Keefe said in the video that “tipsters” had reached out to Project Veritas in 2020 to alert them to the existence of the diary, saying that they had stayed in a room that Ms. Biden had recently been in. But Mr. O’Keefe said that his group could not authenticate the diary and made an “ethical” decision to not publish it.



He said that Project Veritas gave the diary to “law enforcement” and attempted to return it to a lawyer representing Ms. Biden, who he said “refused to authenticate it.” Mr. O’Keefe portrayed the investigation as politically motivated, questioning why the Justice Department under Ms. Biden’s father was pursuing the case.

In recent weeks, federal investigators have reached out to at least one person who worked for Project Veritas to question that person about the diary, one of the people briefed on the case said.

Project Veritas has a history of targeting Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations, news media and others. The group conducts sting operations, using hidden cameras and fake identities. At one point, Project Veritas relied on a former British spy named Richard Seddon to help train its operatives, teaching them espionage tactics such as using deception to secure information from potential targets.

Flyover Media, the company that owns the website that published the pages from the diary, is registered to the same Sheridan, Wyo., address as Mr. Seddon’s company, Branch Six Consulting International. Mr. O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, was once the president of a company that later registered at the same address.


Project Veritas has a pending libel suit against The New York Times over a 2020 story about a video the group made alleging voter fraud in Minnesota.

Ms. Biden, 40, is Mr. Biden’s youngest child. She has maintained a low profile and attracted far less attention than Hunter Biden, her half brother. In 2019, Mr. Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine at the same time he pressured that country’s president for support in investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings, leading to Mr. Trump’s first impeachment.



An F.B.I. spokesman in New York would not comment on the investigation, saying only that agents had “performed law enforcement activity related to an ongoing investigation” at two locations. One of the searches took place in an apartment on East 35th Street near the Midtown Tunnel and the other in Mamaroneck, N.Y., north of New York City.



A spokesman for the United States Attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment.

In Manhattan, a neighbor a floor above the apartment that was searched on East 35th Street said she was woken out of her sleep early Thursday morning by agents pounding on a door and repeatedly shouting “Open Up!” and “F.B.I.!”

“I thought it was a joke,” said the neighbor, Mychael Green, 23. “For 10 minutes they were knocking on his door obviously really loud,” and eventually forced their way into the apartment, Ms. Green said. Hours later, the doorjamb was clearly broken and the door was hanging ajar.

Spencer Meads, the longtime Project Veritas operative and confidante of Mr. O’Keefe, has lived in that apartment since 2019, according to public records.

Ms. Green said that the agents were yelling “Spencer, open up!”

A former Project Veritas employee said that Mr. Meads had been involved in recruiting operatives. A website that tracks Project Veritas operatives said that Mr. Meads had also been involved in undercover operations for the group.

Mr. Meads did not respond to an email and a text message seeking comment.

The Justice Department finds itself in a highly unusual situation in regards to Mr. Biden’s children. Not only is it investigating the case of Ms. Biden’s diary, but Hunter Biden disclosed last year that Justice Department prosecutors in Delaware were investigating his taxes.

The pages were posted online under the byline of Patrick Howley, a reporter who has worked for several conservative outlets in recent years. He was the first to disclose a yearbook photo from the page of Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia that showed one individual in a Ku Klux Klan outfit and another individual in blackface.



Mr. Howley also disclosed damaging text messages between Cal Cunningham, a Democrat running for Senate in North Carolina, and a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair.

While the disclosure of Ms. Biden’s diary was largely ignored, some far right outlets and supporters of Mr. Trump jumped on the news of the diary as further evidence that Mr. Biden was unfit to be president. Alex Jones, a prominent far right radio host, brought up the diary on an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast.

Mr. Trump used Twitter to send or promote positive comments about Project Veritas at least six times in the last two years of his presidency. Mr. Trump boosted Project Veritas content even before he became president, and shortly after he announced his campaign for president in 2015, Mr. O’Keefe visited Trump Tower and showed Mr. Trump footage he was intending to release to damage Hillary Clinton, the most likely Democratic nominee.

In 2016, a Project Veritas operative infiltrated Democracy Partners, a political consulting firm, using a fake name, fabricated résumé and made secret recordings of the staff.

Democracy Partners later sued Project Veritas. In a ruling last month in the lawsuit, U.S. District Court Judge Paul L. Friedman said that Democracy Partners could refer to the conduct by Project Veritas as a “political spying operation” in the upcoming trial.

Kitty Bennett and Matthew Cullen contributed research.


An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the steps that Project Veritas said it took in dealing with the diary. In a video, the group's founder, James O'Keefe, said Project Veritas had returned the diary to law enforcement and had attempted to return it to a lawyer for Ashley Biden. He did not say that the group had attempted to return it to the Justice Department and a lawyer for Ms. Biden.

