Tag Archives: FBI

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Daily Broadside | Another Tip to the FBI and Another Missed Opportunity to Take Down a Terrorist

You might remember that earlier this month I wrote about a terrorist attack in Fargo, North Dakota, that got very little national attention. The attacker, Mohamad Barakat, killed one police officer and wounded two others. He had an AK-47, 1,800 rounds of ammunition, explosives, a grenade and propane tanks in his car and was apparently on his way to a large event in the city center where he planned to kill lots of people.

I bring this back up because, wouldn’t you know it, the FBI had received a tip about this guy long before he went on his murderous rampage.

The FBI received a tip about the cop-killing, Syrian gunman plotting a mass casualty attack in Fargo in 2021, DailyMail.com can reveal.

The gunman, Mohamad Barakat, 37, was shot dead by Fargo police officer Zach Robinson on July 14.

Before finally being brought down, Barakat shot and killed rookie cop and Afghanistan veteran Jake Wallin, 23.

The article goes on to talk about the tip.

In response to inquiries from DailyMail.com about whether or not he was on any form of watch list or was known to police, the FBI today revealed that agents received an anonymous tip in 2021 about how many weapons he owned. 

They however forwarded the matter on to Fargo Police Department, whose officers visited his home three times in 2021.

They had received a tip from a concerned member of the public.

The cops spoke with Barakat once, during which time he insisted he had ‘no ill-intentions’ despite his enormous weapons inventory.  They then decided not to pursue any kind of action against him. 

‘During this visit, FPD detectives observed Barakat had several firearms in the apartment; however, none of them were illegal. Barakat was not prohibited from acquiring or possessing guns. 

This is hard to wrap my head around. The cops get a tip from a concerned member of the public, they visit three times, talk with him once (he’s not home the other two times?) and when he says “nah, all good bro'” they decide not to pursue anything? I mean, not even a short period of surveillance to see what he’s up to?

But the red flags were there. “He was permitted entry to the US in 2012 as a political asylum seeker from Syria.” So we bring in a man from an unstable country with radical beliefs under the rubric of “political asylum.” He stockpiles arms and some citizen raises their hand to say there might be a problem with this guy. The authorities ask some routine questions, decide there’s no issue, and then the killer unleashes hell on a quiet city because … we still don’t know why.

Little is known of Barakat, who had no social media presence and worked odd jobs in Fargo and surrounding areas. 

At one time, he worked at Fleet Farm, a firearms store in Fargo. He also frequented gun ranges and was seen there in the hours before the shooting on July 14.  

It’s unclear if he had a family before or after he moved to the US, and federal immigration officials are yet to share details of his political asylum application. 

Before Tuesday’s incident, his only crime or infraction was a speeding ticket. 

North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley said there was a ‘suggestion’ he may have been on an FBI Guardian list. 

Unfortunately, this sounds all too familiar.

The latest FBI transgressions resulted in some of the deadliest terrorist attacks since Islamic jihadists carried out their plots in 2001, killing thousands of innocent Americans. They include the 2009 massacre at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the 2016 mass shooting at an Orlando, Florida nightclub and the 2017 attack at the Fort Lauderdale Airport in south Florida. In 2011 the FBI opened a counterterrorism lead into Nidal Hasan, the perpetrator of the Fort Hood shooting, but the probe was closed five months later after agents evidently determined that Hasan did not pose a national security threat. Months later he massacred 13 people at a U.S. military post. The Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, was also under FBI investigation before he carried out his attack for making statements that displayed his radicalized ideology. Less than a year later the probe was closed after agents ruled the information to be unfounded. Mateen killed 46 people.

You want to know why so many Americans don’t trust our national departments of law enforcement like the FBI and the DOJ? Because they’re too busy pursuing the bogeyman of “domestic terrorists” while ignoring true threats to our safety like Mohamad Barakat.

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Daily Broadside | The Administrative State Will Be The Death of Us

I long ago came to the conclusion that the alphabet agencies populating the federal government are unconstitutional and should be defunded, decommissioned, razed and salted over — permanently abolished, never to be formed again. The federal government was supposed to be small with powers restricted to those enumerated in the U.S. Constitution.

Jefferson also felt that the central government should be “rigorously frugal and simple.” As president he reduced the size and scope of the federal government by ending internal taxes, reducing the size of the army and navy, and paying off the government’s debt. Limiting the federal government flowed from his strict interpretation of the Constitution.

Offices with the powers of the IRS, the EPA, the DOE, the HHS, the DOJ, FBI and on ad infinitum, were never envisioned by the founders.

Under that system of a separation of powers each branch of the Federal Government was expected to protect its own Constitutional powers such that no single branch accrued power it was not allocated by the Constitution. The Founders understood that individuals were free in direct proportion to each branch of the Federal Government staying strictly within its own bounds, and the most important lane was the legislative lane; a narrow road of strictly enumerated powers written by a Congress consisted of duly elected representatives; with the House of Representatives the body most regularly elected, and with special powers over the origination of revenue bills in the driver’s seat.

But today many legislative and budget powers have been ceded to Presidents and the executive branch through statutes delegating legislative responsibility to Federal regulatory agencies composed of unelected people; and statutes mandating automatic and increased spending on certain programs administered by the executive branch.

That bolded text is the crux of the issue: Congress has delegated its own authority to unelected bureaucracies which issue regulations and rules that have the practical effect of law. Constitutionally, however, only Congress has the power to make law — it’s the legislative branch of the government, for Pete’s sake! — and only the House has the ability to appropriate funds, the lifeblood of these agencies and extra-constitutional organizations.

