Willis began her investigation into Trump in February 2021. Yet, she waited until the 2024 election season was in full swing to charge the former president and current leading GOP candidate.
Jack Smith request to hide evidence from Trump legal team is denied. Last month Jack Smith’s lawyers asked Judge Cannon to keep documents under seal because it is considered “highly sensitive classified information.”
Aileen Cannon, the judge presiding over former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case, on Monday ordered the unsealing of documents filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith, who had asked that they be kept under wraps because they could reveal his trial strategy.
On Monday, Cannon ordered the unsealing of documents filed by Smith in the case, making them public, adding that she was “mindful of the strong presumption in favor of public access to judicial documents.”
On November 22, Smith asked that the filing be kept under seal because it contained government plans to delete “highly sensitive classified information” from sharable discovery.
Cannon said that Smith had not provided “sufficient justification” for his filing because the motions did not “contain or otherwise reveal classified information.”
Additionally, a Friday court document revealed the response to the initial order of unsealing in which Smith’s team agreed to unseal the documents, as requested by the defense, though prosecutors insisted on some redactions.
“The defendants did not oppose the Government’s request, but reserved the right to challenge them later,” Smith wrote, adding that a full unsealing could disclose classified defense counsel information about how government’s CIPA motion.
“This is the same information that the Government proposed redacting. Because the Court rejected that position and ordered the Government to provide unredacted versions of the two docket entries to defense counsel, there is no justification for keeping them from the public.”
For time reasons, I had to cut my actual address a bit short Thursday. This statement, which began with a nod to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, is what was entered into the congressional record:
November 30, 2023
Chairman Jordan, ranking member Plaskett, members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak.
Exactly one year ago today I had my first look at the documents that came to be known as the Twitter Files. One of the first things Michael, Bari Weiss and I found was this image, showing that Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya had been placed on a “trends blacklist”:
This was not because he was suspected of terrorism or incitement or of being a Russian spy or a bad citizen in any way. Dr. Bhattacharya’s crime was doing a peer-reviewed study that became the 55th-most read scientific paper of all time, which showed the WHO initially overstated Covid-19 infection fatality rates by a factor of 17. This was legitimate scientific opinion and should have been an important part of the public debate, but Bhattacharya and several of his colleagues instead became some of the most suppressed people in America in 2020 and 2021.
That’s because by then, even true speech that undermined confidence in government policies had begun to be considered a form of disinformation, precisely the situation the First Amendment was designed to avoid.
When Michael and I testified before the good people of this Committee in March we mentioned this classically Orwellian concept of “malinformation” — material that is somehow both true and wrong — as one of many reasons everyone should be concerned about these digital censorship programs.
But there’s a more subtle reason people across the spectrum should care about this issue.
Former Executive Director of the ACLU Ira Glasser once explained to a group of students why he didn’t support hate speech codes on campuses. The problem, he said, was “who gets to decide what’s hateful… who gets to decide what to ban,” because “most of the time, it ain’t you.”
The story that came out in the Twitter Files, and for which more evidence surfaced in both the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit and this Committee’s Facebook Files releases, speaks directly to Glasser’s concerns.
There’s been a dramatic shift in attitudes about speech, and many politicians now clearly believe the bulk of Americans can’t be trusted to digest information. This mindset imagines that if we see one clip from RT we’ll stop being patriots, that once exposed to hate speech we’ll become bigots ourselves, that if we read even one Donald Trump tweet we’ll become insurrectionists.
Having come to this conclusion, the kind of people who do “anti-disinformation” work have taken upon themselves the paternalistic responsibility to sort out for us what is and is not safe. While they see great danger in allowing anyone else to read controversial material, it’s taken for granted that they’ll be immune to the dangers of speech.
This leads to the one inescapable question about new “anti-disinformation” programs that is never discussed, but must be: who does this work? Stanford’s Election Integrity Project helpfully made a graphic showing the “external stakeholders” in their content review operation. It showed four columns: government, civil society, platforms, media:
One group is conspicuously absent from that list: people. Ordinary people! Whether America continues the informal sub rosa censorship system seen in the Twitter Files or formally adopts something like Europe’s draconian new Digital Services Act, it’s already clear who won’t be involved. There’ll be no dockworkers doing content flagging, no poor people from inner city neighborhoods, no single moms pulling multiple waitressing jobs, no immigrant store owners or Uber drivers, etc. These programs will always feature a tiny, rarefied sliver of affluent professional-class America censoring a huge and ever-expanding pool of everyone else.
Take away the high-fallutin’ talk about “countering hate” and “reducing harm” and “anti-disinformation” is just a bluntly elitist gatekeeping exercise. If you prefer to think in progressive terms, it’s class war. The math is simple. If one small demographic over here has broad control over the speech landscape, and a great big one over there does not, it follows that one group will end up with more political power than the other. Which one is the winner? To paraphrase Glasser, it probably ain’t you.