Michael S. Schmidt is a Washington correspondent covering national security and federal investigations. He was part of two teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2018 — one for reporting on workplace sexual harassment and the other for coverage of President Trump and his campaign’s ties to Russia. @NYTMike

William K. Rashbaum is a senior writer on the Metro desk, where he covers political and municipal corruption, courts, terrorism and law enforcement. He was a part of the team awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. @WRashbaum • Facebook

Adam Goldman reports on the F.B.I. and national security from Washington, D.C., and is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. He is the coauthor of “Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden's Final Plot Against America.”  @adamgoldmanNYT

G M

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1114 on: November 06, 2021, 09:47:43 AM »
"Flyover Media, the company that owns the website that published the pages from the diary, is registered to the same Sheridan, Wyo., address as Mr. Seddon’s company, Branch Six Consulting International. Mr. O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, was once the president of a company that later registered at the same address."

Only someone ignorant of Wyoming corporate laws or someone intending to be deceptive would say the above.

G M

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How does the FBI have jurisdiction?
« Reply #1115 on: November 06, 2021, 10:01:11 AM »
How would the theft of a diary be a federal matter? I haven't found a copy of the search warrants in the Veritas linked case. They would cite the applicable statutes. They may currently be under seal.

Inadvertently, this action by the feds tends to validate that the diary was legitimate.

https://nationalfile.com/bombshell-new-york-times-fbi-confirm-legitimacy-of-ashley-biden-diary/

ccp

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1116 on: November 06, 2021, 10:57:18 AM »
anything good in the diary?

G M

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1117 on: November 06, 2021, 11:06:34 AM »
anything good in the diary?

She claimed she was sexually molested as a child (Hunter?) and her dad (Pedo Joe Biden) used to take "inappropriate showers" with her.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1118 on: November 06, 2021, 12:55:21 PM »
Whoa!

Do we have any citations for that?


Crafty_Dog

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1120 on: November 06, 2021, 04:24:37 PM »
Whoop!  There it is!






ccp

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FBI is corrupt
« Reply #1126 on: November 12, 2021, 06:02:38 AM »
" The New York Times reveal the extent to which the group has worked with its lawyers to gauge how far its deceptive reporting practices can go before running afoul of federal laws."

is this not a good thing?
PV is trying to stay legal.

UNLIKE THE NYT THAT GETS ILLEGALLY LEAKED MATERIAL ALL THE TIME AND TURNS AROUND AND PRINTS IT , and 98% OF THE TIME IT IS IN FAVOR OF DEMOCRATS.

This was not about a diary
it is a political hit plain and simple
targeting political enemies and
establishing lists of sources contacts
and then the surveillance begins.



« Last Edit: November 12, 2021, 06:04:49 AM by ccp »

G M

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Best I can do is...
« Reply #1127 on: November 12, 2021, 09:19:18 AM »



G M

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National School Board Association Changed Language In Its "Domestic Terrorism"
« Reply #1130 on: November 12, 2021, 10:47:14 AM »
National School Board Association Changed Language In Its "Domestic Terrorism" Letter At White House's Suggestion, FOIA'd Emails Reveal

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/396466.php

Crafty_Dog

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1131 on: November 12, 2021, 12:49:17 PM »
 :x :x :x

ccp

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Obama judge ruled against FBI !
« Reply #1132 on: November 12, 2021, 01:02:04 PM »
moved to correct thread  :-D:

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/11/11/breaking-judge-orders-fbi-to-stop-search-of-project-veritas-founder-okeefes-phone-following-raid-n1532173

shocking

even an Obamster judge
calls this out

Wray et al, involved in this need to be first on the "need fire list"
as soon as Repubs get back into the driver's seat ( if we do)

DougMacG

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Re: Obama judge ruled against FBI !
« Reply #1133 on: November 12, 2021, 04:58:01 PM »
O'Keefe is right; his people have to operate within the law.  That said, he is my journalist hero.  His brand of embedded, domestic reporting is exactly what we need - at inner city vote count operations for example.

Good for this judge, if what happened is he had the courage to do the right thing no matter who it benefits.



Crafty_Dog

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1136 on: November 12, 2021, 07:16:59 PM »
Agreed, yet this statement by Wray is to the good.

G M

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1137 on: November 12, 2021, 07:31:26 PM »
Agreed, yet this statement by Wray is to the good.

I think it’s been well established that Wray is a f’ing liar.

https://www.bostonherald.com/2021/09/25/howie-carr-abolish-the-fbi-you-heard-it-here-first/amp/

reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN2AU22P


DougMacG

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Re: FBI leaks to the NYT
« Reply #1139 on: November 15, 2021, 08:50:33 AM »

G M

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Re: FBI leaks to the NYT
« Reply #1140 on: November 15, 2021, 12:20:12 PM »

Crafty_Dog

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1141 on: November 15, 2021, 02:31:53 PM »
The FBI and the New York Times Collude against Project Veritas
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
November 12, 2021 7:59 PM


Left to right: FBI building in Washington, D.C.; Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe at CPAC in 2019; the New York Times building in New York City. (Aaron P. Bernstein, Yuri Gripas, Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)
You don’t need to love Project Veritas to be offended by the blatant government leaking of confidential information and the Times’ hypocritical coverage.