Yet the pressures of keeping a seat in the House or the Senate means that outsourcing their responsibility to unelected bureaucrats is a convenient way of avoiding responsibility for the onerous administrative state that Americans suffer under.

At first Congress had the upper hand; Congress had been creating the bureaucracy to carry out its wishes. But the more Congress gave away its powers in the form of broad regulatory authority, the more bureaucrats effectively became the lawmakers. The rise of the new imperial Presidency, and it should be shocking but no surprise, as Congress has expanded the bureaucracy creating programs, delegating authority, neglecting budgeting; the executive has attained unprecedented levels of authority. Our executives can command the bureaucracy to implement new procedures and policies without the cooperation of Congress by abusing executive discretion, by exploiting the vagaries of poorly written laws, and now by willfully neglecting and disregarding the laws which indeed are clear.

In his testimony before the 2016 Task Force for Executive Overreach Judiciary Committee (in the same linked document), Dr. Matthew Spalding of Hillsdale College, wrote:

This transfer of lawmaking power away from Congress to an oligarchy of unelected experts who rule through executive decree and judicial edict over virtually every aspect of our daily lives, under the guise of merely implementing the technical details of law, constitutes nothing less than a revolution against our constitutional order. The significance of this revolution cannot be overstated. It threatens to undo the development of the rule of law and constitutional government, the most significant and influential accomplishment of the long history of human liberty.

This revolution has created an increasingly unbalanced structural relationship between an ever more powerful, aggressive and bureaucratic executive branch and a weakening legislative branch unwilling to exercise its atrophied constitutional muscles to check the executive or rein in a metastasizing bureaucracy. If the executive-bureaucratic rule now threatening to overwhelm American society becomes the undisputed norm — accepted not only among the academic and political elites, but also by the American people, as the defining characteristic of the modern state — it could well mark the end of our great experiment in self-government.

Against that background, Michael Walsh’s latest column takes on more urgency.

Bureaucratic parasitism has only accelerated since start of the Nixon administration … as demands for D.C. to “do something” about pretty much everything grew and grew. Having won the war in Europe with Soviet and British help, and defeated the Japanese Empire practically by themselves, Americans felt there was no task too big to tackle. On Nixon’s watch —Tricky Dick’s fatal flaw, like Donald Trump’s, was the fool’s errand of trying to get his enemies (who detested him) to like him—the regulatory agencies were summoned into being, dark golems bent on destroying the Constitution in the guise of trying to Save the Earth.

One of the first up was the Environmental Protection Agency, the demon spawn of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, which mandated (what an ugly word for a democracy to employ) “environmental impact” statements for future federal projects. Nixon put teeth in the law with the creation by executive order of the Environmental Protection Agency at the end of that same year. Then the unelected bureaucrats took over, and turned what had been sold as benign into a ravenous, uncontrollable, punitive beast. And now here we are:

The Biden administration is planning some of the most stringent auto pollution limits in the world, designed to ensure that all-electric cars make up as much as 67 percent of new passenger vehicles sold in the country by 2032, according to two people familiar with the matter. That would represent a quantum leap for the United States — where just 5.8 percent of vehicles sold last year were all-electric — and would exceed President Biden’s earlier ambitions to have all-electric cars account for half of those sold in the country by 2030.

It would be the federal government’s most aggressive climate regulation and would propel the United States to the front of the global effort to slash the greenhouse gases generated by cars, a major driver of climate change.

Death by a thousand cuts as the administrative state piles rule upon rule on top of our backs. Today’s Washington D.C. is a sinister, grotesque Gordian knot not unlike a cancerous tumor that has wrapped itself around the brain stem of its victim. Not doing anything will allow it to eventually kill any semblance of representative government — something I believe we are fast approaching.

Yet the alternative is an aggressive, unsparing treatment that cuts it out before it can do any more damage, and one of those agencies — the DOJ — has already demonized anyone who dares raise an objection to the administrative state as a “domestic terrorist.”

This is why I’ve warned that we’re heading for a significant conflict that can only be described as a civil war. That’s the trajectory we’re on, which is underscored by the literal movement of Americans out of blue zones across the fruited plain.

What we found was striking: There has been a vast migration out of counties that voted for Joe Biden into those counties that voted to reelect Donald Trump.

Census data show a net internal migration of almost 2.6 million (2,562,937 to be exact) from blue counties to red since Biden was elected. (These figures don’t count immigrants or births or deaths, just those Americans moving from one location to another.)

More than 61% of the counties that voted for Biden in 2020 lost population, while 65% of Trump-supporting counties gained population.

Some highlights:

  • Of the 555 counties Biden won, 335 (or 61%) lost population due to internal migration, our analysis found. Of the 2,589 counties that Trump won, 1,675 (or 65%) gained population.
  • Two Biden-voting counties that lost the most from net migration were Los Angeles County, which was down 363,760, and Cook County, Illinois, down 200,718. While many of the blue counties that lost population were urbanized, the exodus was widespread and nationwide, including many far more sparsely populated liberal areas.
  • In contrast, the biggest loss in any red county was Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, down just 18,470.
  • In 13 states that had a net loss of population, red counties nevertheless showed gains. In California, which saw a massive net outflow of 871,127 people in just the past two years, counties that backed Trump had a net gain of 8,412. New Jersey suffered a loss of 107,749 over the past two years, but counties in the Garden State that voted for Trump gained 22,507. Michigan lost 43,188 overall, but its red counties had a net gain of 28,091.
  • On the other hand, blue counties lost population in states that saw overall gains. For example, Florida had a net gain of 622,476 over the past two years. But counties that backed Biden nevertheless lost 3,374. Georgia had a large gain of 128,089, but blue counties still had a net loss of 28,178. Tennessee saw an increase of 146,403 people, but counties that voted for Biden saw a decline of 37,306.

