By DEXTER DUGGAN
Sowing fear and resentment among Americans while treating lawbreaking aliens as kings and queens further disfigures the morally pockmarked Joe Biden administration.
This leaves some observers to wonder how such a nefarious government could be trusted to keep its sneaky hands off preparations for the 2022 elections that could deprive Biden’s Democrats of their congressional majorities.
Meanwhile, Biden’s predatory conduct on the secular front seems likely to grow bolder if he sees that even the Catholic bishops with a direct say over his religious behavior fail to name and confront his sacrileges. Predators smell fear.
Those media that seek to avoid or minimize the severe disruption that Biden seeks to inflict should pay attention to Marxist lady Saule Omarova, his nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, who wants to transfer all private bank accounts to the Federal Reserve, and his administration’s aim to force men into college women’s dorms and showers, even at Christian schools.
Radical Biden’s highly politicized Department of Justice made it plain that people who doubt his agenda for this nation may expect to get tough treatment — including parents who object to schools indoctrinating their children in left-wing “wokeness” and racism.
Nor did the DOJ’s Federal Bureau of Investigation agents hesitate to act like thugs when they recently rousted Project Veritas, the conservative undercover investigators who specialize in videos exposing the dishonesty and hypocrisies of their foes.
The FBI never was in President Trump’s pocket like it is in Biden’s. Indeed, FBI officials pretty much were part of the Washington swamp trying to dispose of Trump.
But just imagine that federal agents had followed Trump’s orders to swipe confidential material from a prominent liberal journalist during a dawn raid at his home and then promptly leaked it to a conservative platform like Fox News.
There would have been immediate calls for Trump’s impeachment, and a good argument to be made that this impeachment, unlike the other two, would be justified.
That never happened. However, in reality Biden’s FBI raided the residences of current and former Project Veritas journalists, including PV’s leader and founder, James O’Keefe, in pursuit of the belief that in 2020 PV obtained a stolen diary belonging to Biden daughter Ashley.
Information yanked away from PV then was passed along to the left-wing New York Times, which published multiple stories on the conservative investigators.
Conservative commentator Roger Kimball wrote that O’Keefe’s lawyer said the FBI “showed up with a battering ram, cuffed O’Keefe, and tossed him out in the hallway in his underwear as they proceeded to ransack his home,” taking “lots of booty, including two mobile phones chock full of privileged attorney-client communications, donor information, as well as information about ongoing Project Veritas investigations.”
In a statement, O’Keefe admitted that PV received a diary after tipsters said it had “explosive allegations” against Joe Biden, but PV didn’t know if the journal was authentic. He said PV couldn’t verify its contents and, without doing any story on it, turned the diary over to law enforcement so it could be returned to its rightful owner.
O’Keefe said that regardless of whether the diary was stolen, “in what world is the alleged theft of a diary investigated by the president’s FBI and his Department of Justice? A diary! This federal investigation smacks of politics. Project Veritas never threatened or engaged in any illegal conduct.”
Or, as commentator Kimball put it, what if you had an “Uncle Fred who was scribbling his embarrassing memoirs? Can you call your Uncle Joe and have him put the FBI on the case? Of course you can’t. Who do you think you are?”
In his statement, O’Keefe continued: “Should the Southern District of New York try to take away our First Amendment rights to uncover and publish newsworthy stories without government intimidation, be assured, Project Veritas will not back down.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists, which describes itself as “an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide,” issued a statement on November 15 saying: “The government must provide a clear link between members of Project Veritas and alleged criminal activity before searching their homes for information about source material.
“Conducting raids without this kind of link sets a dangerous precedent that could allow law enforcement to search and confiscate reporters’ unpublished source material in vague attempts to identify whistleblowers,” the committee said.
Even the left-wing American Civil Liberties Union, while disdaining the work of PV, said on November 14 that “the precedent set in this case could have serious consequences for press freedom. Unless the government had good reason to believe that Project Veritas employees were directly involved in the criminal theft of the diary, it should not have subjected them to invasive searches and seizures.
“We urge the court to appoint a special master to ensure that law-enforcement officers review only those materials that were lawfully seized and that are directly relevant to a legitimate criminal investigation,” the ACLU said.
A Politico story posted on November 13 said: “‘This is just beyond belief,’ said University of Minnesota law professor Jane Kirtley, a former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. ‘I’m not a big fan of Project Veritas, but this is just over the top. I hope they get a serious reprimand from the court because I think this is just wrong’.”
Politico’s senior legal-affairs reporter, Josh Gerstein, wrote: “The Biden administration’s effort to establish itself as a committed champion of press freedom is facing new doubts because of the Justice Department’s aggressive legal tactics against a conservative provocateur known for his hidden-camera video stings.”
It’s Not Journalism
The Wanderer asked three sources to comment on the raids against Veritas.
National conservative commentator Quin Hillyer said: “These are authoritarian tactics, pure and simple, and a blatant violation of the First Amendment. They must not stand.”
