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As Americans struggle to keep up with the rising tide of prices and feel the squeeze of high interest rates on housing, President Joe Biden continues to claim that the economy is good. “Bidenomics” is working, there’s no recession to see here, so shut up and enjoy the drag queen performances at the White House.
That narrative took a hit back in 2022, however, when America experienced two consecutive quarters of decline in gross domestic product—the traditional definition of a recession. In the first quarter of 2022, inflation-adjusted GDP declined in the U.S. by 1.6%, and it declined by an additional 0.6% in the second quarter of that year.
The Biden administration responded by simply redefining the word “recession.” The move made a bizarre kind of sense coming from a bureaucracy that has redefined what it means to be a woman.
The White House stated in July 2022 that “it is unlikely that the decline of the GDP in the first quarter of this year—even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter—indicates a recession.”
The Heritage Foundation, a stick-in-the-mud organization that doesn’t support willy-nilly redefining words to suit the woke movement, decided to get to the bottom of this whole redefining-a-recession nonsense. Heritage’s Oversight Project filed a Freedom of Information Act request in July 2023, asking the Treasury Department for internal communications regarding recessions. (Heritage created The Daily Signal in 2014.)
Treasury asked Heritage to narrow the parameters of the request. It did so. Treasury refused to hand over the documents by the time required by law. Heritage sued. Late last month, Treasury handed over some documents.
The catch? Most of the conversations in those documents have been redacted.
To be sure, we do get little gems like “I’d be glad to discuss tomorrow or Monday,” and “Thank you for forwarding.” These largely meaningless pleasantries are among the few words Treasury apparently deems nonthreatening enough to reveal to the public.
Many pages simply feature a large black box redacting the entire page.
One email shows Treasury staff discussing a quote from the International Monetary Fund stating that a “technical recession” consists of two quarters of economic decline.
“For the United States, some indicators, such as the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s GDPNow forecasting model, suggest that a technical recession (defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth) may already have started,” Gene Sperling, a senior adviser to Biden, quoted the IMF in an email on July 26, 2022.
Treasury redacted Sperling’s own words in his email, along with the substance of every email responding to him.
So, Heritage plans to sue again.
“The Oversight Project sued the Treasury Department to seek answers on why the Biden administration gaslit the American people into changing the definition of recession,” Kyle Brosnan, chief counsel at the Oversight Project, told The Daily Signal. “We have received multiple document productions from our lawsuit showing that there were a lot of communications about this change, but excessive redactions have hampered our ability to determine the truth. We intend to challenge these redactions as we progress in the case.”
The Biden administration’s apparent attempt, yet again, to hide the substance of internal discussions about the definition of a recession raises more questions than answers.
Did Treasury officials intentionally twist the definition in order to politically protect Biden in a midterm election year? Did they develop strategies for hiding negative economic news that might interfere with the 2024 election? If they weren’t trying to monkey with the definition of recession, why are they so insistent on hiding that fact?
Perhaps the Biden administration merely wishes to redefine “transparency,” as well.
The post WHAT ARE THEY HIDING? Biden Admin Redacts Its Justification for Altering the Definition of ‘Recession’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Following the announcement of prison sentences for pro-life activists last week, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit on Monday against seven pro-life activists and two pro-life organizations.
The DOJ’s lawsuit alleges that the pro-life organizations, Citizens for a Pro Life Society and Red Rose Rescue, as well as activists Laura Gies, Lauren Handy, Clara McDonald, Monica Miller, Christopher Moscinski, Jay Smith, and Audrey Whipple, violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act when they sought to stop abortions from taking place at Ohio abortion clinics.
Notably, the DOJ does not use the word “abortion,” but rather “reproductive health services”—except in a statement from U.S. Attorney Rebecca C. Lutzko for the Northern District of Ohio.
“Obstructing people from accessing reproductive health care and physically obstructing providers from offering it are unlawful,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement.
“Congress passed the FACE Act 30 years ago this month in response to acts of violence, threats of violence and physical obstruction at reproductive health clinics in our country,” she added. “The Civil Rights Division is committed to enforcing federal law to protect the rights of those who seek and those who provide access to reproductive health services.”
The DOJ’s complaint seeks “compensatory damages, monetary penalties and injunctive relief as provided by the FACE Act.”
Handy, one of the activists mentioned in the release, was sentenced to 57 months in prison for trying to stop abortions at a Washington, D.C., abortion clinic. Clarke similarly issued a statement last week celebrating news that Handy and six other pro-life activists would spend time in prison for attempting to stop abortions from taking place.
The FACE Act is a 1994 law that supposedly protects both abortion clinics and pregnancy resource centers, but has been heavily enforced by President Joe Biden’s DOJ against pro-lifers since the June 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade.
The enforcement of the FACE Act is led by Clarke, who, following a report from The Daily Signal, recently admitted that she hid an arrest and its subsequent expungement from investigators when she was confirmed to her Justice Department post.