Once the majority of moves have been completed, the red and blue state boundaries will harden and then there won’t be anywhere else to run to. As the federal government favors blue states over red, red states will either file for divorce or have to fight to leave the union.

We’re in for a long slog.

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Daily Broadside | Are You Being Watched While You Worship?

Every day brings more evidence that we’re rapidly evolving into a police state as our historic norms and traditions disintegrate and lawlessness is flaunted by our domestic enemies on the Left, whether in politics, education, science, entertainment, religion, medicine or business. We can no longer assume that we live in freedom with the U.S. Constitution guarding our rights, because those in power no longer respect that historic document.

Take, for instance, our rights of religion, speech, assembly and, though not specifically listed, freedom of association. Every one of those rights was to be violated with the latest revelation that the FBI planned to cultivate informants within the Catholic church.

The chair of the House Judiciary Committee has subpoenaed FBI Director Christopher Wray for all records relating to a leaked internal memo that proposed developing sources in traditionalist Catholic parishes to inform on potential “violent extremists” in such houses of worship.

In an April 10 letter (pdf) attached to the subpoena, Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) noted that the committee’s investigation of that Jan. 23 memo, which has since been repudiated by the FBI, had revealed that it was produced by at least one undercover agent and that, despite leadership’s claims to the contrary, the bureau intended to act on the memo’s recommendations.

“Based on the limited information produced by the FBI to the Committee, we now know that the FBI relied on at least one undercover agent to produce its analysis, and that the FBI proposed that its agents engage in outreach to Catholic parishes to develop sources among the clergy and church leadership to inform on Americans practicing their faith,” Jordan wrote to Wray. “This shocking information reinforces our need for all responsive documents, and the Committee is issuing a subpoena to you to compel your full cooperation.”

“Shocking”? Really, Jim?

Is it really so shocking after all we have endured during and post-Trump? We’ve learned that the FBI helped fuel the Russia! Russia! Russia! hoax, likely took part in instigating the J6 “insurrection”, coordinated the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home with the White House, targeted concerned parents opposed to public (i.e. state-run) schools corrupting their kids with critical race theory and transgenderism, concocted a ludicrous entrapment scheme to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen “Wretched” Whitmer, and abused their authority to arrest a pro-life activist in front of his family as a warning to anyone else who might think they can protest abortions at the little extermination camps set up across our fair nation without reprisal.

So, “shocking”? No. Not shocked at all.

This is the kind of police state activity you might expect in communist or socialist countries ruled by dictators-for-life. The FBI is acting more like the East German Stasi or the Russian NKVD than it is the domestic investigative unit whose mission is “to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States.” (*spit*)

FBI Director Christopher Wray denied that the FBI condoned such activity, protesting that, “we do not and will not target people for religious beliefs, and we do not and will not monitor people’s religious practices.” Yet, Jordan found that, “The document itself shows that its contents, including its proposal to develop sources in Catholic churches, were reviewed and approved by two senior intelligence analysts and even the local Chief Division Counsel.”

Say, I wonder if the FBI is developing sources within Islamic mosques to monitor for “potential ‘violent extremists’”? Or nah?

It’s not like the FBI had identified a specific threat coming from a specific church. The plan was simply to develop inside sources among “clergy and church leadership” to report to the FBI what certain church members were up to.

Can you imagine the distrust and suspicion that would be sown among the body of believers, especially as people found out that parishioners were winding up in federal prisons? The effect would chill relationships and conversation. After all, who could you trust?

For now it seems like the threat has been averted. But the fact that it was even proposed tells us all we need to know about how the FBI sees religious conservatives.

Today the Catholics; tomorrow the Protestants. Now that the precedent has been set and the idea of surveilling churches is out there, don’t be surprised when parishioners begin to be arrested or simply disappear without a trace.

It shouldn’t be that shocking.

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Daily Broadside | Distorting History Will Never Bring the Offended Justice

As I mentioned on Friday, I was traveling this weekend. I was in Washington, D.C., where the world, the flesh and the devil meet in a swirling vortex of power and greed.

While I was there I walked down Pennsylvania Avenue past the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where plots against Trump were hatched and dirty information on Joe and Hunter Biden was suppressed. I walked down Constitution Avenue past the Department of Justice where Merrick Garland had the audacity to green light a raid on Donald J. Trump’s personal home, a first in American history, over nothing more than “classified” documents that he had the inherent power to declassify as he wished.

I wasn’t filled with pride when I saw these buildings; I was filled with revulsion at the sickening abuse of power that they represent.

There were some good experiences that offset the grim reminders those granite buildings represented. I walked through the National Archives (right next door to the DOJ) and saw the originals of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Those made my heart swell with pride over the foresight and wisdom of our Founding Fathers, who created the freest country the world has ever known.

But even they, in all their earthly wisdom, couldn’t make something that would outlast the evil in the human heart. I’ve quoted it before and will quote it a hundred more times before I die, but John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Generally speaking, we are no longer a “moral and religious People.” The people currently in the government “of, by and for the People” are drawn out of that no-longer-religious community. They are, with few exceptions, of, by and for themselves.

A good example of how this plays out was in the National Archives’ gift shop. As I walked through it something felt “off” to me. I couldn’t place my finger on it until it occurred to me that while there were facsimiles of our founding documents and pocket Constitutions and stickers and magnets and pencils and coffee cups and T-shirts, there were very few representations of the MEN who wrote these documents. Instead, what I saw were sections devoted to women and minorities.

