LGBT activist and Princeton University alumni volunteer Roy "Trey" Farmer was arrested Friday on child pornography charges near Princeton University's campus.
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It is unclear if James Biden, brother of President Joe Biden, is a target in the DOJ's investigation, Politico reported Monday.
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New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) revealed on Monday that Chinese state-sponsored hackers attacked two computer systems used by the New Zealand Parliament in 2021.
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Boston, Massachusetts, Christian leaders are calling on "white churches" to dole out millions of dollars in reparations to black people to rectify their history with slavery.
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Former "Real Housewives of New York" star Leah McSweeney is calling on television host and executive producer of Bravo's "The Real Housewives" franchise Andy Cohen to apologize to Kate Middleton.
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A-List actress Sharon Stone has recently spoken out on abuse she claims to have suffered in Hollywood, and comedian Dana Carvey is apologizing for an act he feels may have harmed her.
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President Biden's Department of Justice (DOJ), celebrated the launch of the National Extreme Risk Protection Order Resource Center and the administration's subsequent pledge of $750 million the Center can use to pursue more red flag laws.
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Comedian Howie Mandel took a swipe at woke attacks on comedians and comedy and insisted that comedy hurts no one.
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The Heritage Foundation has been issuing its doorstop-length “Mandate for Leadership” books since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. But this is the first one that has inflamed The New York Times into painting it as a manual for autocracy.
On the March 8 edition of PBS’ “Washington Week With The Atlantic,” moderator Jeffrey “Obama Is Awesome” Goldberg cued up New York Times book reviewer Carlos Lozada to discuss his article “What I Learned When I Read 887 Pages of Plans for Trump’s Second Term.”
What surely delighted Goldberg was Lozada’s hot take. The Heritage book is “not about anything as simplistic as being ‘dictator for a day,’ but about consolidating authority and eroding accountability for the long haul.”
Here’s what is left unsaid. Conservatives would like to impose more political appointees on the executive branch because they feel the permanent bureaucracy is stacked with “progressives” who treat conservative presidencies as an occasion for clandestine warfare.
Under then-President Donald Trump, both career appointees and political appointees leaked to liberal media outlets with all kinds of anonymous “resistance.” One wrote a New York Times op-ed and then a book under the byline “Anonymous.” The author later revealed himself as political appointee Miles Taylor, who was barely 30 when he became a deputy chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security.
As Lozada noted in reviewing the “Anonymous” book, it was full of “stuff we already know.” It was written to be bought by Trump haters who loved MSNBC guest snark like Trump is “like a 12-year-old in an air-traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately.”
This, we know, is what Lozada means by “eroding accountability,” making it harder for liberal rags like The New York Times to undermine the Republican president from within. No one on PBS is going to ask him if anonymous sourcing “erodes accountability.” Because “accountability” is a one-way street for them.
The incentive structure is different for the bureaucracy under Democrats. Nobody at The New York Times wants an anonymously sourced war on the president. No major book publishers want a “tell-all” book lacerating the liberals for acting like 12-year-olds … or like feeble octogenarians.
Anonymous sourcing at the Times isn’t used for trashing the White House anymore. It’s now reserved for the most pedestrian stories on Team Biden. In January, John Kerry was leaving the State Department to join the Biden campaign, and it was announced “at a hastily arranged meeting, said the person, who asked to remain anonymous in order to discuss personnel matters.”
Under President Joe Biden, liberal journalists are expected to preach the most preposterous gospels. Lozada proclaimed on taxpayer-supported TV that the Heritage team wants “to politicize the Justice Department. … It’s very overt. They emphasize how, for instance, the White House Counsel’s Office and the [Justice Department] have to work as a team. That’s a quote.”
The “accountability” specialists of the pro-Biden media somehow can’t concede that the Biden Justice Department is aggressively prosecuting their opponent as a campaign strategy. Their press statements boast how their prosecutions in the Jan. 6 riot are massive and still unloading indictments.
Liberal reporters warn of Trump’s “retribution” and couldn’t possibly imagine that Biden’s seeking retribution through his Justice Department. Their “news judgment” is perfectly partisan. Implying Biden’s DOJ is nonpartisan is the most wretched misinformation you could publish.
The Heritage folks are not wrong to assert that the Left controls the permanent bureaucracy and that they’re very upset that conservatives have gotten organized. Other Republican presidents have taken their “mandate” seriously, but the “deep state”—especially defined as the anonymous sources perennially pushing statism—remains an entrenched and powerful foe.
