patrick.net

The Biden Administration seems to be getting desperate, at least when it comes to stopping a new bribery whistleblower from testifying before Congress. The story began last week, when an Israeli professor with a murky covert intelligence background, Gal Luft, uploaded a viral 12-minute video claiming he was being “hunted” because he was prepared to testify before Congress that Joe Biden is a dirty, rotten traitor and bribe taker who has sold the U.S. out to the Chinese.

Now he’s on the most-wanted list. For a process crime, of course.

Yesterday the DoJ suddenly and unexpectedly indicted professor Luft, in absentia. Nobody even knew he was under investigation. It was the fastest indictment in DoJ history.

What Luft was charged with is particularly ironic. The government has charged Luft with a so-called “FARA violation,” under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. It’s a process crime. You can lobby for foreign governments all you want, but you have to send in the paperwork first.

The DoJ has often been accused of prosecuting FARA, shall we say, “unevenly.” Back in April, many observers believed that the drawn-out five-year Hunter Biden investigation, which only produced a paper-thin plea deal, would have produced instead a serious FARA charge, since Hunter has obviously been roaming the world hoovering up cash (and other things) from foreign governments and corporations, and they weren’t paying him for his keen insight and wit, either.

Some estimates place the total Biden family score at over a billion dollars.

Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley was one of many to write about the expected Hunter FARA charges — back in April of LAST YEAR:




Silly Jonathan! You’d think any con law professor worth his salt would know how things really work in Washington.

After an exhaustive five-year DoJ investigation into Hunter’s affairs, where every stone was left undisturbed, he got a mild, non-criminal plea deal over a small amount of unpaid taxes that he won’t even have to pay. Now he’s Even-Steven. Or Even-Hunter. Or something.

Anyway, until Trump, FARA was known as a joke of an ancient law, originally passed after World War I. Nowadays, everybody violated it, and nobody was ever prosecuted. It was just business as usual. But then Special Counsel Robert Mueller dusted the 1938 law off and weaponized it against the entire Trump political organization. ...

Luft explained in his video that a couple months ago he met with no fewer than six DoJ and FBI officials to tell what he knew about the Biden family crime spree. They didn’t arrest Dr. Luft then. The investigation must have started after that.

On the other hand, Hunter’s FARA investigation took five+ years and resulting in nothing, even though the DoJ had a laptop full of his emails and texts with Chinese and Ukrainian crooks. On the other hand, Luft’s FARA investigation only took five minutes. With no laptops.

I suppose the good news, if there is any, is that the DoJ can move quickly when it wants to. But then again, we already knew that, didn’t we, from how fast it tracked down thousands of dirty-rotten Capitol Hill trespassers using only partial face shots on social media video clips. ...

Like most lawyers seeing this story, I can only say, “wow.” Yesterday, the UK Daily Mail ran the story with the headline, “Hunter Biden's lawyers face SANCTIONS after being accused of lying to the clerk in his criminal tax case as judge orders First Son's attorneys to explain themselves by tonight.”

Commercial-grade legal fireworks illuminated Hunter’s plea deal case yesterday. It began as the Court was considering whether to approve the sweetheart deal that the Biden DOJ proposed to clear Hunter’s criminal record. On Monday, House Republican Jason Smith filed a legal brief that suggested Judge Noreika should flush the proposed deal, due to claims of preferential law enforcement. The brief, filed on behalf of the House Ways and Means Committee, included lots of helpful data from the democrat IRS whistleblower who has been testifying to Congress over the last couple weeks.

Shortly after the Committee’s brief and its attached materials were filed, the Court abruptly took them down and sealed them from public view on the electronic docket. Through some miracle, the Committee’s lawyer noticed the document had been withdrawn and promptly called the Court clerk. The clerk said wait a minute, you guys just called us and told us to take it down because you filed it by mistake. ...

On Wednesday, Hunter Biden appeared in federal court in Delaware to plead guilty to two misdemeanors for failing to pay millions in federal taxes and to accept a pre-trial diversion agreement on a gun charge, all in exchange for two years probation with no jail time. The sweetheart plea deal that was widely panned by experts fell apart in court and was ultimately rejected by the judge, forcing Hunter Biden to plead “not guilty.”

Suddenly, the president’s son’s “Get Out of Jail Free” card was gone, and the Democrats’ hopes of putting the Hunter Biden saga behind them were dashed. This is certainly going to be a huge problem for Democrats because it means that Hunter’s legal issues are far from over, and that the First Son could in fact face jail time — all while his father runs for president again, and his own Department of Justice faces questions of interfering with the investigation.

And for many reasons, President Trump is a deeply flawed candidate; and DeSantis has none of Trump’s baggage.

But — thanks to democrats and feckless Republican officials should be shutting all this down hard but aren’t — I now predict the upcoming presidential election won’t be about policy, inflation, recession, jabs, Russia, China, Taiwan, Disney, drag queens, the deep state, January 6th, or Proxy Wars. Instead, it will be about a singular, existential crisis in our rule of law, a crisis affecting every single American whether they admit it or not.