I have no problem with acknowledging that women played a role in our founding, or that minorities also contributed. But the degree to which they were represented in the gift shop was all out of proportion to the contributions they made. Again, not to disparage any group, but it wasn’t women and minorities who wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.

It doesn’t matter that it was a patriarchal society — you can’t make that “right” by somehow downplaying or demonizing men and increasing the presence of women in a gift shop.

Yet, that’s what I saw. And that is a direct result of a grievance, which comes from feeling a dissatisfaction or perceiving an injustice, which is believing you have been wronged — and that is exacerbated by not getting the justice or revenge you think you deserve.

Somehow, those in charge think they are getting “justice” by replacing our history or emphasizing minor actors out of proportion to their contributions. Unfortunately, all they’re doing is distorting history.

True justice for things done a hundred or two hundred years ago can’t be had. But, someday, the True Judge of all mankind will bring justice to bear and make all things right across all time.

Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you;
    therefore he will rise up to show you compassion.
For the Lord is a God of justice.
    Blessed are all who wait for him!
— Isaiah 30:18

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Daily Broadside | The FBI is Now the KGB and Stasi All Rolled Into One

Daily Verse | Zephaniah 3:8
“Therefore wait for me,”
    declares the Lord,
    “for the day I will stand up to testify.
I have decided to assemble the nations,
    to gather the kingdoms
and to pour out my wrath on them—
    all my fierce anger.
The whole world will be consumed
    by the fire of my jealous anger.“

Wednesday’s Reading: Haggai 1-2

It’s Wednesday and middle of the week. Everything is smooth sailing from here, right?

Wrong.

The FBI has become a politicized arm of the Democrats to intimidate, harass and make the subject of lawfare anyone who actively opposes the Left or doesn’t keep their mouth shut.

A well-known pro-life author, sidewalk counselor, and father of seven was the latest victim of a U.S. Department of Justice-sponsored SWAT raid and arrest — for supposed “FACE Act” violations — at his rural home as his children looked on “screaming.”

Mark Houck is the founder and president of The King’s Men, which promotes healing for victims of pornography addiction and promotes Christian virtues among men in the United States and Europe.

According to his wife Ryan-Marie, who spoke with LifeSiteNews, he also drives two hours south to Philadelphia every Wednesday to sidewalk council for six to eight hours at two different abortion centers.

Ryan-Marie, who is a homeschool mother, explained the SWAT team of 25 to 30 FBI agents swarmed their property with around 15 vehicles at 7:05 a.m. this morning. Having quickly surrounded the house with rifles in firing position, “they started pounding on the door and yelling for us to open it.”

What did Houck do to warrant such an overwhelming show of force? Did he firebomb an abortion clinic? Did he murder an abortion doctor? Did he rally white supremacists to pound on the doors of the local Planned Parenthood?

No, no and no.

Houck was accused of, get this, “violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, due to a claimed ‘ATTACK OF A PATIENT ESCORT.'” Exactly what did Houck do?

Ryan-Marie stated this charge comes from an incident that had already been thrown out of the District Court in Philadelphia but was somehow picked up by Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice.

On several occasions when Mark went to sidewalk counsel last year, he took his eldest son, who was only 12 at the time, she explained. For “weeks and weeks,” a “pro-abortion protester” would speak to the boy saying “crude … inappropriate and disgusting things,” such as “you’re dad’s a fag,” and other statements that were too vulgar for her to convey.

Repeatedly, Mark would tell this pro-abortion man that he did not have permission to speak to his son and please refrain from doing so. And “he kept doing it and kind of came into [the son’s] personal space” obscenely ridiculing his father. At this point, “Mark shoved him away from his child, and the guy fell back.”

“He didn’t have any injuries or anything, but he tried to sue Mark,” and the case was thrown out of court in the early summer.

This incident happened in October 2021—a full year ago!

Here’s another example:

Then there is the issue of the FBI raiding a business in Beverly Hills. Agents had a warrant because there was cause to believe that there was criminal activity going on, specifically drug trafficking and money laundering. But while agents were on-scene, they also broke into safety deposit boxes belonging to customers and seized the assets and money inside. The FBI maintains that everything was above-board, but the Post Millennial has information that the judge who issued the warrant was misled. Specifically, the warrant did not show that the agents intended to permanently confiscate everything in boxes that contained at least $5,000 in assets.

Paula Bolyard observes:

Once again, we see Joe Biden’s two-tiered justice system at work. Remember when news dropped that the Supreme Court was set to overturn Roe v. Wade and the violent left attacked more than 50 pro-life centers? Guess how many people have been arrested in connection with those attacks? Not a single one. PJ Media’s Robert Spencer reported:

Nonetheless, it’s clear that Biden’s Justice Department, which took the highly unusual step of openly dissenting from the decision overturning Roe and has been decidedly reluctant to protect conservative Supreme Court Justices from illegal protests at their homes, is hardly making the protection of pro-life centers a high priority. No one has been arrested from the pro-abortion group Jane’s Revenge, despite its open threats to pro-lifers. “We will hunt you down and make your lives a living hell,” the group has said. This is, it says, a “war” against pro-lifers.

Then there are the two FBI whistleblowers, Steve Friend and Kyle Seraphin. Both have been suspended as retaliation for their disclosures (although Friend’s is a de facto suspension because his security clearance was revoked, making it impossible for him to do his job).

As Ace writes:

One major point he makes is that the FBI has shifted from a crime-investigation organization to an intelligence organization.

This is important. Consider: To investigate you criminally, a law enforcement investigation first needs grounds to suspect you have committed a specific crime. There is a necessary predicate to justify digging into you. It’s not a high threshold, but it is a threshold.