The president’s critics have accused Biden and the DOJ of weaponizing the FACE Act against pro-lifers while failing to charge pro-abortion criminals for the hundreds of attacks on pregnancy resource centers since the May 2022 leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion indicating that Roe would soon thereafter be overturned.
Some, among them Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, have called for the repeal of the FACE Act, arguing that it serves no purpose but to target pro-life activists.
“The Biden administration is using the FACE Act to give pro-life activists and senior citizens lengthy prison terms for nonviolent offenses and protests—all while turning a blind eye to the violence, arson, and riots conducted on behalf of ‘approved’ leftist causes,” Lee told The Daily Signal in a Tuesday statement.
“Unequal enforcement of the law is a violation of the law,” he added, “and men and women who try to expose the horrors of abortion are being unjustly persecuted for their motivations.”
The post Biden DOJ Ramps Up War on Pro-Lifers With Lawsuit appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The Defense Department undercounted the number of abortions that it authorized between 2016 and 2020, new data shows.
Following a lawsuit from the Oversight Project, a division of The Heritage Foundation, the Department of Defense said that it had identified a total of 77 abortions performed in military medical treatment facilities (MTFs) during the four-year period between 2016 and 2020. (Heritage founded The Daily Signal in 2014.)
That number includes 17 abortions that had previously not been included in the DOD’s figures.
The babies aborted were either the children of a service member or of the service member’s dependents. Eighteen of the abortions were tied to the Air Force, 28 to the Army, four to the Marines, and 27 to the Navy.
In 2021, the DOD authorized 14 abortions of unborn babies throughout the military—bringing the total number of abortions that the DOD authorized between 2016 and 2021 up to 91.
The Defense Department explained the undercounting by saying in a report shared with the Oversight Project that it began updating its methodology counting the abortions it authorizes in 2021.
“As a result, a yearlong effort, involving data analysts and women’s health subject matter experts, began in early 2021 to review and update the methodology for collection of data related to performance of abortions in military medical treatment facilities (MTFs),” the DOD explained. “The updated methodology identified, and corrected, inadvertent underreporting of authorized abortions.”
Some of the DOD’s methodology updates include developing a new definition of abortion: the “termination” of an unborn baby’s life “that would otherwise result in a live birth.” This new definition does not include the removal of ectopic or molar pregnancies, both of which are nonviable pregnancies. It also does not include miscarriages.
The new methodology also included both active-duty members and their dependents (such as their daughters) who aborted their babies at a military medical treatment facility.
“The methodology utilized for this updated report will be the standard for future reports, in order to ensure consistent methodology and understanding, and will be annually reviewed for new medical or coding updates for processes or procedures,” the report noted. “Additional actions will be identified as necessary to ensure accurate reporting consistent with this methodology.”
The Oversight Project initially sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the DOD a few weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling.
The lawsuit sought information on whether the abortions DOD was authorizing were “Hyde Amendment-compliant ‘covered’ abortions, meaning if they were performed if the life of the mother was at risk or if the unborn child is result of rape or incest,” Oversight senior investigative counsel Roman Jankowski told The Daily Signal.
“We also requested all records regarding the number of ‘covered’ abortions that are the result of an act of rape and incest that resulted in some type of prosecution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice,” he added. “The DOD did not respond to our FOIA request, forcing the Oversight Project to sue in federal court. These records only provide a partial picture of abortions covered by the DOD, and the Oversight Project will continue to update this as additional records are released.”
The DOD did not immediately respond to requests for comment for this article.
In October 2022, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin released a memorandum for senior Pentagon leadership on “ensuring access to reproductive health care.” That memorandum announced that the Defense Department would establish “travel and transportation allowances for service members and their dependents … to facilitate official travel to access non-covered reproductive health care that is unavailable within the local area of a service member’s permanent duty station.”
The move was a direct response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the memo said. It claimed that funding abortion travel would be done in accordance with federal law, but Republicans noted at the time that funding travel and transportation to get abortions through the DOD would “in and of itself violate federal law” and contradict the Defense Department’s “past recognition, interpretation, and implementation of this law.”
“Congress has clearly and consistently acted to prevent the U.S. military from funding elective abortion procedures and services necessitated by those procedures, and DOD has acknowledged and complied with the law,” the Republicans said in 2022 in a letter first reported by The Daily Signal. “We are appalled by the flagrant disregard for the law expressed by the Department in this memorandum.”
And DOD spokesman Charlie Dietz confirmed to The Daily Signal in October 2022 that “if the dependent of a service member lives in a state where abortion access is restricted, the DOD will cover their travel and transportation costs to a location where they can legally receive the care.”
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., blocked hundreds of military promotions for more than 10 months as pushback to the Pentagon policy promoting abortion, saying that until the policy was changed, he would not approve any military promotions, arguing that the policy is illegal and violates the Hyde Amendment. The Hyde Amendment is a measure dating back to the 1970s that prohibits federal taxpayer funding of most abortions.