Northern California commentator Barbara Simpson, who worked at major electronic news outlets in both Los Angeles and San Francisco, said: “The FBI’s illegal theft of information from James O’Keefe is a shocking breach of personal information guaranteed by the Constitution.
“That it was done by the FBI and turned over to media makes it even more egregious,” Simpson said. “To add insult to injury, President Biden has not done anything to correct this miscarriage of justice. One wonders about his sense of right and wrong.
“If those FBI agents, and those who assigned them this raid, are not punished severely, the result for all journalists will be they will never be safe in their future investigations and reporting,” she said. “They lose, the American people lose, and the Constitution loses. I’m not sure who wins.”
Seth Leibsohn, a conservative strategist and talk host at Phoenix-based KKNT (960 AM), said: “The First Amendment used to be sacrosanct to the media. It was never designed for the media to use it as a weapon to shut down other media.
“Now, in our hyper-politicized and aconstitutional moment we live in, where progressivism and its credenza is more important than the forms and foundations of our country, than the very protection organizations like The New York Times rely upon for their very business model, it is rendered effectively meaningless,” Leibsohn said.
“And I thought The New York Times disliked robber barons,” he said. “The New York Times and the rest of the legacy media achieved their credentials and esteem relying on the First Amendment, and now they have cartelized their industry against anyone who they presume threatens their point of view.
“It’s not journalism. It’s not constitutional. And it’s not sustainable — not in a country that tells itself it’s still free,” Leibsohn said.
Nor was the FBI attack on PV rare bad judgment. Writing on the different topic of the FBI’s use of the bogus Steele dossier alleging Trump collusion with Russia, in order to harm Trump, no less than New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote on November 16:
“James Comey’s FBI became a Bureau of Dirty Tricks, mitigated only by its own incompetence — like a mash-up of Inspector Javert and Inspector Clouseau. Donald Trump’s best move as president (about which I was dead wrong at the time) may have been to fire him.”
Stephens, no fan of the Trump presidency, added that despite Trump’s “many and grave sins, he was the victim of a gigantic slander abetted by the FBI.”
As to other topics mentioned at the beginning of this article — Conservative activist J. Christian Adams had an interesting analysis posted on October 21 at the Gatestone Institute website (www.gatestoneinstitute.org) about undesirable factors in the 2020 elections that could return in 2022.
One was the injection of big bucks by private actors like Mark Zuckerberg into government operations. These weren’t political contributions to candidates, but money involved in processing the votes. Another was fiddling with established election rules.
Adams wrote: “You didn’t need much outright voter fraud when these two ingredients combined to poison the 2020 election.”
The hosts of the national Clay Travis and Buck Sexton radio talk program on November 16 had a different angle — that the only lifeline for Democrats in 2022 is “emergency voting all over again.” The Democrats still need COVID, they said.
As to massive illegal immigration thriving with a Biden welcome mat, the Just the News website (justthenews.com) posted on November 17 that “nonprofits working with the Biden administration have created detailed itineraries and information packets to help illegal aliens travel to wherever they want to go in the U.S., according to documents obtained by a Texas congressman.”
Once more Biden reminds Americans that they’re far inferior to countless lawbreaking aliens who, he hopes, will build him a lasting Dem majority.
“Often courtesy of American taxpayers struggling to pay their bills during surging inflation, illegals are given free quality hotel rooms, plane tickets and transportation to the airport, travel maps, and instructions to TSA to bypass photo ID requirements, according to the documents shared with Just the News,” the article said. It added:
“The prototype packet, which was provided by a whistleblower to Rep. Lance Gooden (R., Texas), undermines Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ claim that the southern border is closed. Instead, it highlights an extensive network of nonprofits, corporations, and family foundations working together to circumvent immigration laws passed by Congress.”
Leaving The Job Half Done
Finally, news reports on November 17 said that at their fall assembly in Baltimore, the nation’s Catholic bishops issued an anticipated document on the Eucharist but avoided a direct rebuke to Biden — a notoriously bad Catholic energetically promoting massive worldwide abortion.
If this kind of conduct doesn’t draw explicit discipline against such a prominent, unrepentant offender, what could? The issue here isn’t what flavor of ice cream he prefers, but infinite infant slaughter.
An Associated Press story put it this way: “U.S. Catholic bishops overwhelmingly approved a long-anticipated document on Communion on Wednesday [November 17] that stops short of calling for withholding the sacrament from politicians such as President Joe Biden who support abortion rights, but offers plenty of tacit justification for individual bishops to do so.”
On the other hand, liberal political writer Ed Kilgore’s article at New York magazine was headlined, “Bishops cave on denying Communion to pro-choice politicians like Biden.” And the Page One headline in the fanatically pro-abortion New York Times saw the prelates as ducking: “Bishops avoid Biden conflict over Eucharist.”
The bishops deserved some credit for sticking with this issue when much pressure was exerted for them to drop it. On the other hand, when doing their duty was called for, they left it only half done. Is that about like a parent saying obedience is expected in the household, but never giving the family brat the spanking he richly deserves?
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