But to open up an intelligence probe of someone, you don’t need any predicate of a crime. All you need is… well, you knew this guy and he knew this guy and you’re all conservatives and this other conservative once posted to a “Stop the Steal” FaceBook group. And now they can begin spying on you.

This is a huge shift in mentality.

And it turns the FBI into a general State Security Police, a general Stasi, a general KGB. They can investigate whoever they want. And no longer are they limited to investigating people for at least having some ties to a suspected overseas intelligence organization or handler; no, now it’s enough that you have some connection to any rightwing group or person they don’t like.

Add to all of this the highly suspect DOJ raid on President Donald J. Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago on ludicrous charges, the FBI’s suppression of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the role the FBI had in framing Trump as a Russian spy, and it’s clear that the agency needs to be razed and the earth salted.

But it’s not going to happen. I’ll say it again—be ready for more and more of this as the “government” expands its abuses of power, all with Darth Brandon’s blessing in his September 1 speech at Independence Hall.

We’re going to be made to care.

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Daily Broadside | Garland Owns Raid Decision, FBI Too Corrupt to Exist Any Longer

Daily Verse | Isaiah 66:2
“These is the one I esteem:
    he who is humble and contrite in spirit,
    and trembles at my word.”

Friday’s Reading: Jeremiah 1-3
Saturday’s Reading: Jeremiah 4-6

Friday and we’re already hitting the middle of August. The days are hurtling by on the road to November and our last chance to right the ship before 2024.

So Attorney General Merrick Garland made a rare statement yesterday and took responsibility for approving the raid on President Trump’s personal residence on Monday.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said he “personally approved” the decision to seek a search warrant for former President Trump’s private residence at Mar-a-Lago, saying the Justice Department has filed a motion to unseal the search warrant and property receipt from the FBI’s raid, amid “substantial public interest” in the matter, while defending the “integrity” of law enforcement officials.

The raid was outrageous not just for its brazen disregard of historical precedent, or for the reported purpose of recovering potentially “classified” materials that Trump had (even though the FBI had already seen everything that he had), or even for the overkill of sending 40 agents to swarm Trump’s home.

No, the real outrage is in the selective application of enforcement and the absolutely appalling corruption that exists in agencies like the FBI, putting the lie to Garland’s defense of the “integrity” of the agency. The FBI in particular and our law enforcement institutions in general have become much too large, much to unaccountable, and much too smug.

They are a danger to the republic.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, once so popular it had its own TV show solely dedicated to its heroics, has become a hyper-politicized, jackbooted bully that no longer serves the American people or the U.S. Constitution, which its employees are sworn to protect. It has become, instead, the intelligence arm and domestic enforcer of the far left.

Did we say defund? Yes. But we don’t mean simply to cut its funding, as leftists have disastrously proposed for police forces across the country. We mean tear down the entire rotting edifice of the FBI and replacing it with a new agency that respects the Constitution and holds itself accountable to all Americans, not just the woke far left.

The Editorial Board of Issues & Insights isn’t the only group calling for a complete dismantling of the FBI. See Kyle Shideler’s recent essay at American Greatness, “For the Rule of Law to Reign, the Bureau Must Be Destroyed.”

Nevertheless, the FBI must be abolished.

The solution to the abuses we now endure is not just to subject the FBI to another fruitless inspector general investigation but to dismantle it completely. The bureau cannot be the focus of yet another congressional hearing. FBI Director Christopher Wray, like his predecessors, is more than happy to sit smirking while a handful of grandstanding congressmen and senators pound the table and yell on C-SPAN. Then he’ll jet off for a holiday vacation on a taxpayer-funded private jet while the same congressmen vote to increase his budget. Again.

No, the FBI must be rendered into component parts and distributed to the four winds…

…The FBI’s actions over the past six years make perfectly clear that the FBI is more than willing to serve as the enforcement arm of the Democratic Party. It serves as its patron’s shield in matters large and small. It exonerated Hillary Clinton for her illicit server. It raided James O’Keefe and Project Veritas when Joe Biden’s daughter lost her diary. It eliminated investigation into Black Lives Matter and other black identity extremists because those pursuits annoyed the Democrats’ Congressional Black Caucus. It refuses even to utter the word “Antifa” while churches and pregnancy centers are fire-bombed. It continues to cover up for Hunter Biden’s corrupt dealings with enemy nations, along with his indulgence in criminal prostitution and drug abuse.

But the FBI has also served as the Democrats’ sword as well. It knowingly laundered the Russian collusion hoax, lying in order to secure FISA warrants. It ambushed the president’s sitting national security advisor in a nonsense perjury trap. The FBI hunts down January 6 protesters while dodging congressional inquiries about the role of federal agents in provoking the incident. The FBI ginned up a fake kidnapping plot in Michigan to instill fear of right-wing terrorism, manhandled the former president’s lawyer, and shackled one of his former high-level aides.

And it has now raided the former president’s home under a mere pretext, while the Democrats openly crow on cable news about using a political prosecution to prevent Trump from ever again being able to serve in office.

That’s what makes the raid on Trump so impossibly outrageous: the flagrant double standard the FBI and any number of other agencies flaunt in our faces. They don’t even pretend to be impartial and even-handed. In fact, they seem to revel in the fact that they’re only serving one team.

It’s been going on for years.

Did former president Clinton’s National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger, who stuffed documents down his pants and in his socks, walked out of the National Archives with them, and lied about doing so, get raided by the FBI to recover any other potentially “classified” materials? No, he got fined and two years’ probation after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material.

Unlike Berger, Trump was the president, the chief executive and, as such, could declassify any documents he wanted. But the FBI decides to raid his home.