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The Biden Justice Department continues to claim presidential privilege to block release of its strategic plan to turn out the vote, although at least two other federal agencies have made their plans public.
In defending a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act, the Justice Department is keeping under wraps its plans to implement President Joe Biden’s 2021 executive order, under which most federal agencies are required to develop a strategic plan for increasing voter participation in elections.
The plaintiff in that case, the Foundation for Government Accountability, contends that privilege claim is undermined by two federal agencies releasing their plans to implement Biden’s Executive Order 14019, which he signed in March 2021.
Notably, the U.S. Trade Representative, an agency that is part of the Executive Office of the President, made its plan public through a public records request, as The Daily Signal reported last week.
The Railroad Retirement Board also released its strategic plan for boosting voting, The Daily Signal reported.
“Now that at least two agencies have handed out their strategic plans, the Justice Department’s claim [that the plan] is protected by presidential privilege in our case is questionable,” Stewart Whitson, legal director for the Foundation for Government Accountability, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.
The Foundation for Government Accountability first sued the Justice Department under the Freedom of Information Act in April 2022 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida.
“The DOJ is supposed to be the arbiter of following the law, and they are doing the opposite,” Whitson said in the interview.
My book “The Myth of Voter Suppression” details how executives at the liberal think tank Demos—one of the private groups working with federal agencies on voter turnout—drafted an executive order in December 2020, the month before Biden took office, suggesting how he should turn government bureaucracies into voter registration agencies.
Possibly more ambiguous is the Defense Department, which said it updated an existing strategic plan to fit Biden’s executive order on voting.
The Pentagon’s strategic plan isn’t dated, but appears to have been drafted in 2021 after Biden signed the order that March. The Defense Department, unlike most other federal agencies, consistently has dealt with voting issues for military personnel.
The Justice Department didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s inquiries for this report. Federal agencies frequently decline to comment on ongoing litigation.
Publicly, however, the Justice Department said in an October 2022 court filing that releasing documents about its strategic plan to implement Biden’s order could cause “public confusion.”
“To qualify for protection under this privilege, material must be inter- or intra-agency, and both pre-decisional and deliberative,” the Justice Department’s motion in the lawsuit says.
In a March 3 speech, Attorney General Merrick Garland said voter ID and other election reforms were “discriminatory, burdensome and unnecessary,” and that the Justice Department would “fight back” against such measures.
Numerous House and Senate Republicans have sought information about the documents related to Biden’s order telling government agencies to register voters.
Critics have said the order could cause federal employees to engage in illegal activity by participating in elective politics. They point to potential violation of the Hatch Act, a law prohibiting partisan political activity using government time or resources, and the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits executive branch agencies from spending money for purposes not designated by Congress.
The Department of Education released a “toolkit” to expand voting among college students and to provide information about voting for students in grades K-12.
Also under Biden’s initiative, the Department of Homeland Security registers new voters during naturalization ceremonies. It’s not clear what else the DHS—which also is charged with stopping illegal immigration—has done to implement Biden’s executive order.
As The Daily Signal previously reported, the Biden administration carved out paid administrative leave to encourage federal bureaucrats—seen as a loyal Democrat constituency—to volunteer as poll workers during elections.
The Daily Signal also reported that federal agencies are working to carry out Biden’s order on voting with Demos and other liberal advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union.
In 2021, the White House announced that the Justice Department would focus on the Bureau of Prisons to “provide information about voting to individuals in federal custody, facilitate voting by those who remain eligible to do so while in federal custody, and educate individuals before reentry about voting rules and voting rights in their states.”
The Biden administration has made little other information available, however.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
The post DOJ Keeps Plan Secret for Biden’s Election Executive Order appeared first on The Daily Signal.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Conservative U.S. senators condemned President Joe Biden’s Justice Department for receiving a briefing on “hate” from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far-left group notorious for comparing conservative organizations with the Ku Klux Klan.
“It is sadly predictable that the Biden administration is echoing the anti-conservative activists at the Southern Poverty Law Center,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told The Daily Signal in a written statement Friday. “Even pretending to take them seriously demonstrates a serious lack of judgment.”
“Biden’s leadership at the DOJ are partisans using another partisan organization to legitimize prosecuting Biden’s political opponents,” he added.
Cruz was responding to documents unearthed by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, which show that the SPLC reached out to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division before releasing the 2022 version of its “hate map” in June 2023. The SPLC developed the “hate map” to track chapters of the Klan and other racist groups, but it has placed mainstream conservative and Christian organizations on the same map in recent years, suggesting they are hateful like the KKK. The “hate map” inspired a terrorist attack at the Family Research Council in 2012.