Want to understand how outrageous Friday’s New York Times coverage of the FBI’s seizure of Project Veritas’s proprietary documents is? Just imagine what the Times would be saying if what is happening to PV were happening to . . . well . . . the Times itself.

What if federal prosecutors had had the temerity to seek, and managed to obtain, court-authorized search warrants against Times reporters, on the allegation that the paper was in possession of evidence of a crime — perhaps even that some of its reporters were somehow complicit in the crime? The screams of bloody murder from West 40th Street would be audible across America.

Let’s start with the government leaks.

The reason that prosecutors and police are permitted covertly to seek judicial warrants to seize evidence, and that the courts keep the government warrant applications under seal, is that investigations are supposed to be kept confidential. This is to protect people who have not been charged with crimes — their privacy and their presumption of innocence. Government agents are not permitted to publicize such information, much less selectively leak it to the press. The information does not belong to them. They are given a legal privilege to acquire access to it for investigative purposes only.


Moreover, as no one knows better than the Times, there are special considerations when the government targets the press in a search or other information demand. A free-press right is guaranteed in the First Amendment. Amazingly under the circumstances, the Times’ default position — at least when rights of the Times and the rest of the media-Democrat complex are at stake — is that our constitutional system is threatened if the government demands or seizes information from reporters.

In point of fact, this is not true. The First Amendment prohibits the government from telling the press what it can publish — i.e., no prior restraints. Yet members of the media have the same obligations as every person in this country to provide evidence if demanded by a lawful subpoena. The government has the same power to seize evidence from reporters as from ordinary citizens.

Because of the constitutional recognition of free-press rights, the Justice Department (DOJ) has internal guidelines that require high-level approval before prosecutors and the FBI may demand information from the media. The guidelines discourage such demands unless the case is important and there is no alternative source. But that is discretionary government restraint, not mandatory. The media regularly advocate “press shield” laws precisely because the Constitution does not empower journalists to withhold information and guarantee confidentiality to their sources.

So, contrary to a lot of overheated commentary by PV sympathizers in conservative media, it is not a violation of the Constitution for the Justice Department — specifically, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), working with the FBI — to seize documents and other items from PV members. It is stunning, however, to find Times reporters, of all people, cheerleading this investigative gambit and publishing its fruits.

Let’s back up.

Reportedly, the government’s investigation revolves around a diary that was stolen from President Biden’s 40-year-old daughter, Ashley. A website called National File later published what it described as portions and has claimed to have the complete diary.

I confess to being curious about the basis relied on by the Justice Department — evidently, the Trump Justice Department, in October 2020, at then-candidate Biden’s request — to open a criminal investigation. The stealing of personal items from a non-government official is not a federal crime.

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To be clear, I am curious; I am not saying it was necessarily improper for the Justice Department to look into the theft. Joe Biden, at the time, was not just a former vice president, for whose protection the government is responsible; he was running for (and favored to win) the presidency. While we don’t know all the relevant facts, it is thus easy to conjure up legitimate federal interests in the robbery investigation.

Sometimes, for example, there is federal-government jurisdiction for robbery — if, for example, stolen items involve federal-government materials or such interstate-commerce items as narcotics. It could be a federal crime to transfer or sell stolen items in interstate commerce. A theft involving a close family member of a high government official (or candidate for high office) could also be part of a bigger scheme; there could be a federal crime if the robbery of his daughter signaled a threat to Biden’s own safety, perhaps, or an effort to blackmail or extort him.

So we’d be getting out over our skis to pronounce that the FBI and federal prosecutors had no business looking into the robbery. Plus, it’s not like the Justice Department went off on its own hook here. A federal district court judge issued a search warrant. That is only supposed to happen if there is probable cause to believe that a federal crime has occurred (or is occurring) and that the location to be searched probably contains evidence of that crime.

Now, yes, judges sometimes get it wrong on warrants. The vast majority of the time, though, once the pertinent facts are known, it turns out that the judge had a solid legal basis for issuing warrants. And a federal judge knows very well, just as the Justice Department knows very well, that search warrants targeting journalists — even such unconventional journalists as PV staffers — are fraught with constitutional implications. I bet we will learn that the search warrants were sought and granted only after very careful consideration at the FBI, DOJ, and the court. With due respect to PV founder James O’Keefe, we should not assume that his public explanations, which understandably cast PV in a favorable light, are necessarily the whole story here.

All that said, it is not a crime for journalists to come into possession of unlawfully converted documents. And it is to be expected that journalists zealously guard their right to publish such materials — or at least to consider doing so. We see this play out often when Times reporters receive classified leaks from intelligence officials — it being both against the law for government officials to disseminate the information to unauthorized persons, and potentially criminal for the press to publish national-defense secrets (though doubts about constitutionality make such a prosecution highly unlikely).