Victor Davis Hanson, one of my favorite essayists, puts it just as bluntly as the others:

The FBI is dissolving before our eyes into a rogue security service akin to those in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.  

Take the FBI’s deliberately asymmetrical application of the law. This week the bureau surprise-raided the home of former President Donald Trump—an historical first. 

A massive phalanx of FBI agents swooped into the Trump residence while he was not home, to confiscate his personal property, safe, and records. All of this was over an archival dispute of presidential papers common to many former presidents. Agents swarmed the entire house, including the wardrobe closet of the former first lady. 

Note we are less than 90 days out from a midterm election, and this was not just a raid, but a political act. 

An October surprise in August. I wonder what they have planned for October?

The FBI interferes with and warps national elections. It hires complete frauds as informants who are far worse than its targets. It humiliates or exempts government and elected officials based on their politics. It violates the civil liberties of individual American citizens. 

The FBI’s highest officials now routinely mislead Congress. They have erased or altered court and subpoenaed evidence. They illegally leak confidential material to the media. And they have lied under oath to federal investigators.

It’s time to dismantle the FBI, tear out the studs, dig up the foundation and salt the earth where it once stood. There is no reforming it.

And Trump may be just the guy to do it because, well … this, which he and his team released the day after the raid.

Have a good weekend.

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Daily Broadside | There’s A Lot About the Raid That Really Doesn’t Make Sense

Daily Verse | Isaiah 62:12
They will be called the Holy People,
    the Redeemed of the Lord;
and you will be called Sought After,
    the City No Longer Deserted.

Thursday’s Reading: Isaiah 63-66

Thursday and the FBI’s panty raid on Trump’s personal residence keeps getting weirder and weirder. As disturbing as it is, Very Important People are disavowing any foreknowledge of the event and the pretext for the raid itself is beginning to look shaky.

The first black LBGTQ+ spokespyrson insists that Brandon only learned about the raid from the newspapers (just like Barack Hussein Obama did with many of his scandals, including the Fast & Furious gun-running operation).

If that’s true, then heads should roll, don’t you think? I mean, they didn’t give the current Resident a heads up that they were going to raid his predecessor’s—and likely future opponent’s—home?!? For the first time in American history? Breaking with 250 years of precedent?

No?

Oh, and even Merrick Garland supposedly didn’t know about the raid. “Garland had no prior knowledge of the date and time of the specific raid, nor was he asked to approve it.“

Here’s the rest of the stuff that is looking hinky at this point.

  1. The judge who approved the warrant, Bruce E. Reinhart, is a former US Attorney who went to work for Jeffrey Epstein in the middle of the investigation, donated $2,000 to Barack Hussein Obama’s presidential campaign and PAC, and was appointed a Federal Magistrate. Nothing here that would suggest bias!
  2. The FBI was ostensibly looking for classified materials that Trump took with him after leaving office. Sources also said National Archives and Records Administration referred the case to the Justice Department, which recovered 15 boxes of classified materials from the home.  But the FBI had already looked through the boxes back in May and had not taken anything then.
  3. I they were looking for classified documents, then they were looking in the wrong place because “we’ve known for months now that the documents in question were already declassified by then-President Trump,” according to Kash Patel, a former Trump administration official.
  4. That Trump had the documents may have been the result of an administrative error outside of his team. “A legal source said that the boxes had been packed up by the General Services Administration and shipped to Mar-a-Lago when Trump left office in January 2020.”

In the same Newsweek article above that distances Garland from the raid:

The officials, who have direct knowledge of the FBI’s deliberations and were granted anonymity in order to discuss sensitive matters, said the raid of Donald Trump’s Florida residence was deliberately timed to occur when the former president was away.

FBI decision-makers in Washington and Miami thought that denying the former president a photo opportunity or a platform from which to grandstand (or to attempt to thwart the raid) would lower the profile of the event, says one of the sources, a senior Justice Department official who is a 30-year veteran of the FBI.

The effort to keep the raid low-key failed: instead, it prompted a furious response from GOP leaders and Trump supporters. “What a spectacular backfire,” says the Justice official.

The article goes on to say, “some 10-15 boxes of documents were removed from the premises. Donald Trump said in a statement that the FBI opened his personal safe as part of their search. Trump attorney Lindsey Halligan, who was present during the multi-hour search, says that the FBI targeted three rooms—a bedroom, an office and a storage room. That suggests that the FBI knew specifically where to look.”

They fail to mention that they also went through Melania’s wardrobe, which apparently wasn’t targeted, yet they specifically looked there.

Perverts.

The FBI needs to be disbanded and defunded. As does the DOJ and the IRS because what we’re witnessing is the centralization and consolidation of power in the hands of an unelected and unaccountable bureaucracy—exactly what the separation of powers that our Founders so wisely created was intended to prevent.

I’ll say it again: America as founded is dead. There isn’t any going back; you can’t undo what has now been done. The Democrats are the enemy of the people and must be destroyed at the voting booth. As I wrote yesterday, it’s important that the Right doesn’t respond violently to the provocation.

If New York Times reporting is right — and they never err on the side of being soft on Trump — then this raid was over documents the National Archives thinks Trump should not have, or perhaps classified documents in his possession. That is not something the FBI raids major political candidates over — See, In Re Hillary Rodham Clinton.

This is a provocation. They are trying to get a reaction that allows a further crackdown. See, In Re J6.

It’s a distressing time to be a patriot but be patriots we must.

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Daily Broadside | Our Only Option is to Go Scorched Earth on the Democrats in 2022 and 2024

Daily Verse | Isaiah 58:4
You cannot fast as you do today and expect your voice to be heard on high.