The 2022 “hate map” added parental rights groups, such as Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education, framing the parental rights movement as an “anti-student inclusion movement” led by “anti-immigrant extremist groups.”
The Justice Department warmly received the SPLC’s suggestion of a briefing at the time. The DOJ confirmed to The Washington Examiner’s Breccan Theis that the SPLC did indeed brief law enforcement on hate shortly after the release of the “hate map.”
“The Southern Poverty Law Center is a corrupt and vicious tool used by far-left radicals to label anyone they disagree with as hateful or extremist to advance their own extreme political agenda,” McKinley Lewis, communications director for Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday.
“Sen. Scott finds it alarming that the Biden administration would continue to coordinate with this radical group to label a group of parents, well within their rights to be involved in the education of their children, as dangerous or hateful,” Lewis added.
As I wrote in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has faced numerous scandals related to its hate accusations. The SPLC paid millions in a defamation settlement to a Muslim reformer it had slandered, calling him an “anti-Muslim extremist.” Amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal that led the SPLC to fire its co-founder in 2019, a former employee called the “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”
Despite these scandals, the Biden White House has hosted SPLC leaders and staff at least 11 times, and Biden nominated an SPLC attorney to a top federal judgeship.
Recently unearthed documents showed that a leading Education Department official met with SPLC staff in 2022, a year before the SPLC put Moms for Liberty on its “hate map.”
The White House had previously targeted parents who spoke out to school boards amid school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, helping to draft the (subsequently rescinded) National School Boards Association letter to President Joe Biden likening concerned parents to domestic terrorists.
In a 2021 call with donors, SPLC President Margaret Huang bragged that the Biden administration reached out to her organization for advice to “help shape” its domestic terrorism strategy. These new documents from the DOJ suggest Huang was indeed telling the truth about this influence in the Biden administration.
The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division enforces the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, and under Biden, the division has charged at least 26 pro-life protesters with violating the FACE Act by protesting in front of abortion centers. Meanwhile, according to CatholicVote, the division has brought only five cases against pro-abortion activists, despite the fact that pro-abortion vandals targeted at least 88 pro-life pregnancy centers and 228 Catholic churches since the May 2022 leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.
Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta admitted in December 2022 that the overturning of Roe increased “the urgency” of the DOJ’s work, including the “enforcement of the FACE Act, to ensure continued lawful access to reproductive services.”
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com, and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
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The Justice Department arm focused on prosecuting “hate crimes” welcomed input from a far-left organization known for demonizing conservatives and Christians right after that organization put parental rights groups, including Moms for Liberty, on a “hate map” alongside the Ku Klux Klan, documents obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project reveal. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which notoriously brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations as hateful by placing them on a “hate map” in what a former employee describes as a fundraising scheme, reached out to the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division on June 6, 2023—the day the SPLC released its annual “Year in Hate and Extremism” report and had added Moms for Liberty to the map.
The new documents, obtained by the Oversight Project via a Freedom of Information Act request, reveal yet more collaboration between the Biden administration and the far-left group.
The Justice Department confirmed to the Washington Examiner that the briefing did indeed take place, although the department did not specify when.
Michael Lieberman, senior policy counsel for “hate & extremism” at the SPLC, reached out to Robert Moossy Jr., deputy assistant attorney general at the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, and Sheila Foran, acting head of the Civil Rights Division’s Policy and Strategy Section, granting Moossy and Foran a “quick embargoed peek” ahead of the full report.
“We’d love to work with you both and the policy team to set up a briefing for interested DOJ interdepartmental hate crime task force members this month,” Lieberman wrote. “If you’re interested, happy to talk about scheduling time with our report authors and SPLC Intelligence Project subject-matter experts.”
The SPLC used its Intelligence Project to monitor Klan activity in the 1980s and later expanded the project to develop the “hate map,” which began to include mainstream conservative organizations in the 2000s.
Foran forwarded Lieberman’s email to Johnathan Smith, deputy assistant attorney general at the Civil Rights Division, and Luis Lopez, chief of the Policy and Strategy Section at the division. That section supports and coordinates the division’s policy work “by developing and analyzing legislative, regulatory, and policy proposals relating to the division’s enforcement authorities,” according to its website.
Lieberman’s “sneak peek” included a summary of the “Year in Hate and Extremism” report, describing the report as an “annual census of hate groups and anti-government groups” and as “one barometer of the level of hate and anti-government extremist activity in the country.”