So why isn’t the press closing ranks around Project Veritas? Because the so-called mainstream media despise PV.

That, too, is to be expected: PV uses against the Left, very much including against left-leaning media, the Left’s own sandbag tactics — e.g., covert investigation, spying informants who pretend to befriend the people they investigate, and selective publication of the fruits of the investigation in order to paint the target in the worst possible light. If Saul Alinsky had been a right-winger, James O’Keefe would be his favorite student. But PV’s unpopularity cannot mean that it does not merit the status of journalist, with all of the free-press protection that status implies.

O’Keefe concedes that PV came into possession of the diary. He says PV elected not to publish it after becoming aware of it through “tipsters.” To the extent that PV had physical custody of the diary, or some part of it, or a copy of it, O’Keefe says, “Project Veritas gave the diary to law enforcement to ensure it could be returned to its rightful owner.”

Regardless of whether that turns out to be a true and complete version of events, it is highly irregular for investigative journalists to be subjected to such intrusive government investigative tactics as search warrants. Furthermore, if what has been reported by the Times is indicative of the scope of the searches permitted by the court, then clearly the warrants were not narrowly tailored to authorize seizure only of evidence related to the stolen diary. To the contrary, the FBI grabbed extensive PV work product and attorney-client communications.

Thus does the Times report today:

Project Veritas has long occupied a gray area between investigative journalism and political spying, and internal documents obtained by The New York Times reveal the extent to which the group has worked with its lawyers to gauge how far its deceptive reporting practices can go before running afoul of federal laws.

The documents, a series of memos written by the group’s lawyer, detail ways for Project Veritas sting operations — which typically diverge from standard journalistic practice by employing people who mask their real identities or create fake ones to infiltrate target organizations — to avoid breaking federal statutes such as the law against lying to government officials.

Two of the Times’ A-team national reporters, Adam Goldman and Mark Mazzetti, then elaborate in detail on advice that PV has received from its lawyer, in connection with PV investigations going back for years. In the main, the advice is what you’d expect: How to navigate the perils of collecting information through ethically questionable tactics that skate along the razor’s edge between the legitimate and the lawless — something you’d be right to suppose that the Times knows a thing or two about.

Significantly, what has been leaked to the Times, and what the Times has editorially chosen to publish, is not confined to the Ashley Biden–diary investigation. The Times is heedless of Project Veritas’s right to counsel and to the constitutionally based confidentiality of its attorney-client communications. Given how the Times would react were the shoe on the other foot, which is hardly inconceivable, this is shocking. Not surprisingly, SDNY judge Analisa Torres, the Obama appointee who issued the search warrants, has now abruptly ordered the government to stop extracting materials from the PV operatives’ digital files. Plainly, the Justice Department is running roughshod over PV’s right to counsel.

I can only assume the Gray Lady’s judgment is skewed. It is not so much reporting a newsworthy story as exploiting the opportunity for full-bore scrutiny of PV as a journalistic enterprise. And scrutiny with barely disguised disdain: Because of PV’s political motivations, which the Left finds noxious — which, in fact, have resulted in prominent progressive figures and institutions being targeted, sometimes to their humiliation — PV operatives are somehow unworthy of being regarded as reporters, presumed to enjoy constitutionally driven deference from government investigators.

Judge Torres should be infuriated by the leaks to the Times. And she should do more than merely fulminate.

The judge should order the SDNY’s Biden-appointed U.S. attorney, Damian Williams, to provide the court, immediately, with affidavits detailing communications with the media from every prosecutor, FBI agent, and support staffer who is either involved in the investigation or has had access to the items seized from the current or former PV officials. Judge Torres should ask that Attorney General Merrick Garland immediately refer the matter to Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz for a thorough investigation of how the search-warrant information came to be transmitted to the Times.

Garland and Horowitz should announce that the Justice Department will conduct the investigation requested by the court, and Horowitz should be given the affidavits so his office can hit the ground running. Judge Torres should ask for periodic updates to stress to the Justice Department and FBI that the court is troubled by the government’s apparently pretextual exploitation of coercive judicial processes in order to fuel media coverage. That coverage has imperiled the constitutional rights of PV members to freedom of the press, due process, privacy, and assistance of counsel.

You don’t need to love Project Veritas to be offended by the blatant government leaking of confidential investigative information and by the Times’ hypocritical coverage: the crown jewel of American journalism branding PV as a lower caste, not entitled to the presumptions of privacy and legitimacy that the Times demands for its own information-collection practices.

G M

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DougMacG

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Andrew McCarthy, The FBI and NYT Collude against Project Veritas
« Reply #1143 on: November 15, 2021, 09:46:32 PM »
From the article:

"You don’t need to love Project Veritas to be offended by the blatant government leaking of confidential investigative information and by the Times’ hypocritical coverage: the crown jewel of American journalism branding PV as a lower caste, not entitled to the presumptions of privacy and legitimacy that the Times demands for its own information-collection practices."