The Alabama lawmaker, who received heavy criticism from his Democratic colleagues, ended his holds in December. Tuberville had also come under fire from some GOP senators, who called on him to give up his effort and allow the promotions to move forward despite the Pentagon’s unchanged pro-abortion policy.
But other leaders, including Ryan Williams, president and publisher of The Claremont Review of Books and of The American Mind; Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project; and Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, praised Tuberville for his commitment to stand against the Pentagon’s pro-abortion policy, saying that his hold “on military promotions over the Pentagon’s unjust decision to fund abortion tourism is a righteous manifestation of the Senate’s responsibility to scrutinize military leadership.”
The post EXCLUSIVE: Defense Department Admits to Undercounting Abortions It Authorized appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The top House Republican is warning that the Democratic Party is trying to jail its chief political rival before November’s election.
Appearing with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Saturday morning’s episode of “This Week on the Hill,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., declared, “Donald Trump is being targeted because of who he is. If he was not running for president again, I don’t think you’d see any of this barrage of prosecutions, these local district attorneys and state attorneys who are after him … .”
Referring to the myriad state and federal indictments leveled against former President Donald Trump over the past 15 months, Johnson added, “They have targeted him because he is soon to be officially the nominee of the Republican Party for president, and this is their only way to stop him.”
“Everybody around the country can see this for what it is, anybody who looks at what is happening objectively has to reach the same conclusion. They are targeting him because of who he is,” Johnson explained.
He continued, “And the real threat to this … is it is the weaponization of our system of justice itself. … You have to understand this is something that would undermine a very foundational principle of our country. The people have to trust that the justice system is fair, that there really is equal justice under law. And if we don’t have that, we lose something very important to maintain a constitutional republic.”
Perkins added, “The former president says it’s not just about him, but it’s what he represents, the people that he represents, the fact that he has stood up to the Left, to the media. That’s the reason he is the target.”
Johnson agreed: “I think he symbolizes a pushing back against that federal corruption and the Deep State and the bureaucracy and all the things that frustrate the American people. They see in Donald Trump someone who is unafraid to sort of crash through those barriers in a certain respect.”
He further noted, “I think that’s why he is such a threat to them, and that’s why they pulled out all the stops.”
Over the course of 2023, four criminal indictments, amounting to a total of 88 felony charges, were issued against Trump. The first, consisting of New York state charges, alleged that the former president had falsified business records. That trial is currently underway in Manhattan.
The Department of Justice indicted Trump last June for allegedly illegally keeping classified documents pertaining to national security—after having left the White House in 2021. A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., then indicted Trump for allegedly attempting to “defraud the United States” by overturning the 2020 election results. Almost immediately afterward, Trump was indicted in Fulton County, Georgia, for alleged racketeering related to the 2020 election results.
“What they’re doing here really is a travesty of justice,” Johnson said of the Democrats’ campaign against Trump, which critics have characterized as “lawfare.”
“Very practically speaking, this was [Trump’s] fifth week of trial in Manhattan on this charge, a crime that they can’t even adequately define. Prosecutors passed on bringing these charges eight years ago. They did it now for political reasons, and they kept him off the campaign trail.”
Perkins noted that left-wing lawfare extends far beyond just Trump, pointing to the 57-month prison sentence handed down to pro-life activist Lauren Handy for blockading the entrance to a Washington, D.C., abortion facility in 2020.
Handy is reportedly the first person to be sentenced to prison under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, although the Biden administration’s Justice Department is actively prosecuting other pro-lifers, too. Johnson said that the Biden administration’s targeting of pro-lifers is an “instance of priorities being exactly in the wrong place.”
“They’re aggressively prosecuting people who are exercising their First Amendment freedom to talk about the sanctity of human life on a public sidewalk. And meanwhile, they catch and release dangerous criminals, persons who come across the border illegally, and people who are violent offenders multiple times over,” Johnson stated. “And yet they’re targeting people that have a different political viewpoint. I just think it’s such a blatant example of exactly what we’re talking about. And the people see this. They see a two-tiered system of justice, and that’s a real threat to us.”
“If you lose the rule of law, if you lose the foundational underpinnings of a constitutional republic, what you ultimately result with, again, is a return to tyranny, because the people who are in charge have abused their authority,” the speaker explained. “And we know that power corrupts, and as Lord Acton observed, absolute power corrupts absolutely. You have to have all these checks and balances. You have to have the separation of powers, and you have to have the maintenance of law and order.”
Recent polling suggests that a supermajority of Americans agree that the Biden administration is carrying out a lawfare campaign against the former president.
A March survey from McLaughlin and Associates found that nearly 70% of voters believe the slew of indictments against Trump are politically motivated, and almost 60% of voters (including close to 40% of Democrats) think [President Joe] Biden has played a role in the crusade against Trump. Additionally, 56% of voters (including a third of Democrats) said they believe that “Joe Biden wants to stop President Trump from winning the election by putting him in jail.”