The document described the report’s “key messages,” such as the claim that “hate and anti-government extremist groups are descending on Main Street America”; that “far-right lawmakers are pushing legislation straight from the scripts of hate groups, including bills that seek to control the bodies of women and those who can give birth, whitewash black history in schools, and criminalize LGBTQ+ people”; and the claim that “one group at the forefront of this ‘anti-student inclusion’ movement is Moms for Liberty,” which the SPLC accused of attempting to “normalize assaults on inclusive education.”
Lieberman sent a follow-up email with a link to the SPLC report after it had been published, again asking to arrange a “special briefing” on it.
His email also highlighted aspects of the report, noting that “for the first time, we are designating reactionary anti-student inclusion groups, like Moms for Liberty, as anti-government extremist groups.”
The email also lists policy recommendations, such as enforcing “hate crime” laws, providing “initiatives to reduce structural racism,” confronting “white supremacy in the military and in law enforcement,” confronting “reactionary anti-student inclusion and censorship campaigns,” and demanding that “social media companies should not enable the funding or amplifying of white supremacist ideas or provide a safe haven for extremists.”
The document also warns that the “great replacement” theory, which it describes as “a conspiracy theory that is inherently white supremacist and antisemitic,” is “being widely perpetuated in media and political narratives.”
Foran responded to this email by thanking Lieberman and promising to share the report with the Hate Crimes Enforcement and Prevention Initiative. She also promised to “circle back” on “setting up a briefing.”
“We appreciate the offer!” she added.
“Arranging a briefing for members of the Hate Crimes Enforcement and Prevention Initiative is a high priority for us,” Lieberman responded. “Hope we can arrange it.”
Separately, Moossy wrote to Foran, Smith, and Lopez, misspelling Foran’s first name, “Shaila, this briefing makes sense to me, when is the next quarterly meeting?”
Moossy also forwarded the SPLC report to other colleagues, suggesting members of the Hate Crimes Enforcement and Prevention Initiative would accept the briefing and discuss the report.
He addressed the Policy and Strategy Section and the Criminal Section at the Civil Rights Division, asking, “Anything in here relevant or useful for next week’s meeting?”
These documents do not reveal whether the SPLC did indeed brief the hate crimes initiative, but they do demonstrate that the Civil Rights Division took the SPLC’s “hate map” report and the SPLC’s smears against conservative and Christian organizations, particularly Moms for Liberty, seriously.
As I wrote in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has faced numerous scandals related to its hate accusations. Its smears led to a domestic terrorist attack in 2012. The SPLC also paid millions to a Muslim reformer it branded an “anti-Muslim extremist.” And amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal that led the SPLC to fire its co-founder in 2019, a former employee called the “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”
Despite these scandals, the Biden White House has hosted SPLC leaders and staff at least 11 times, and Biden nominated an SPLC attorney to a top federal judgeship.
Recently unearthed documents showed that a leading Education Department official met with SPLC staff in 2022, one year before the SPLC put Moms for Liberty on its “hate map.”
The White House had previously targeted parents who spoke out to school boards amid school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, helping to draft the (later rescinded) National School Boards Association letter to President Joe Biden comparing concerned parents to domestic terrorists.
In a 2021 call with donors, SPLC President Margaret Huang bragged that the Biden administration reached out to her organization for advice to “help shape” its domestic terrorism strategy.
These new documents from the DOJ suggest Huang was indeed telling the truth.
The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division enforces the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, and under Biden, the division has charged at least 26 pro-life protesters with violating the FACE Act by protesting in front of abortion centers. Meanwhile, according to CatholicVote, the division has only brought five cases against pro-abortion activists, despite the fact that pro-abortion vandals targeted at least 88 pro-life pregnancy centers and 228 Catholic churches since the May 2022 leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.
Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta admitted in December 2022 that the overturning of Roe increased “the urgency” of the DOJ’s work, including the “enforcement of the FACE Act, to ensure continued lawful access to reproductive services.”
Neither the Department of Justice nor the SPLC responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com, and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
The post SMOKING GUN: Biden DOJ Took Advice From Group Demonizing Concerned Parents, Docs Show appeared first on The Daily Signal.
President Joe Biden’s fitness to stand trial and his fitness to serve as president are not comparable standards, the forensic psychiatrist who led the movement to oust Donald Trump from the presidency via the 25th Amendment contends.
