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The Front Page Cover
The Events of the Week -- Featuring:
Is the FBI Constitutional?
by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.
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Rolling Stone's Terrible Defamation
Rolling Stone should stick to reviewing music. The iconic magazine lost a huge defamation lawsuit Friday stemming from its fabricated story in November 2014 about a supposed gang rape by a fraternity at the University of Virginia. Reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely recounted the story of the college student known only as "Jackie" without corroborating her account. Police determined that key elements of Jackie's story were false. There were serious lapses at all levels of reporting and editing at Rolling Stone, and the magazine eventually retracted the story. Former UVA dean Nicole Eramo sued, alleging the magazine's careless and agenda-driven "reporting," which cast her as the villain and face of an indifferent administration, had destroyed her entire career of helping victims of sexual assault. A jury agreed, and deliberations on monetary damages begin today. (The Phi Kappa Psi fraternity has also filed suit.) That defamation suits are notoriously difficult to win illustrates just how far off the rails Rolling Stone went.
Campus sexual assault has been a major theme for the Left — not entirely without reason — and Jackie's story evidently proved too good to do even basic fact-checking. But it was all a lie, and lies are what make it harder for actual victims, not the fact that Rolling Stone is being held accountable. Anyone accused of a crime is innocent until proven guilty. That doesn't change because the alleged crime was sexual assault on a college campus, and it doesn't change because some "hip" leftists at a rock and roll rag have a story to tell. Reckless and deceitful reporting should have consequences, making this is a welcome turn of events. ~The Patriot Post
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OPINION IN BRIEF
Peggy Noonan: "One thing I saw this year was that sincere conservatives wholly opposed to socialism had real respect for Bernie Sanders because they saw his sincerity. He wasn’t part of the web and they honored him for it. Both parties have their webs. Maybe this year begins the process by which they will be burned away. A closing thought: God is in charge of history. He asks us to work, to try, to pour ourselves out to make things better. But he is an actor in history also. He chastises and rescues, he intervenes in ways seen and unseen. Or chooses not to. Twenty sixteen looks to me like a chastisement. He’s trying to get our attention. We have candidates we can’t be proud of. We must choose among the embarrassments. What might we be doing as a nation and a people that would have earned this moment?" ~The Patriot Post
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More Clues That Tie liar-Clintons/Podesta
to Child Prostitution Ring
by Philip Hodges
{eaglerising.com} ~ Rumors of high-profile politicians – even in the White House – being involved with child sex trafficking, child pornography, child rape, and everything else related have been circulating for decades... In fact, the Washington Times almost blew the lid on what was called the “call boy scandal” that spanned the Carter, Reagan, and Bush, Sr. administrations. Apparently, within an hour or so, these papers were quickly recalled, and snatched up from the newspaper stands. The story was immediately discredited/covered up by officials and other media outlets at the time. The U.S. Secret Service also helped to quash it... http://eaglerising.com/38210/wikileaks-more-clues-that-tie-clintonspodesta-to-child-prostitution-ring/
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Islamists Boast Over Million Muslims
Registered To Vote In US Election
by Daniel Greenfield
{frontpagemag.com} ~ This is how it begins. Look at Turkey if you want to know how it ends. Islamist groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood have aggressively pushed a voter registration effort for Muslims to gain influence and power for their agenda... And they continue to gain power. These are the latest warning signs that our migration policy is badly broken. More than one million American Muslims have registered to vote in the November 8 U.S. elections, a record number that puts the community in a position to tip the race in states where they live in large numbers as polls show a tightening contest, Muslim advocates said on Wednesday...
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liar-Hillary Would Use SCOTUS Vacancies
to Destroy the Constitution
by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.