Wednesday’s Reading: Isaiah 60-62

Wednesday and the audacious attack on Trump under the flimsiest of legal cover in our multi-tiered system of justice continues to astound and shock. Any illusions that America as founded still exists was shattered with this latest in-your-face jackbooted stomping of precedent and the rule of law.

How anyone can still believe we’re not at least approaching DEFCON 3 is beyond me. If sabotaging 2016’s election results with the Russia! Russia! Russia! collusion hoax, the two counterfeit impeachment trials, the rigged and stolen election of 2020, the January 6 Reichstag fire and illegal sham trials haven’t convinced you that unconstitutional covert operations designed to short-circuit our liberties are being run out of formerly trusted institutions, I’m not sure what will.

What makes this even worse is who hasn’t been raided by the DOJ and its mini me, the FBI.

Hunter Biden and Joe Biden: The FBI has been in possession of Hunter’s laptop since 2019, which contains evidence that Hunter used Joe’s position to conduct lucrative foreign business. He also cut his dad into deals and commingled their funds.

Hillary Clinton: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mishandled classified information on a private server she likely used to hide efforts to use her office to raise money for her family’s foundation. She was infamously excused by the FBI…

Black Lives Matter: Amid evidence that the left-wing group has been abusing its charitable status, even liberal states issued warnings to the group. But though the movement’s scope is nationwide, the FBI or DOJ have yet to do anything about it…

By contrast, Trump allies past and present — such as Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Peter Navarro, and others — have been subjected to spectacular raids, often leaked to friendly media ahead of time, over relatively minor or unrelated allegations.

I’ve warned for years now that we were heading toward Civil War 2.0. The unprecedented invasion of a former president’s and most likely future presidential candidate’s and current private citizen’s home on the pretext of searching for “classified” documents from his time as president pushes us a great deal further toward that eventuality.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that was part of the calculus involved in planning the raid. The great danger is that some far-right activists or MEAL Team 6-types will take the provocation as permission to plot a counterattack. But as one of my favorite bloggers and pastors, Douglas Wilson, wrote in a discussion about this very thing,

“And so the takeaway lesson for conservatives is: don’t take the bait. Under no circumstances should we take the bait. I think I may have mentioned before that we should not take the bait.”

You should read the whole thing and you should also not take the bait. So should the extremes on the Right.

What we can do is really the only thing legally permissible right now, and that is to vote out the grifting ankle-biting dead weights who are part of the problem, who say they’re Republicans but act like Democrats. People like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, and any of the 14 House Republicans and 15 Senate Republicans who voted to interfere with our Second Amendment right to bear arms because teenage criminals don’t obey our laws.

Fortunately, voting them out that seems to be happening, especially in races with Trump-endorsed candidates.

Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (Wash.), one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump last year, has conceded in her tough primary contest against Joe Kent. Kent is a Green Beret endorsed by the former president and is expected to advance in Washington state’s all-party primary…

Herrera Beutler, who voted to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, would be the third such House Republican to lose in a primary this year, joining Rep. Peter Meijer (Mich.), who was defeated last week and, Rep. Tom Rice (S.C.), who lost last month. Two Republicans have advanced — both from all-party primaries: Rep. Dan Newhouse (Wash.) and Rep. David G. Valadao (Calif.). Four others decided not to seek reelection.

The final House Republican to face a primary is Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), who will go before voters Aug. 16. She faces a challenger running to her right who is backed by Trump.

I don’t believe that we can simply vote our way out of this but, apart from the unmentionable, it’s the only option we have right now. To some degree, it’s being effective. And at least one observer thinks the Deep State’s days are numbered:

But even if the Deep State were to succeed, they have already burnt their bridges by creating this precedent. The path is now wide open for either a returning President Trump or a newly minted President DeSantis to investigate Joe “The Big Guy” Biden and his possible history of pay for play. What a rich target, given Hunter’s lack of discretion about how the family became so wealthy on a government salary. Ditto for Nancy “I Rip Up State of the Union Addresses” Pelosi, the most amazing investor in stock market history. And what about those sexual harassment charges against old Joe?  No more “let the defeated opposition party leave town in peace” after they lose an election. When you play this high-stakes game, you had better come with very clean hands. While Trump may have been too much of a Mr. Nice Guy when it came to prosecuting his opponents, Gov. DeSantis can play hardball with the best of them.

Couple that with the ascendancy of conservative lawmakers and you have the makings of a tool that can be used to pry the shadow government out of its hole. And then whack it over the head.

The Democrats have demonized half the country’s voters for the last decade or more, with Barack Hussein Obama starting the practice with his “bitter clingers” epithet, followed by Hillary’s “deplorables” comment, and Brandon’s “dregs of society” insult. We’ve suffered their slights with patience, believing (perhaps naively) that we’d eventually have our say.

It could be coming, starting with the mid-terms and following it up with a strong showing in 2024. But the victories must be decisive and overwhelming. They must absolutely wreck the Democrat Party of Soviet Suck-ups. And we must put people in place who are willing to go scorched earth on those players and organizations that have acted like the tyrants they are.

After the raid at his home, Trump posted a video that captures what a majority of us are probably feeling.

I’ll leave Paula Bolyard with the final word.

Now that we see clearly what the problem is, where do we go from here? Sure, we can peacefully protest, send angry emails, or post diatribes on social media, but that’s not going to fix the problems that are eating away at our republic. The answer lies in winning elections. Decisively. First the midterms and then the White House in 2024. As I wrote last week, Trump did the country a great service by exposing the deep state and making Americans aware of the corruption within our government. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to drain the swamp — in part because it was constantly investigating him. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last week dropped a political bomb on the ruling class by suspending woke Hillsborough County state attorney Andrew Warren, who had announced he would refuse to enforce Florida laws he didn’t like. Once we regain control of the White House and Congress, this should be our template going forward.