Dr. Bandy X. Lee, who edited “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” first released in 2017, said earlier this month that she did not judge Biden’s cognitive decline to be a danger to his service as a president.
Last week, several Republican lawmakers responded to her comments, with many alleging a “double standard” for judgments of Trump and Biden.
In a detailed email sent Friday to The Daily Signal, Lee responded to both GOP lawmakers’ comments and The Daily Signal’s coverage of her comments in what she called “too many misconceptions” by lawmakers and in the news story.
The investigative report that special counsel Robert Hur released on Feb. 8 looking into Biden’s mishandling of classified documents said Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen” at his home and office.
However, Hur said he would not seek charges because Biden would appear to a jury to be an “elderly man with a poor memory” and because his “diminished faculties” make it less likely he intentionally violated the law.
“Robert Hur is not a mental health professional, and he commented on capacity to stand trial, not capacity to serve,” Lee told The Daily Signal in the detailed email.
Several Republican lawmakers have made the comparison of Biden’s capacity to stand trial and his ability to do the job of president.
Among those lawmakers, Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., argued, “Either President Biden is fit to stand trial, or he is unfit to serve as president. There is no middle ground.”
Lee, who has worked for Yale, Columbia, and Harvard, responded, “On the contrary, fitness to stand trial and fitness to serve are two different standards.”
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, a Republican, made a similar comment to Tenney, to which Lee said, “Actually, you can [compare fitness to stand trial versus fitness to serve as president], because they are two different standards.”
Lee insisted that she and other mental health professionals conducted an evaluation of special counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report and determined Trump was not fit to be president. Mueller investigated allegations of a conspiracy between Trump and Russia to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.
Lee disagreed with a statement from a previous Daily Signal story on Wednesday that “Neither Trump nor Biden were evaluated by medical professionals for mental fitness,” which was meant to convey that neither man was personally examined. She contends the review of the Mueller report counted as an actual evaluation.
“Again, there was a formal mental capacity evaluation done by a panel of the nation’s top mental health experts, for which Donald Trump failed every criterion,” Lee wrote about her colleagues’ and her review of the Mueller report.
While the Mueller report “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” several aspects of the report indicated temperament issues with Trump.
The press release that accompanied Lee’s and her colleagues’ 2017 evaluation said, “Without diagnosing, these top experts on mental health demonstrate, through a standard procedure, that the president clearly poses a danger to the nation and the world in his role as commander in chief.”
She also responded on Friday to several Republican members of Congress who said there was a “double standard” among the people who called for ousting Trump for supposed mental health reasons but who apparently have no problem with Biden.
In extended comments in her email to The Daily Signal, Lee was also dismissive of a cognitive test that Trump took in person while in office. She said this was a 10-minute screening.
“He [Trump] passed a 10-minute cognitive screen by his personal physician who did not have proper qualifications or the training to do a fitness test,” Lee told The Daily Signal.
Lee is the co-founder of the Violence Prevention Institute and is the president of the World Mental Health Coalition, a coalition specifically created to critique Trump’s mental health, and author “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.”
Last week, Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill., told The Daily Signal, “There has been a glaring double standard. … The same people who questioned President Trump’s mental stamina after he passed a cognitive test are now defending Biden’s mental acuity.”
Rep. Mike Collins, R-Ga., told The Daily Signal, “The only reason you’d refuse a cognitive test is if you can’t pass it.”
Lee scoffed at this presumption.
“If he [Collins] is referring to the one Donald Trump passed, there is another reason: it would be an insult, if not a grave concern, for a president to have to take that 10-minute screen (not a full test),” Lee wrote in the email.
Referring to another lawmaker’s comment, Lee wrote, “Again, Donald Trump did a 10-minute screen, which if he did not pass, he would be in a nursing home.” She also noted, “That was a 10-minute screen, on which hospitalized psychiatric patients get perfect scores.”
Lee expressed that she was not happy with how Wednesday’s Daily Signal news story came out. The story included comments from several GOP members of Congress.
“I was told that a publication by The Heritage Foundation would at least be intellectual,” she said (Heritage is the parent organization of The Daily Signal). “There were just too many misconceptions, I had to respond.”
She took exception to the story’s reference that she “defended” Biden.
“A psychiatrist does not ‘defend’ a president; she detects (or not) signs of unfitness, regardless of person,” Lee said.
She also disputed the previous Daily Signal stories that said making an assessment of either Trump or Biden without an in-person evaluation could violate the “Goldwater Rule.” Lee countered that it actually “fulfills” the rule.