The monthly Harvard CAPS/Harris polls have found some shifting over the past few months on whether voters would still support Trump if he were convicted on various charges, with voters typically being split 50-50 with a slight advantage in Trump’s favor, but the latest poll’s findings demonstrated that the flurry of lawsuits against the former president isn’t helping Biden’s popularity.
Originally published at WashingtonStand.com
The post ‘A Travesty of Justice’: House Speaker Dissects the Left’s ‘Lawfare’ Campaign Against Trump appeared first on The Daily Signal.
A federal Justice Department attorney expressed concerns to a Michigan judge about conservative media coverage suggesting that President Joe Biden’s administration is persecuting Christians and pro-lifers for their beliefs.
The discussion took place during a March pre-trial conference in USA v. Zastrow, in which the federal government brought Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act charges against eight pro-life individuals who tried to stop abortions of unborn babies from taking place at Michigan abortion clinics.
Those pro-life activists are Calvin Zastrow, Eva Zastrow, Chester Gallagher, Heather Idoni, Caroline Davis, Joel Curry, Justin Phillips, and Eva Edl (a communist death camp survivor who recently spoke with The Daily Signal).
The FACE Act is a 1994 law that prohibits individuals from obstructing the entrances of both abortion clinics and pregnancy resource centers, although it has been heavily enforced by Biden’s DOJ against pro-lifers since the June 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade.
During the pre-trial motion hearing, according to a transcript obtained by The Daily Signal, DOJ attorney Laura-Kate Bernstein raised concerns that “there’s a great deal of press about this case and the case in Nashville recently.” Bernstein was referring to a case in Tennessee where six pro-lifers were praying outside of an abortion clinic in 2021 and were charged with FACE Act violations.
Bernstein did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Where?” questioned Judge Matthew Leitman. “I haven’t seen any.”
Bernstein explained that she was referring to online media “like Mike Huckabee’s show or Laura Ingraham’s show, and those sorts of sources, and some written sources, too, in which at least one of the defense attorneys is making very acerbic statements about the government’s case and the legitimacy of the laws at stake, and that the Biden regime is persecuting Christians.”
WATCH:
“My concern is one of the jury pool,” she continued. “My concern is that as these national media reach more and more people, including people in the district, that they may be tainted with a preconceived notion of the Biden regime’s persecution of Christians and be unable to try the case as neutral jurors.”
The DOJ attorney said that she was not asking the court to do “something in particular,” but then told the judge that it is the court’s “affirmative, constitutional duty to minimize the effects of prejudicial pretrial publicity.”
Leitman, after asking for clarification on her question, noted that he could ask the jurors whether they had read anything about the case. But he said that Bernstein’s question seemed to be rooted in “important political speech.”
“It seems to me that your first statement, the Biden administration is persecuting Christians … that’s pretty core, important political speech, whether you agree with it or not,” the judge said. “I mean, I’d be hard pressed to tell somebody not to say that.”
The DOJ attorney then pushed back, saying she was referring to interviews in which the pro-lifer’s attorney said that “this case is a war on pro-lifers, that the Department of Justices is using the FACE Act as a weapon against pro-lifers,” or that “the clients are victims of political persecution.”
She also pushed back against the idea that “there’s a two-tier justice system, one for friends of the administration who go free and one for people who are on the wrong spiritual side of the administration.”
“There’s also extremely inflammatory language undermining the legitimacy of the laws to be implied in this case, that you’ve already ruled on—the constitutionality of it—whether reproductive health care includes abortion, as the statue defines it,” she continued. “And because the court has this affirmative, constitutional duty, we wanted to bring it to your attention.”
Bernstein then asked the judge to admonish Thomas More Society attorney Steve Crampton “about speaking about this case in inflammatory and acerbic ways that might taint the jury pool.”
“This isn’t about trying to, you know, interfere with any of his First Amendment rights,” she followed up, noting that Crampton is “of course” free to speak about his clients. “It’s about trying to protect the due process rights in this trial and the government’s right and the public’s right to a fair trial.”
Crampton clarified to the court that Bernstein was referring to Tennessee pro-life activist Paul Vaughn’s interview on the “Mike Huckabee Show,” in which Vaughn made such comments “only after the jury verdict” was entered in his case.
In January, a federal jury convicted Vaughn and five other defendants of a felony conspiracy against rights and a FACE Act offense for trying to stop abortions from taking place at a Mount Juliet, Tennessee, abortion clinic in March 2021.
BREAKING: Six pro-life activists were just found guilty in federal court after being prosecuted by Biden's DOJ under the FACE Act for protesting outside a Nashville abortion clinic.
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 30, 2024
Here's a snippet of the protest, which occurred on March 5, 2021.
For the crime of praying and… pic.twitter.com/UPzZvtZebM
“Any reference to United States against Zastrow and this case were, at best, minimal to nonexistent,” the Thomas More Society attorney said. “So I think the government, perhaps, is overreacting to the press coverage of the Nashville case. Nobody’s called any press conference regarding this case, and we certainly have no intention of doing so.”