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Daily Broadside | FBI Goes Full KGB in Raid on Trump Mar-a-Lago Home

Daily Verse | Isaiah 57:21
“There is no peace,” says my God, “for the wicked.”

Tuesday’s Reading: Isaiah 58-59

It’s Tuesday and Monday, August 8, may very well go down in history as the defining moment that irreversibly destroyed our nation.

The unprecedented, unannounced raid on President Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home by our politicized law enforcement agencies drives home the reality that we no longer live in a country governed by equality under the law, but in a tin-pot dictatorship led by a corrupt cabal of powerful elitists who rule by selective intimidation and force.

There is no difference between what happened yesterday and the activities of the KGB in the former Soviet Union. This is all about destroying the political enemies of those in power.

Are our Norms now restored? Are the Adults back in charge? Are we happy with our current State of Affairs?

Here’s the Trumped-Up Charges that the FBI is angling to stick Trump with (my emphasis):

Early reports that the F.B.I. search of former President Donald J. Trump’s residence in Florida related to an investigation into whether he had unlawfully taken government files when he left the White House focused attention on an obscure criminal law barring removal of official records. The penalties for breaking that law include disqualification from holding any federal office.

Because Mr. Trump is widely believed to be preparing to run for president again in 2024, that unusual penalty raised the prospect that he might be legally barred from returning to the White House.

Specifically, the law in question — Section 2071 of Title 18 of the United States Code — makes it a crime if someone who has custody of government documents or records “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies or destroys” them.

If convicted, defendants can be fined or sentenced to prison for up to three years. In addition, the statute says, if they are currently in a federal office, they “shall forfeit” that office, and they shall “be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”

On its face, then, if Mr. Trump were to be charged and convicted of removing, concealing or destroying government records under that law, he would seem to be ineligible to become president again.

This is today’s FBI: find some obscure law and conduct an illegal daylight raid to accuse a political opponent of a crime that would put them in prison for three years and disqualify them from ever holding any office in the United States.

How conVEEEEnient!

Funny how political persecution seems to only go one way in this country: against conservatives and Republicans.

This event will please the progressive Left and anger the conservative and, perhaps moderate, Right. This seems like a violation of decency and precedent. Donald J. Trump, while he has his faults, has endured more political persecution for the last 7 years than any other president. And he’s not even in office anymore, for peetsake!

Still, they persisted.

The forces arrayed against him include the unelected bureaucrats in the U.S. government, the Deep State operatives that infest our unelected alphabet agencies, the Democrat mouthpieces known as the Lame Stream Media, and any number of institutions that are saturated by cultural Marxists. In fact, they all worked together to “fortify” the 2020 presidential election against DJT and literally bragged about it in a national magazine.

Trump is, as usual, unbowed (Truth Social account necessary).

Statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents. Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before. After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate. It is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024, especially based on recent polls, and who will likewise do anything to stop Republicans and Conservatives in the upcoming Midterm Elections. Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries. Sadly, America has now become one of those Countries, corrupt at a level not seen before. They even broke into my safe! What is the difference between this and Watergate, where operatives broke into the Democrat National Committee? Here, in reverse, Democrats broke into the home of the 45th President of the United States.

The political persecution of President Donald J. Trump has been going on for years, with the now fully debunked Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment Hoax #2, and so much more, it just never ends. It is political targeting at the highest level!

Hillary Clinton was allowed to delete and acid wash 33,000 E-mails AFTER they were subpoenaed by Congress. Absolutely nothing has happened to hold her accountable. She even took antique furniture, and other items from the White House.

I stood up to America’s bureaucratic corruption, I restored power to the people, and truly delivered for our Country, like we have never seen before. The establishment hated it. Now, as they watch my endorsed candidates win big victories, and see my dominance in all polls, they are trying to stop me, and the Republican Party, once more. The lawlessness, political persecution, and Witch Hunt must be exposed and stopped.

I will continue to fight for the Great American People!

What makes this so maddening is the clear double-standards that are in place. Hillary Clinton, James Comey, John Brennan, Lois Lerner, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and dozens more hive scum in Washington D.C. break laws and skate all the time.

We all see it. The risk here is that this (intentional) provocation could send the Deplorables over the edge and we could have another January 6 event, which would give the bastards the justification to crack down even more. (Although, the way it’s going, I’ll bet in the not-too-distant future they won’t even search for a justification—they’ll just crack down to “prevent” some made-up crisis they tell us they’re averting.)

Don’t react.

Instead, stay calm.

And keep your powder dry.

Then vote for Donald J. Trump in 2024 as a giant rebuke to the out-of-control government leviathan.

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time’s almost up

GIVEN WHAT WE’RE LEARNING, THERE BETTER BE PERP WALKS. They Knew… But Will They Face Justice? You should read the whole shocking thing.

Understand how vile this is. It had been proven by the time Trump was inaugurated that the FBI had found zero evidence Trump had colluded with Russia. (In just one specific case, they knew Lt. Gen. Flynn had done nothing, nada, zilch, zero wrong in talking to the Russian ambassador. Yet Comey and McCabe still sent Peter Strzok to the White House to entrap Flynn.)

What the newly unveiled evidence shows is the FBI knew Trump was not acting with Russia. Instead, Russia had been feeding disinformation to Steele, who was working for Hillary Clinton. This was disinformation designed to undermine Trump to Hillary’s benefit. And yet Trump and his associates, family and friends were the ones hounded for another three years.