The “Goldwater Rule” prevents psychologists from offering a “professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.” The American Psychiatric Association adopted the rule after a group of partisan Democratic psychology professionals declared that 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was “psychologically unfit to be president.”
Lee said her previous evaluation of Trump didn’t violate the rule. “Rather, it fulfills the ethical guideline that precedes 7.3 (“the Goldwater Rule”), which is 7.1: ‘Psychiatrists are encouraged to serve society by advising and consulting with the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches of the government.’”
Specifically, the 25th Amendment to the Constitution allows for the vice president and a majority of presidential Cabinet secretaries to determine whether a president is physically or mentally unfit to carry out the duties of the office. If the president is deemed unfit, the vice president would become acting president on a temporary basis.
Under the amendment, Congress could remove the president from office permanently with a two-thirds vote of both the House and Senate. That is a higher bar than for impeachment, which requires only a simple majority in the House to vote for impeachment and a referral to the Senate for a trial and possible removal from office.
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The post Is Biden’s Fitness to Stand Trial Relevant to His Ability to be President? What This Psychiatrist Has to Say appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Miranda Devine addresses “The Smirnov turnoff” in today’s New York Post column “New election year means another Russiagate as Biden, Dems try to smear impeachment probe.” Devine is of course the invaluable historian of The Laptop From Hell and the Biden family business. Here is the opening of her column:
For the 2016 election, Democrats launched Russiagate 1.0: the Trump-Russia collusion hoax proven groundless by the Mueller investigation.
For the 2020 election, it was Russiagate 2.0. Biden campaign adviser Antony Blinken prompted former CIA Acting Director Mike Morell to concoct the “Dirty 51” letter falsely claiming that Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop was Russian disinformation.
That lie justified censorship of The Post’s accurate stories from the laptop of Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s international influence peddling schemes.
Now that we’re heading into the 2024 election, we have Russiagate 3.0. Democrats pretend the impeachment inquiry has “utterly collapsed” because of the curious indictment last week of trusted FBI informant Alexander Smirnov on false statement charges after he allegedly told his FBI handler that Hunter and Joe each had received a $5 million bribe from the Ukrainians.
In a frantic effort to keep Smirnov in jail pre-trial, prosecutors for notorious Biden protector David Weiss, the Delaware US attorney, used language ripped straight out of the Russiagate textbook: “Smirnov’s efforts to spread misinformation about a candidate of one of the two major parties [Joe] continues.”
Now Smirnov is being used as make-believe vindication of the 51 former intelligence officials who signed the fake laptop letter to help Biden win the 2020 election.
Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA operations officer who claims to be a victim of the dubious “Havana syndrome,” pounced on the Smirnov story.
“It validates exactly what we were warning about,” he told NBC News. “The Russians were going to push this narrative of Hunter Biden and corruption, to hurt Joe Biden.”
No. Hunter’s “laptop from hell” was not Russian disinformation. It still isn’t. The FBI has had it in its possession since December 2019 and has authenticated it as real and valid for use in court.
The Dirty 51 are grasping at straws to try to justify their interference in the 2020 election. It wasn’t the Russians. It was Trump-deranged former CIA management who felt any means justified the ends if they could stop Trump winning a second term.
But now, as the laptop is augmented by whistleblower receipts and witness testimony, and as House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer unravels the complex web of corrupt foreign payments to the Biden family, the president’s praetorian guard is desperate. They are drowning in evidence of corruption while burbling, “There is no evidence!” Russia is all they have.
The joke is on Biden’s media handmaidens still pushing Joe Biden’s absurd lies.
No, the laptop is not a “Russian plant,” as he claimed. And, yes, Joe did talk to Hunter about his “overseas business dealings.”
Heck, he did a lot more than talk.
He made himself available for breakfasts, lunches, dinners, coffees, and pleasant chit chat on the speakerphone with Hunter’s foreign benefactors, all to oil the wheels of the family business — which was selling access to him, as he well knew.
“Look after my boy,” he told Kremlin-backed oligarch Elena Baturina and her husband, Yuri Luzhkov, the corrupt former mayor of Moscow, when Hunter activated the speakerphone at a Russian restaurant in Brooklyn called Romanoff on May 4, 2014.
They sure did. Just three months earlier, Baturina had wired $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton LLC, the firm cofounded by Hunter, his “best friend in business” Devon Archer, John Kerry’s stepson Chris Heinz, and Jimmy Bulger, nephew of mobster “Whitey” Bulger.
Devine has much more here.