{thenewamerican.com} ~ Just days before the presidential election, numerous pundits and politicos are weighing in on who the next occupant of the Oval Office might appoint to the Supreme Court should current justices retire during the next presidential term... While party affiliation has not shown itself to be a reliable guide to the ideological fidelity of a judge once he's secured a seat on the high court's bench, there are some clues as to what liar-Hillary Clinton might look to accomplish with her appointments should she be sworn in next January. First, given her constant claim that she will make sure to ensure the safety of American children by the enactment of "common sense gun restrictions," it is more likely than not that a President liar-Hillary Clinton would seek to seat a pro-confiscation jurist on the Supreme Court... http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/24560-hillary-clinton-would-use-scotus-vacancies-to-destroy-the-constitution
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CAIR Whips Pre-Election Hysteria
and Fear Against FBI
{investigativeproject.org} ~ Federal law enforcement officials reported concern Friday over vague threats of an al-Qaida terrorist attack that could come today in an attempt to disrupt Tuesday's U.S. elections... Three states – New York, Virginia, and Texas – were identified as potential targets. So it makes sense that FBI agents in eight states reportedly wore out some shoe leather during the weekend, knocking on doors of people with family connections to Afghanistan or Pakistan – both operating bases for al-Qaida. One of those questioned reportedly is a youth group leader. Others were doctors. No one was arrested... http://www.investigativeproject.org/5698/cair-whips-pre-election-hysteria-and-fear-against
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The Crime and Corruption of
liar-Hillary Rodham Clinton
{restoreamericanglory.com} ~ At some point in the future, Americans will review the 2016 election and scratch their heads in puzzlement... Removed from the extraordinary drama of this campaign season, they’ll be unable to grasp how a criminal like liar-Hillary Clinton got so close to becoming president of the United States. Or, depending on what happens Tuesday, how she actually realized that goal. What could the voters have been thinking? How could they have overlooked her long list of scandals, any one of which made her unfit to hold the highest office in the land. Take the email scandal. Most of us probably agree with Bernie Sanders by now and are “sick and tired” of hearing about her “damn emails,” but it’s not the trivial concern that he and others have tried to make it out to be. By using a private server to share classified material, liar-Hillary Clinton violated federal law and put our national security at risk. She lied about it to the FBI, she lied about it to the State Department, and she lied about it to the American people. You may or may not believe that she deserves prison time, but who could possibly believe she deserves to be president?... http://www.restoreamericanglory.com/breaking-news/the-crime-and-corruption-of-hillary-rodham-clinton/
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Is the FBI Constitutional?
by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.
{thenewamerican.com} ~ Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) James Comey is again under fire, this time by supporters of liar-Hillary Clinton for permitting the re-opening of the investigation into her use of personal servers to store and send classified material, the second round of a scandal that could prove fatal to the Democratic nominee's chance to occupy the Oval Office in January.
Republicans had their own go at Comey when he declared after the original investigation of liar-Clinton's mishandling of classified documents and information that there was insufficient evidence to charge her with any criminal violation.
Comey, it seems, has become a punching bag being worked over by partisans on both sides of the political aisle.
Regarding the sound and fury coming out of the liar-Clinton camp, they don't see that their candidate has fallen into a pit she dug for herself. She knew, or should have known, that there are rules governing the treatment and transmission of data that could place U.S. national security in danger.
She broke those rules, and despite what Comey claimed, whether she did so knowingly or not is irrelevant, as the requisite mental state codified into the regulation is "negligence." That is to say, in order to be in violation of the relevant statute, one need only fail to take reasonable care in the behavior in question.
It is beyond dispute that there was a duty of care, and liar-Hillary Clinton's behavior fell well below that bar.
What is also beyond dispute is that neither the Republicans — when liar-Clinton was exonerated — or the Democrats — when the whole affair was brought back into the light of investigation — ever questioned the authority of the FBI to carry on as a federal police force.
The larger question, the constitutional question, is why does the federal government have an armed police force with nearly unlimited authority (at home and abroad) and with the power to conduct most of its work in secret, beyond the oversight of the American people, whose interest they ostensibly serve?