Everyone should be offended - but they aren't.

G M

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Re: Andrew McCarthy, The FBI and NYT Collude against Project Veritas
« Reply #1144 on: November 15, 2021, 09:59:01 PM »
From the article:

"You don’t need to love Project Veritas to be offended by the blatant government leaking of confidential investigative information and by the Times’ hypocritical coverage: the crown jewel of American journalism branding PV as a lower caste, not entitled to the presumptions of privacy and legitimacy that the Times demands for its own information-collection practices."


Everyone should be offended - but they aren't.

The left is cheering.


Crafty_Dog

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AMcC: Garland's Bannon Indictment
« Reply #1146 on: November 16, 2021, 07:08:31 PM »
Garland’s Bannon Indictment: A Self-Defeating Act of Politicized Prosecution
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
About Andrew C. McCarthy
Follow Andrew C. McCarthy On Twitter
November 16, 2021 6:30 AM

Left: Attorney General Merrick Garland at the Department of Justice, June 25, 2021. Right: Former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon outside U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., November 15, 2021. (Ken Cedeno, Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
The prosecution will make America’s political divisions worse still.

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Attorney General Merrick Garland waxed self-reverential after indicting Trump confidant Steve Bannon last week. “Since my first day in office,” he droned, “I have promised Justice Department employees that together we would show the American people, by word and deed, that the Department adheres to the rule of law, follows the facts and the law, and pursues equal justice under the law. Today’s charges reflect the Department’s steadfast commitment to these principles.”

No, they don’t. Last Friday’s indictment of Bannon for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena is a sop to the Democrats’ Trump-deranged base.

The criminal-contempt charges, on which Bannon surrendered on Monday, stem from a House January 6 Committee subpoena directing him to testify and produce documents. The Justice Department has rarely brought such an indictment in American history and hasn’t tried to do so in nearly 40 years. Nor has it escaped notice that DOJ has shown no interest in prosecuting government officials who, for example, misled the FISA Court on Russiagate or refused to cooperate in Congress’s probe of such Obama-era scandals as the IRS’s harassment of conservative groups and the ATF’s “gun-walking” debacle.

While the Bannon indictment was met with glee in the media-Democrat complex, it will confirm in the minds of half the country that the Biden/Garland Justice Department is a crude weapon of the political Left — with no real interest in “equal justice under the law.” Politics aside, the indictment is counterproductive, and not just because the case is weak. If the real objective is to obtain Bannon’s testimony about the Capitol riot, then even a stronger indictment at this juncture would have been self-defeating.

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Bannon will fight the case for months, maybe even for a couple of years. And now, he can add his Fifth Amendment privilege to Trump’s still-live executive privilege as a basis for refusing to cooperate. Meantime, the courts are already rapidly ruling against Trump’s privilege claim. That litigation elucidates that (a) Bannon has a legally defensible argument for declining to testify until the courts rule on the privilege claim, but (b) Bannon would lose, and probably soon, if the committee were to press its subpoena in court, as the Supreme Court encouraged Congress to do in last year’s Trump v. Mazars ruling. Thanks to the indictment, though, he is now better positioned to avoid testifying at all.

This is not about Bannon, Donald Trump’s formerly estranged White House adviser, who has groveled his way back from presidential punching bag to pardon grantee to Mar-a-Lago courtier. The issue here is the politicization of the Justice Department.

Bannon v. J-6 Committee on Executive Privilege

Let’s stipulate that executive privilege protects from disclosure not just communications between presidents and their advisers, but also the “deliberative process” — i.e., communications between executive subordinates who carry out the president’s policies.

The committee is correct that, even if Trump’s privilege claim were persuasive, much of what it wants to ask Bannon about would not conceivably be covered. Bannon was not a government official during the post-election controversy. Even assuming arguendo that communications between presidents and their private (nongovernment) advisers fit within the privilege’s carapace, the protection would be narrower than for communications involving actual government officials. More to the point, the committee wants to grill Bannon on his own actions and nonpresidential communications; on such matters, an executive-privilege claim is frivolous.

Still, the committee clearly does want to inquire into Bannon’s communications with Trump. In addition, it appears to be taking the legally untenable position that, as a former president, Trump may not assert executive privilege in an effort to block congressional inquiries into his communications during his presidency.

In a perfect world, Bannon would be required to show up for the committee deposition and, on a question-by-question basis, refuse to answer if he believes Trump’s privilege invocation applies, but otherwise respond. Analogously, regarding subpoenaed documents, he should be required to itemize, category by category, documents he is refusing to disclose on privilege grounds, but turn over any responsive documents as to which no privilege arguably applies.