In other words, if they can do this to President Trump, they can do it to anybody.

If we aren’t there already — and if we’re not, we will be soon — it’s not going to matter whether Governor DeSantis (or anybody else) is better able than Trump to brake this runaway political prosecution train. Trump’s absolutely compelling campaign message will be: you can’t let them get away with this. Because if they get away with it, there won’t be any stopping it, not ever. ...

And for many reasons, President Trump is a deeply flawed candidate; and DeSantis has none of Trump’s baggage.

But — thanks to democrats and feckless Republican officials should be shutting all this down hard but aren’t — I now predict the upcoming presidential election won’t be about policy, inflation, recession, jabs, Russia, China, Taiwan, Disney, drag queens, the deep state, January 6th, or Proxy Wars. Instead, it will be about a singular, existential crisis in our rule of law, a crisis affecting every single American whether they admit it or not.

In other words, if they can do this to President Trump, they can do it to anybody.

If we aren’t there already — and if we’re not, we will be soon — it’s not going to matter whether Governor DeSantis (or anybody else) is better able than Trump to brake this runaway political prosecution train. Trump’s absolutely compelling campaign message will be: you can’t let them get away with this. Because if they get away with it, there won’t be any stopping it, not ever. ...

The truth of it is painfully and inescapably obvious. And it is already starting. Here’s just one example from an AOC parody account, but it’s not at all funny:



... It’s not just Trump. The January 6th prosecutions of grandmothers and firefighters, the FBI raids on soccer moms complaining at school board meetings, the Gretchen Whitmer Fed-napping plot, and the Biden Administration’s vast social media censorship bureaucracy will coalesce around the Trump prosecutions to make the inarguable case that it is now or never.

Will the defendants be allowed to present evidence of serious irregularities in the 2020 Georgia election results? If not, would that not be grounds for dismissal. So far, Democrats in charge of the machinery of law all over the country have skated on mere assertions that the 2020 election was fair. In Georgia, none of the principals involved in the dispute have been subject to cross-examination, the best instrument for truth-finding in the American legal system. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Sec’y of State Brad Raffensperger may not be so hot for an airing of what actually went on Nov 3, 2020 and the days after, especially the validity of over 100,000 mail-in ballots in a state where “Joe Biden’s” margin of victory was a mere 11,799 votes.

Mr. Trump seems to be thriving under the tribulation of four court cases brought against him as he runs for election in 2024. Each new set of charges boosts his poll numbers. It helps him hugely that the cases are transparently idiotic and mendacious. If he is initially convicted in any of them, he can still run for president and be elected, even if he’s jailed — as Eugene Debs did in 1920 getting 913,693 votes running on the Socialist Party from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he was jailed under the 1917 Espionage Act for speaking out against America’s entry into the First World War.

The Party of Chaos is running scared. Everybody knows that “Joe Biden” can’t possibly run for another term and yet the public debate is so grotesquely disabled that nobody will talk about it. Most particularly, they will not talk about who might take his place. All they are really demonstrating with this barrage of prosecutions against their chief adversary is how broken, craven, and degenerate the party is, and what a menace it is, as they like to say,

You may have seen, in passing headlines, reports of a bizarre police raid on an elderly newspaper owner's home in a small Kansas city.

But that barely sums up the insanity of it all.

Police in Marion County originally launched the raid at the beginning of this month, hitting the offices of the Marion County Record and seizing, reportedly, "everything" on-site...

And yes, tragically, Mrs. Meyer died a day after this bizarre and frightening spectacle.

This kind of police action is nuts. You don't expect to see this sort of activity unless some grave, serious crime has been perpetrated — something violent, something to do with state or national security, something big.

So what, exactly, was the reason for the extreme raid? Well:

The police chief who led the raid of a Kansas newspaper alleged in previously unreleased court documents a reporter either impersonated someone else or lied about her intentions when she obtained the driving records of a local business owner.

Um, what?

So, there are a few major things wrong with this:

First of all, in the U.S., police officers are generally forbidden to conduct raids on news establishments; they are instead required by law to issue subpoenas of journalistic materials so as to protect the integrity of news organizations and the First Amendment rights of the people who run them.
Second of all, how on earth could a raid like this be justified, even absent those protections? Because a reporter "impersonated someone else?" That's a case of fraud, not espionage. It requires an arrest warrant, not a knock-em-and-sock-em clean out of a newspaper's offices.
Third, it appears that the original motivation for the warrant was, well, you know, completely incorrect:
[R]eporter Phyllis Zorn, Marion County Record Editor and Publisher Eric Meyer and the newspaper's attorney said Sunday that no laws were broken when Zorn accessed a public state website for information on restaurant operator Kari Newell. ...

Apart from exciting the democrat base, it’s hard to see what advantage they’ve gained. And they may not be able to ultimately afford the cost. Four indictments and four arrests create four precedents for arresting and charging other officials. And there are a bunch of officials who are sitting squarely in those crosshairs.

I’m looking at you, Bob Peters.