This week, seven pro-life defendants have been sentenced to prison time on DOJ FACE Act charges related to their attempts to stop abortions from taking place at a Washington, D.C., abortion clinic. That abortion clinic is run by Cesare Santangelo, an abortionist who has been accused of allowing babies to die if they survive his botched abortions.
The District of Columbia does not have laws restricting abortion.
The DOJ said in a release Wednesday: “Lauren Handy was sentenced to 57 months in prison, John Hinshaw was sentenced to 21 months in prison, and William Goodman was sentenced to 27 months in prison,” adding that “Jonathan Darnel was sentenced to 34 months in prison, Herb Geraghty was sentenced to 27 months in prison, Jean Marshall was sentenced to 24 months in prison, and Joan Bell was sentenced to 27 months in prison.”
Those efforts are led by Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, who just admitted, following a report from The Daily Signal, that she hid an arrest and its subsequent expungement from investigators when she was confirmed by the Senate to her Justice Department post.
“Violence has no place in our national discourse on reproductive health. Using force, threatening to use force, or physically obstructing access to reproductive health care is unlawful,” said Clarke in a statement accompanying this week’s DOJ release.
“As we mark the 30th anniversary of the FACE Act, it’s important that we not lose sight of the history of violence against reproductive health care providers, including the murder of Dr. David Gunn in Florida—tragic and horrific events that led to passage of the law,” she added. “The Justice Department will continue to protect both patients seeking reproductive health services and providers of those services. We will hold accountable those who seek to interfere with access to reproductive health services in our country.”
The post EXCLUSIVE: DOJ Attorney Expressed Concerns About Conservative Media Coverage of Biden Admin Persecuting Christians, Pro-Lifers appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The Department of Justice under President Joe Biden failed to comply with federal protections when suspending whistleblowers’ security clearances, according to a memo released Tuesday by the Office of the Inspector General.
The inspector general found that the Justice Department doesn’t give employees a way to appeal suspended security clearances, which does not align with a federal regulation updated in 2022, according to its memo. Additionally, the inspector general found that the DOJ under Biden failed to provide employees a reasonable opportunity to stay on the federal payroll if they think the department suspended their clearance to retaliate against them for protected whistleblower activity.
“Existing DOJ practice is inconsistent with the intent of the federal statute,” the inspector general’s office announced in a news release.
House Republicans accused the FBI in a May 18, 2023, report of retaliating against FBI special agent Stephen Friend, FBI special agent Garret O’Boyle, and FBI staff operations specialist Marcus Allen for speaking out against the agency. O’Boyle said being placed on unpaid suspension by the FBI left his family effectively homeless.
The Office of Inspector General said it unearthed these concerns after receiving complaints from “employees alleging that their security clearances were suspended in retaliation for protected whistleblowing activity.”
Empower Oversight President Tristan Leavitt, who represents Allen through his organization, stated on social media that the memo was prompted in part by Allen’s complaint.
? This morning @JusticeOIG released a memo citing concerns about DOJ's compliance with whistleblower protections for employees with a security clearance. The review was in part prompted by the whistleblower complaint of @EMPOWR_us's client, Marcus Allen. https://t.co/Xg0u8bSCGM
— Tristan Leavitt (@tristanleavitt) May 14, 2024
Though the DOJ provides employees with an appeals channel if their security clearance is revoked, no such path exists for employees whose clearance is suspended pending a final decision on whether or not to revoke it, according to the Office of Inspector General. The inspector general identifies this as a problem because the law requires the DOJ to provide a path for whistleblowers to challenge suspensions lasting longer than a year as retaliatory.
Since the DOJ lacks a way for employees who suspect retaliation to contest suspensions if they go on for longer than a year, the agency “does not meet the requirements” required by law, according to the inspector general’s memo.
Losing security clearance often means DOJ employees can no longer do their jobs, seeing as jobs in the department can require that employees have clearance in order to perform their duties, according to the memo. This means, in addition to having their clearance suspended, these employees are often suspended from their jobs without pay.
Federal law mandates that individuals who believe the DOJ suspended their security clearance in retaliation for whistleblowing must be permitted, as far as it is practical, “to retain their government employment status” during the course of the suspension, according to the inspector general.
The Office of Inspector General also found that the DOJ’s existing policies create “the risk that the security process could be misused, as part of an inappropriate effort to encourage an employee to resign.”
The DOJ did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
The post Inspector General: Biden DOJ Broke Law on FBI Whistleblower Protection appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The Justice Department’s Kristen Clarke allegedly reached out to her ex-husband Reginald Avery in May 2021, he told The Daily Signal, asking him for a statement saying that she was not a domestic abuser during a confirmation process where she did not disclose her past arrest.
The revelation is significant given that Clarke, at that time, had been nominated for a high-ranking position in the Department of Justice but chose not to disclose her 2006 arrest during a domestic violence incident. She now serves as the assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.
The Daily Signal first revealed the existence of that arrest, and its subsequent expungement, in an April 30 report that has prompted calls for her resignation from figures including Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah.