Of course, we’re not in a perfect world: Bannon and Trump have an extravagant notion of what the privilege covers; the committee, on the other extreme, does not believe a former president may assert privilege at all, and even if he arguably may in some instances, he may not with respect to communications with nongovernment officials (such as Bannon was at the relevant time). Plainly, this disagreement is going to have to be sorted out by the judiciary. It would thus be more just and more efficient to get a court ruling before the questioning proceeds. And it is common for committees and prosecutors to litigate privilege claims that way — i.e., to assume that the witness will refuse to answer all questions, rather than going through the motions of making a question-by-question record before proceeding to court.

To be clear, Bannon should lose in the end. He is entitled, however, to argue that the privilege applies and to litigate its application in the courts. That is how due process works. We don’t tell a defendant that he can’t have a trial or move to suppress evidence just because the facts and law appear to be against him. The Justice Department’s obligation is to do justice, not win one for the Democrats. It is the guardian of a system in which we give people their day in court when there is a real legal dispute.

And here, there is such a dispute. Bannon and Trump are not fabricating an executive privilege for former presidents out of whole cloth. They are relying on an explicit, if ill-conceived, Supreme Court opinion.

A Low-Risk Soap Box for Bannon

There are two criminal contempt counts in the indictment. Yet, contrary to DOJ’s bombast, they are just misdemeanors. The indictment is not a real threat to Bannon; it is a low-risk soapbox. For his burgeoning career as MAGA’s media majordomo, the indictment is a coup. On the other side of the equation, Bannon stands a good chance of acquittal (for reasons we’ll come to). Even if he were finally convicted, after a year or two of trial and appeals, he would be facing no more than a month or three in jail.

Ergo, his incentive is to jump with both feet into a public battle against a committee that Republicans overwhelmingly disfavor — seeing it as a partisan hatchet job designed either to persecute Trump (according to the GOP’s pro-Trump faction), or to keep Trump relevant while Biden flails (according to the GOP’s growing “I wish Trump would just fade away” faction).

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Now, why do I say Bannon has a good chance of beating the case? Because a contempt charge is not easy to prove.

The controlling statute requires prosecutors to establish that the defendant acted willfully in defaulting on a congressional subpoena. In any criminal case, the government must establish the defendant’s criminal intent (mens rea) beyond a reasonable doubt. Of the criminal law’s various gradations of mens rea, willfulness is the toughest one to prove. As explained by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the Supreme Court in Ratzlaf v. United States (1995), to demonstrate that a defendant acted willfully, the government must show that he knew what the law required and acted with a bad purpose to disobey that mandate.

With that in mind, let’s turn to the indictment. It recounts that when Bannon refused to produce documents as directed by the subpoena on October 7, 2021, his attorney informed the committee of former President Trump’s instruction that he was asserting executive privilege and that Bannon should withhold testimony and documents “to the fullest extent permitted by law” (emphasis added).

Take note of that, for it is the antithesis of a bad purpose to break the law. Bannon did not say he was unwilling to comply with what the law required. Rather, in subsequently explaining why he would not appear to testify on October 14, Bannon’s counsel advised the committee that his client would stand down “until such time as you reach an agreement with President Trump or receive a court ruling as to the extent, scope and application of executive privilege.”

How could it be willful noncompliance with the law to say, in effect, “I will follow the directive of a court of law” — especially when, as we shall see, the Supreme Court has both invited the privilege claim at issue and indicated that any dispute over its scope is properly resolved by courts?

Bannon’s position is no different from that taken by some Republican witnesses during the House impeachment proceedings in 2019 (e.g., former Trump national-security adviser John Bolton and his deputy, Charles Kupperman). House Democrats grumbled but took no action to censure or sue those witnesses — plainly fearing they’d lose in court.

In other instances, moreover, House Democrats have insisted that sweeping assertions of executive privilege should be resolved by the courts — exactly what Bannon claims here. For example, the House Judiciary Committee went to court to try to force former Trump White House counsel Don McGahn to testify about privileged communications with President Trump in one of its impeachment investigations. And after Biden took office, that committee even acceded to White House demands for strict limitations on what McGahn could be asked — notwithstanding that (a) Trump was no longer in office, and (b) while in office, Trump had waived his privilege to allow McGahn to cooperate with the Mueller probe.

Bannon’s defense has a lot to work with here.

Do Former Presidents Retain Executive Privilege?

As I have explained, I believe the constitutional claim of confidentiality for executive communications, which is rooted in separation of powers, is a privilege that belongs only to the incumbent president. A former president — a private citizen who has no executive power — should not be able to claim a privilege that belongs not to a person (i.e., not even to Joe Biden, who is president at the moment) but to the executive branch of the United States government, to be invoked only by the sitting chief executive.

Thus, if we were writing on a blank slate, I’d agree with the January 6 Committee that former President Trump has no business asserting executive privilege. But we’re not on tabula rasa. The Supreme Court has explicitly said that former presidents retain executive privilege.