Perhaps Ryan McMaken has hit upon the answer to that question in an article published on the Mises Wire blog. McMaken writes of the federal government's law enforcement agency:
Of all federal police forces, the FBI is the most romanticized, and every FBI agent is assumed to be the modern embodiment of a fictionalized version of Eliot Ness: incorruptible, professional, and efficient. Decades of pop culture has driven this home with TV series and movies such as The Untouchables, The FBI Story, and This Is Your FBI have long perpetuated the idea that when local police fail, the FBI will step in to be more effective and simply better than every other law enforcement agency. Corruption cannot touch the FBI, we are told, and they apply the law equally to everyone.
According to a piece penned in 2012, "A Stasi for America," reporter James Bovard painted a darker, less egalitarian picture of the FBI's application of the law:
A ripple of protest swept across the Internet in late March after the disclosure that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was teaching its agents that “the FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedom of others.” This maxim was inculcated as part of FBI counterterrorism training. The exposure of the training material — sparked by a series of articles by Wired.com’s Spencer Ackerman — spurred the ritual declaration by an FBI spokesman that “mistakes were made, and we are correcting those mistakes.” No FBI officials were sanctioned or fired for teaching lawmen that they were above the law.... At least the FBI has been consistent. Since its founding in 1908, the bureau has rarely let either the statute book or the Constitution impede its public service. Tim Weiner, the author of a superb exposé of the CIA (Legacy of Ashes) has delivered a riveting chronology of some of the FBI’s biggest crimes with his new book, Enemies.
There's no question that in its roughly 100 years of existence, the FBI has seen its reputation rise and fall.
McMaken recites a bit of recent history in support of his assertion that the creation and the continuation of the FBI as a federal secret police force is an assault on the liberty of the United States:
The reality and the romance, of course, have always been two totally different things, and it's helpful to remind ourselves that it was the FBI that was in charge of the Waco massacre where 26 children were killed. It was the FBI that led the raid on Randy Weaver's house where an FBI sniper shot a woman dead while she was holding a 10-month old baby. It was the FBI that spied on Martin Luther King, Jr., and targeted peaceful anti-war organizations for political reasons during the 1960s and 70s. It was the FBI that came of age arresting opponents of the First World War.
Naturally, in all of these cases, the FBI has actively covered up the facts and denied wrongdoing.
Next, the history lesson looks further back to the beginnings of the FBI to illuminate the transformation of the FBI from crime-fighting force (albeit no less unconstitutional) to powerful partner in the surveillance state:
Thanks to war hysteria during World War I, the FBI rose to prominence as Woodrow Wilson's shock troops against "dissidents" (i.e., peaceful opponents of the war). Indeed, persecuting and prosecuting political enemies of the American state would become something of the forte of the FBI, with the role of the agency being expanded ever more during times of perceived national crisis. The idea of the FBI as a crime-fighting organization — the primary message of fawning treatments of the FBI such as The Untouchables and The FBI Story — for decades served as cover for the FBI's political activities. As Foreign Policy pointed out in 2014, though, the FBI quietly dropped its claims of being a crime fighting organization and began declaring itself a "national security" organization. Down the memory hole goes the FBI's original claimed raison d'etre.
This point is borne out in the FBI's own description of its purpose. On the "Questions and Answers" section of its official web page, the agency describes itself as "an intelligence-driven and threat-focused national security organization with both intelligence and law enforcement responsibilities."
Where, one wonders, does the Constitution grant the federal government or any of its associated agencies any intelligence gathering and federal law-enforcement power?
Finally, not only is the FBI's assumption of its current role as federal police force and armed branch of the federal surveillance apparatus unconstitutional and a persistent threat to freedom, but it represents yet another example of the inability of the government to perform any task on par with a privately owned entity with the same or similar objective. Again, from the Mises Wire: "The unreliability of metropolitan police, with their strong local and partisan ties, prompted major businesses and industrialists to establish the Pinkertons and other private police forces. The Pinkertons ultimately functioned as a de facto national detective and policing service until the 1920s, when the FBI finally came into its own."
As one scandal blends into the next, and as each generation sees the occurrence of some serious act of FBI abuse of power, perhaps it is time to consider the abolition of the agency and the return of its assumed duties to the private sector.
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