“Kristen Clarke is in charge of enforcing civil rights laws,” said Lee on April 30. “She enforces those laws aggressively against anyone who sneezes near an abortion clinic. And not at all against those who vandalize churches. She lied under oath during her confirmation proceedings, and should resign.”
New allegations indicate that Clarke sought her ex-husband’s help handling the potential publicization of her arrest just days before she was officially confirmed.
In May 2021, as some evidence emerged that Clarke might have an arrest in her background, Avery says that Clarke called him with her publicist on the line. According to Avery, Clarke asked him to provide her with a statement that clarified she was not a domestic abuser.
At this point, Clarke’s April 14, 2021, confirmation hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee had already taken place. She had already submitted her “responses for the record” to senators.
That includes her answer to Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton’s question: “Since becoming a legal adult, have you ever been arrested for or accused of committing a violent crime against any person?”
“No,” Clarke responded.
Avery says that at Clarke’s request, he sent an email on May 19, 2021, to his ex-wife’s publicist, Clothilde Ewing. The email, which he shared with The Daily Signal, read: “Kristen Clarke was not an abuser in our relationship.”
Clarke did not end up publicly using the statement from Avery, which related to a 2006 incident wherein Avery says she was arrested after she allegedly stabbed him with a knife. Earlier this month, following the publication of The Daily Signal’s report, Clarke accused Avery of being a domestic abuser but confirmed that she had not disclosed the arrest.
Avery told The Daily Signal that Clarke and Ewing (who did not respond to requests for comment) wanted him to say that Clarke was not “the” abuser in their relationship. He chose to say “an” rather than “the” to avoid giving the impression that he himself was an abuser, he shared.
Since Clarke and Avery share a son (who is now 19), Avery said he was eager to put the matter to to rest. He said his understanding at the time was that Clarke was facing underhanded attacks from conservatives and that his statement would “bring closure to the whole thing.” He does not have a record of the 2021 phone call.
“I thought it was harmless,” he explained of the email. “Looking back, it was a huge mistake, but I didn’t foresee any of this coming. So it was probably stupid on my part. But the bottom line is, they did approach me.”
The same day that Avery sent this email to Ewing, the American Accountability Foundation (AAF)’s Tom Jones published a report on AAF’s findings that the FBI failed to properly vet Clarke when it did not interview Avery.
AAF had distributed that report to its lists around 11:30 a.m. on May 19, 2021. Avery could not recall the exact day on which Clarke called him, but his email to Ewing was sent at 11:50 a.m. on May 19, 2021.
Jones previously told The Daily Signal that he began digging into Clarke’s background during her confirmation process and spoke to Avery around the same time. In early May 2021 text messages, Avery told Jones that Clarke attacked him with a knife, slicing his finger to the bone, during a domestic dispute in July 2006.
“The accusations against Kristen Clarke of lying to Congress and domestic violence are deeply troubling,” Jones told The Daily Signal last week. “Clearly she does not possess the character or integrity to be in any position of power. She must resign now.”
Clarke was confirmed to the DOJ, to lead the Civil Rights Division, on May 25, 2021.
Congratulations to Kristen Clarke on making history — there’s no one better to lead the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. I know she’ll work tirelessly to advance civil rights and push our nation closer to our founding ideals of liberty, justice, and equality for all. https://t.co/57OTZDrb8c
— President Biden (@POTUS) May 26, 2021
The revelation comes after The Daily Signal published a report April 30 highlighting evidence that Clarke had not disclosed a 2006 arrest and subsequent expungement during her 2021 confirmation to the DOJ—and then explicitly denied ever having been arrested to Cotton in an interview April 21, 2021.
Clarke has not responded to requests for comment from The Daily Signal, though the DOJ acknowledged receipt of these requests. She did speak to CNN earlier this month, however, confirming that she did not disclose the arrest and expungement and alleging that Avery domestically abused her.
He denied that he had abused his ex-wife in a statement to The Daily Signal, though he did say that Clarke got a restraining order against him shortly before he moved out of their shared home as they were getting divorced (court records show that Avery and Clarke finalized their contentious divorce in 2009).
Clarke got the order “after an argument,” Avery told The Daily Signal. “It was temporary but I just moved out anyway. She lied in court then too. Bunch of nonsense … but I just got my own place. I was so over it.”
That restraining order was the subject of an inquiry from The Washington Post to AAF’s Jones: On May 19, 2021, The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin reached out to Jones asking about his “allegation regarding Kristen Clarke’s role in domestic abuse.”
Rubin’s press inquiry to Jones included a query about Avery (who says that Rubin never actually reached out to him).
“Do you have any comment on court documents showing she successfully obtained a restraining order against Reginald Avery?” Rubin asked Jones, who replied with a statement “unequivocally” condemning domestic violence and calling for a proper investigation into Clarke’s background.
Rubin did not respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal as to why she ultimately did not write her story.