To be sure, the scope of this privilege depends on the circumstances, such as the nature and importance of the inquiry, the subject matter of the communications at issue, and whether the incumbent president supports the privilege claim. But the fact that post-presidential executive privilege is a valid claim is not open to credible dispute. In addition, because fixing the scope of the privilege in any particular situation calls for a variegated, fact-intensive inquiry, it is reasonable — and certainly not contemptuous of Congress — to maintain that court intervention is warranted.

A constitutional conservative can empathize with the committee’s exasperation (though not with the Justice Department’s heavy-handedness). Again, former presidents should have no right to claim executive privilege. For the Supreme Court to have said otherwise undermines the unitary executive — the theory that the Constitution reposes all executive power in one officer, the president, which was memorably articulated in Justice Antonin Scalia’s famous Morrison v. Olson (1988) dissent, and reaffirmed last year by Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion for the Court in Seila Law v. CFPB. Nevertheless, the Court has endorsed the concept that former presidents retain executive privilege — albeit a very qualified privilege. As Justice William Brennan, writing for the majority, put it in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services (1977):

The confidentiality necessary to this exchange [of information between a president and his advisers] cannot be measured by the few months or years between the submission of the information and the end of the President’s tenure; the privilege is not for the benefit of the President as an individual, but for the benefit of the Republic. Therefore the privilege survives the individual President’s tenure. [Emphasis added.]

The Justice Department’s Disingenuous Indictment

Garland’s indictment of Bannon relates that committee chairman Bennie G. Thompson rejected the privilege claim when Bannon raised it, pointing out that “President Trump had not made any privilege assertion to the Committee.” This is remarkably disingenuous.

As the DOJ well knows, the issue is not that a congressional committee, which is controlled by partisan Democrats who badly want the information at issue, has unsurprisingly rejected the Trump privilege claim. The issue is that the Supreme Court has explicitly recognized the privilege claim on which Bannon is relying. Yet nowhere in the nine-page indictment does the DOJ see fit to mention Nixon v. Administrator.

Moreover, how can the DOJ suggest in its indictment that “President Trump has not made any privilege assertion to the Committee,” when the DOJ knows well that President Trump has sued the committee in federal court precisely over his privilege claim? The case, in fact, is laboriously titled “Donald J. Trump v. Bennie G. Thompson in his official capacity as Chairman of the United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.”

Not only that. Three days before Bannon’s indictment was announced, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, an Obama appointee to the federal district court in Washington, D.C., issued a 39-page opinion, in which she acknowledged that the Supreme Court had “found, as a threshold matter that [executive] privilege survives the end of a president’s term in office.” That is, Judge Chutkan conceded that Trump’s claim of privilege was not improper, but that it had to be weighed against the competing considerations — which considerations, she proceeded exactingly to show, outweighed the executive branch’s interest in confidentiality.

That’s the bottom line. Trump’s privilege claim is not entitled to win, but it is entitled to be asserted and weighed by the courts against the committee’s demands for information.

If that were not made clear enough by the district court’s opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit stayed the lower-court ruling to enable Trump to litigate his privilege claims on appeal. Given the DOJ’s misleading assertion in the Bannon indictment that Trump has not asserted executive privilege, it is worth quoting from the short order — issued the day before the attorney general personally announced the indictment. Garland’s former colleagues on the D.C. Circuit bench stated that, “The purpose of this administrative injunction is to protect the court’s jurisdiction to address [Trump’s] claims of executive privilege” [emphasis added].

One of a federal prosecutor’s most important tasks is to provide the grand jury with objective instructions on points of law. To obtain Bannon’s indictment, prosecutors would have to have instructed the grand jury that Bannon’s alleged contempt was willful — i.e., that (a) he knew the law required him to provide testimony and documents, and (b) he refused to do so with bad intent.

In point of fact, Bannon, with advice of counsel, informed the committee that the former president had in fact asserted a privilege against disclosure. Thus, Bannon’s position was that he did not know what the law required under the circumstances — the legislative branch was ordering him to appear while insisting that Trump could not assert a privilege covering communications with Bannon, while Trump insisted that his presidential communications with Bannon should be withheld from Congress under a former president’s privilege recognized by the Supreme Court.

Bannon did not outright refuse to testify, as the Justice Department alleges. He represented that he was willing to testify and provide documents if the court ruled that the privilege had been overcome (or if Trump and the Committee came to an agreement about the scope of disclosure).

Given all that, it would be interesting to know exactly what legal instructions Garland’s prosecutor gave the grand jury regarding the required mens rea element of willfulness. Was the grand jury told — notwithstanding the indictment’s suggestion to the contrary — that Trump had asserted privilege and was currently litigating that assertion against the committee in court? Was the grand jury told that Supreme Court jurisprudence, for over 40 years, has said former presidents may assert executive privilege? Was the grand jury told that, in past instances, Congress has disagreed with such assertions and turned to the courts to resolve them — as Bannon was asking the committee to do?