Ewing, who Avery said is Clarke’s publicist, is a children’s author who previously worked for “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” for former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and for former President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. Ewing also has not responded to requests for comment from The Daily Signal.
The Daily Signal’s reporting on Clarke prompted calls for her to resign from Lee, the New York Post Editorial Board, and more. In early May, a group of conservative leaders called on Clarke to resign from her leadership position in a letter sent to the high-ranking DOJ official.
“The American people have lost trust in your ability to lead the Civil Rights Division,” reads a letter to Clarke, signed by Advancing American Freedom Executive Director Paul Teller, American Accountability Foundation’ Jones, Students for Life President Kristan Hawkins, and CatholicVote President Brian Burch. “We request that you resign immediately.”
That letter repeatedly references The Daily Signal’s reporting and attaches a copy of the original report itself. It also points to Clarke’s enforcement of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act against pro-life activists.
“The American people deserve a Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice led with honesty and integrity,” the letter says. “Since taking over the Civil Rights Division, you have weaponized the Department of Justice by wielding the FACE Act against pro-life Americans in an unprecedented manner—even while standing idly by as churches and pro-life pregnancy centers are vandalized, and Jewish students are unable to attend class on college campuses.”
The DOJ did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
When Jones reached out to Avery as part of his 2021 investigation into Clarke’s background and police records, the two men discussed the July 4, 2006, incident over text messages.
“I was seeing another woman,” Avery shared in the May 2021 text message exchange. “She was angry. Attacked me with a knife. I instinctively grabbed it. As I said earlier, I’m not blameless.”
“That’s the story,” Avery insisted. “That’s what happened. She went to jail.”
Prince George’s County Police Department records show that the department was called on nine different occasions by someone at Avery’s and Clarke’s Upper Marlboro, Maryland, household between May 2003 and December 2007.
Seven of those calls were for a “threat” or some type of domestic violence, but most were cleared without a report. The July 4, 2006, call was made by “Mr. Reginald” (Avery’s first name) and accompanied by a 760 code, according to a mainframe print-out from Prince George’s County computer-aided dispatch system obtained by The Daily Signal.
That 760 code is the department’s clearance code for “arrest,” the Prince George County Police Department confirmed. That call was not cleared for four hours. Avery says it was Clarke who was arrested. Clarke has not addressed the specific incident.
The DOJ official’s ex-husband also shared with Jones that on the night of the incident, he called 911 due to his injury and the “cops came because [his] finger was cut off.” (Avery clarified to The Daily Signal that the finger was sliced to the bone, not cut off.) Police allegedly decided to arrest Clarke, and Avery said he went to the emergency room in Bowie, Maryland, for the injury.
Jones and Avery speculated via 2021 text messages about why Clarke would hide the arrest.
“I assume she just thinks she won’t get caught,” Jones queried, to which Avery responded at the time, “Yes, the arrogance has always been there. But I don’t understand lying on a federal application.”
The post EXCLUSIVE: DOJ’s Kristen Clarke Asked Ex-Husband to Say She Wasn’t an Abuser During Confirmation Process, Ex Alleges appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Years before the prosecution called the former porn star to testify Tuesday in Donald Trump’s “hush money” trial in Manhattan, Democrats viewed Stormy Daniels as an avenue for impeaching Trump when he was president.
My 2020 book “Abuse of Power” details the origins of Left’s lawfare against Trump, which began immediately after his 2016 election to the presidency.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat, led the first criminal case against Trump, followed by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in Georgia and two federal prosecutions by special counsel Jack Smith.
Indicted in four separate criminal cases for a total of 91 counts, Trump got some good news Tuesday when a federal judge in Florida postponed indefinitely his trial in the classified documents case, one of Smith’s.
Below is an adapted excerpt from “Abuse of Power”:
It’s funny how “legal experts” who would pop up working for Democrats were talking and writing about Trump’s demise for other reasons months earlier.
Two lawyers whom the House Judiciary Committee hired for impeachment, Norman Eisen and Barry Berke, wrote a New York Times opinion piece along with Noah Bookbinder, also a lawyer, with the headline: “Is This the Beginning of the End for Trump?”
The lawyers suggested Trump could be taken down for a possible campaign finance violation tied to alleged flings with former porn star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal.
Or, as the lawyers characterized it in their Times piece, federal prosecutors determined that “Mr. Trump, the Trump Organization, and the campaign were all directly involved in an illegal scheme to silence two women who claimed they had affairs with Mr. Trump.”
The lawyers’ op-ed in the Times further says Trump “could be named as an unindicted co-conspirator” or “charged if he leaves office before the statute of limitations runs out (most likely in 2022).”
Still, regarding the hush money [for Daniels and McDougal], even House Democrat Leader Nancy Pelosi had said after the news of Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen’s planned guilty plea that it wasn’t grounds for impeachment, even as some of her members were pushing for that.
“Impeachment has to spring from something else. If and when the information emerges about that, we’ll see,” Pelosi said in 2018. “It’s not a priority on the agenda going forward unless something else comes forward.”