Conclusion

The Biden Justice Department’s highly unusual and patently politicized congressional contempt indictment of Steve Bannon is a doleful development on every level. It will exacerbate Republican disillusion about the House January 6 Committee. On the other hand, if you believe a congressional investigation of the Capitol riot is important, and that the committee should get Bannon’s evidence, the indictment makes that less likely.

Meanwhile, Bannon has a good chance of beating the rap, after long delay. The Justice Department, which has to know this prosecution will be tough to win, brought it anyway, even though doing so was certain to bolster the belief that Democrats are weaponizing law enforcement — a belief gripping much of the country after Attorney General Garland’s inexcusable threat of federal investigations against parents protesting progressive indoctrination in the schools.

Joe Biden ran as the candidate who would bridge America’s deep divide. He has made things much worse, and his Justice Department’s Bannon prosecution will make them worse still.


ccp

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another link to article that does not require subscribing
« Reply #1148 on: November 20, 2021, 09:27:59 PM »
https://www.ntd.com/biden-administration-urges-court-not-to-appoint-special-master-in-project-veritas-case_704484.html

Judge blocks NYSlimes from publishing "materials " concerning the rightwing activist group Project Veritas, a rare step that the newspaper said violated decades of first amendment constitutional protections.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/nov/19/judge-temporarily-blocks-new-york-times-publication-project-veritas

ME: 
What "materials"?

I can only assume the FBI has leaked ProjVeritas  files  to the NYSLIMES.


So Proj Veritas  are not allowed to publish the Biden chick's diary (which O'Keefe claimed they were NOT going to do anyway since they could not verify it)

Yet the Times wants to publish out Project Veritas' seized documents leaked to them from the Deep State Feds. --->>.  :x

Funny how Freedom of Speech with regards to Deep State leaks only works for the LEFT.

« Last Edit: November 20, 2021, 09:30:59 PM by ccp »

Crafty_Dog

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Re: The war on the rule of law; the Deep State
« Reply #1149 on: November 20, 2021, 10:41:05 PM »
Biden Administration Urges Court Not to Appoint Special Master in Project Veritas Case
BY ZACHARY STIEBER November 20, 2021 Updated: November 20, 2021 biggersmaller Print
A federal judge should not accept a proposal by Project Veritas to appoint a special master after FBI agents raided homes linked to the journalism group, U.S. government lawyers argued in a court filing on Friday.

After agents executed search warrants on several homes linked to Project Veritas, including a residence of founder James O’Keefe, the group’s lawyers asked a judge to appoint a special master, or a retired judge, to sift through material seized by federal agents and separate out certain files.

Agents seized cell phones and other electronic devices from O’Keefe and two former Project Veritas journalists earlier this month, according to court documents.

The raids were motivated by the apparent belief that the group committed crimes in its handling of a diary said to be penned by Ashley Biden, daughter of President Joe Biden. Project Veritas says it was given the diary last year, but passed it onto law enforcement when it could not verify its authenticity.

“The extraordinary actions taken by the government, most significantly the use of search warrants to seize news gathering materials from journalists, appear to be founded on the premise that the diary does belong to Ashley Biden. That fact, however, does not warrant the exercise of federal criminal authority to investigate and punish journalists who merely obtained the diary and possessed it temporarily,” lawyers for the group wrote in a motion to the court.

Even more troublesome, there were no limits imposed in the search warrants on the government’s access to material it seized, lawyers said, which enables it to access privileged material, whistleblower material, and material about news investigations.

“The appointment of a special master to review the seized materials is necessary to protect core First Amendment interests and attorney-client privileged information,” they added.

District Court Judge Analisa Torres, an Obama nominee, halted the extraction of files from the seized devices last week as she considers the request.

In the Nov. 19 filing, government lawyers said they have already employed a “filter team” of government employees to sift through the seized material and asserted Project Veritas lawyers “have offered no persuasive explanation why that practice would not be sufficient here to protect any qualified journalistic privilege or First Amendment privilege that might exist or to protect any attorney-client or work product privilege.”

The warrants were supported by detailed affidavits and authorized by a federal magistrate judge, the government noted.

Agents say they’re investigating whether Project Veritas was involved in a conspiracy to transport stolen property across state lines.

Journalists are legally allowed to publish stolen materials as long as they themselves did not steal them, according to a Supreme Court ruling in Bartnicki v. Hopper, which has been upheld in subsequent rulings, Project Veritas lawyers said.

The government, though, indicated it has reason to believe Project Veritas was involved in acquiring the diary. However, the proof backing this claim was redacted in the version of the filing released publicly.

Further, the government argued Project Veritas employees aren’t journalists.

“Project Veritas is not engaged in journalism within any traditional or accepted definition of that word. Its ‘reporting’ consists almost entirely of publicizing non-consensual, surreptitious recordings made though unlawful, unethical, and or/dishonest means,” lawyers said.

Project Veritas lawyers have until Nov. 24 to file a response.