But impeachment was a priority for members of the House Democratic Caucus, which she led.
In December 2018, when Cohen pleaded guilty to a campaign finance violation for paying hush money to Daniels, the plea agreement referred to “Individual 1” as directing him to do so. It was clear that this individual was Trump.
Cohen also pleaded guilty to tax evasion and other financial crimes and was sentenced to three years in prison. He later pleaded guilty to lying to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
In late 2019, with Democrats in control of the House, many of the hardliners in Pelosi’s caucus were pushing the speaker to go beyond Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as grounds for impeachment.
Democrats in the House Progressive Caucus wanted to include the ambiguous obstruction arguments from special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the discredited Trump-Russia claims, the campaign finance allegation in the Stormy Daniels case, the emoluments clause of the Constitution, and potentially other matters. By this point, the House had launched 12 separate investigations into Trump.
But after initial resistance, Pelosi had already caved once to the members demanding Trump’s impeachment on the Ukrainian phone call. The other matters would only prolong the process.
Trump admitted he and Zelenskyy talked about Joe Biden. Now, Democrats just had to turn it into an impeachable case.
Nevertheless, keeping swing district House Democrats in the loop was one reason why, early in the process, leadership had considered progressives’ demands for a “kitchen sink” impeachment involving Russia, Stormy Daniels, emoluments, and anything else they could think of.
This would allow moderate Democrats to go home and say they had voted against some articles of impeachment while still voting to oust Trump in order to appease the base and avoid a potential primary challenger from the left. In the age of MAGA and #Resistance voters, primary challenges are a forefront concern for incumbents on both sides.
During the impeachment hearing, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee called former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch to testify.
As with other witnesses, Yovanovitch’s legal counsel was steeped in Democratic politics. Lawrence S. Robbins represented both Republican and Democrat clients.
But in a December 2018 op-ed for Politico, Robbins called for either impeaching or prosecuting Trump for campaign finance violation regarding the Daniels hush money.
Robbins wrote: “The Department of Justice’s description of the role of Individual 1—the president himself—leaves no doubt that career Justice Department prosecutors regard Trump as a full blown co-conspirator. And most serious-minded criminal lawyers agree that, if these allegations are true, the president, but for his day job, would have been sitting in the dock with his long-time fixer.”
Robbins further wrote that Trump would use his office as president to shield himself from prosecution, so “Congress would surely have no choice but to hold him accountable in the way prescribed by the Constitution.”
That way, of course, was impeachment.
The post How the Left Tried to Use Stormy Daniels to Impeach Trump appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The lead prosecutor for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s “hush money” case against former President Donald Trump received thousands of dollars from the Democratic National Committee in 2018, Federal Election Commission records show.
Matthew Colangelo, who was President Joe Biden’s acting associate attorney general and spent two years in the current president’s Justice Department, joined the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office as senior counsel in December 2022.
The lawyer received $12,000 from the Democratic National Committee for “political consulting” in two payments of $6,000 on Jan. 31, 2018, FEC records show.
Fox News Digital first reported the payments to Colangelo from the DNC.
Reports say Matthew Colangelo received $12,000 from the DNC for "political consulting" in 2018.
— Daniel Baldwin (@baldwin_daniel_) May 6, 2024
Colangelo delivered the opening statement for the prosecution in the Trump hush money case.
Yet Trump can't talk about this due to his unconstitutional gag order.
Trump is not supposed to speak about Colangelo because Judge Juan Merchan imposed a gag order that prevents the former president from speaking about prosecutors on the case besides Bragg.
Colangelo was appointed in 2022, while Bragg was still investigating Trump in relation to a $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep her silent regarding an alleged affair. Colangelo delivered opening statements for the prosecution in April, arguing that Trump falsified business documents about the payment as part of a broader initiative to “corrupt the 2016 election.”
“It was election fraud, pure and simple,” Colangelo said.
Trump consistently has characterized the case as “election interference,” referring to it as a “Biden witch hunt” and the “Biden case.”
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan sent a letter Tuesday to Attorney General Merrick Garland regarding Colangelo, requesting documents and communications from his tenure at the Justice Department. Jordan demanded personnel files pertaining to Colangelo’s hiring, employment, and termination there, as well as records and correspondences related to Trump or his organization.
“Bragg is engaged in one such politicized prosecution, which is being led in part by Matthew B. Colangelo, a former senior Justice Department official,” Jordan wrote. “Accordingly, given the perception that the Justice Department is assisting in Bragg’s politicized prosecution, we write to request information and documents related to Mr. Colangelo’s employment.”
While at the New York State Attorney General’s Office before Biden became president, Colangelo led the probe into the Trump Foundation, which resulted in its dissolution. He also led the investigation that eventually became Trump’s civil fraud case, according to The New York Times.
Neither Bragg nor the Democratic National Committee immediately responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
The post Former Biden DOJ Official Prosecuting Trump Received Thousands of Dollars From DNC appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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