It isn’t just one side or the other that will lose if these programs are allowed to continue. It’s pretty much everyone, which is why these programs must be defunded before it’s too late.
Efforts to Silence Trump Harm All Americans. If you think that these attacks on former President Trump, doesn’t affect you, you’re dead wrong. Be you from all sides of the political spectrum, you will be in danger of government weaponization.
You have judges making decisions before the trial even starts. Judges allowing the prosecution to attack the defense, but stopping the defense from responding and defending themselves.
An attorney for Donald Trump told Newsmax on Friday that efforts to place gag orders on the former president in two court cases not only violate his First Amendment right to free speech, but also the rights of others who wish to hear what he has to say.
Gag orders have been placed on Trump by a judge presiding over his D.C. election interference case and by a judge presiding over his $250 million civil fraud trial in New York. Trump was fined $15,000 by New York Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron for twice violating that gag order, which was temporarily stayed by a New York appellate court.
“The First Amendment not only protects President Trump’s right to speak freely about what’s happening to him, but it also protects our rights as American citizens to receive information,” Christina Bobb told “Eric Bolling The Balance” guest host Sebastian Gorka. “They’re trying to block us from receiving information from the most popular presidential candidate in the race currently, Republican or Democrat.
“This very much is an effort to try to interfere with our ability to understand what President Trump is doing, what’s going on with him with his policy positions, with his views on this. They’re absolutely trying to prevent him from gaining popularity because everything he does and everything they do to him, he only grows in the polls.”
Bobb said the efforts to silence Trump, whether through gag orders or civil and criminal proceedings, have been a systematic assault on the president and the rights of all Americans, from the Department of Justice (DOJ) on down.
“It absolutely appears coordinated,” she said. “A few years ago, people used to talk about the deep state or the administrative state or the political class. Whatever you want to call it, the political establishment. I think we all kind of thought of it as this thing that didn’t really have form.
“But now I think we can see exactly how coordinated it is and how calculated they communicate with folks. If you look at [DOJ special counsel] Jack Smith all the way down to [Fulton County Prosecutor] Fani Willis. A county DA. I mean, this is a local race. This is a local district attorney in one county in Georgia and then coordinating with the state attorney general in New York [Letitia James]. It’s exceptionally coordinated from the highest levels down to simple county officials.”
Young Voters Flee Biden. Who Turns 81 Today. Happy Birthday Joe. My question is why they have voted for him in the first place?
The list of bad things that he and his administration have caused is so long. The Border, COVID, Crime increasing, Wars around the world, Weaponization of the courts, etc.
Among young voters (18-34 years old) — just 20% of whom view Biden favorably on Israel’s war on Hamas — Biden (42%) trails Trump (46%) by 4 points, which is outside the poll’s margin of error.
“This could be a massive sea change,” according to NBC News poll analyst Steve Kornacki, who noted Biden was plus-26 points on younger voters in 2020.
CompassCare is using the FACE Act to come after alleged far-left vandals after their property was targeted by arson and graffiti. The graffiti reads "Jane was here," purportedly referencing pro-abortion radicals group "Jane's Revenge." (Courtesy of CompassCare)
After one of its pro-life pregnancy center facilities was allegedly firebombed and vandalized by pro-choice activists, CompassCare is attempting to use a law against the alleged culprits that is commonly used against pro-life activists.
“On October 5, 2023, firebombed pro-life medical network CompassCare, filed a civil Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrance (FACE) Act complaint against pro-abortion extremists,” CompassCare wrote in an October press release.
CompassCare is using the FACE Act to come after alleged far-left vandals after their property was targeted by arson and graffiti. The graffiti reads “Jane was here,” purportedly referencing pro-abortion radicals group “Jane’s Revenge.” (Courtesy of CompassCare)
Burnt debris inside a CompassCare facility targeted with arson.
The Bowling Green Pregnancy Center in Bowling Green, Ohio, was one of many pregnancy centers that have reportedly been vandalized by the radical pro-abortion group Jane’s Revenge. (Fox News Digital)
Reap what you sow. Affirmative Action DA is Car Jacked. Thankfully no one was hurt. Especially the mother. But the DA got some of his own medicine. District Attorney Jason Williams and his 78-year-old mother were carjacked at gunpoint late last month.
Williams was carjacked at gunpoint after he campaigned on social justice reform and dismissed more than 66% of the city’s violent felony cases during his first few months in office.
The part that bothers me is that the judge allows Smith to attack and witnesses like Barr to make derogatory statements. But when Trump defends himself, the judge says no. This from Turley.
“I said that when it was first issued. It’s a very odd concept of an order because the court here insisted on having this trial before the election, sort of shoehorned it in before Super Tuesday,” Turley added. “And everyone in this election is going to be talking about these cases, except one person under this gag order and that is Donald Trump.”
Turley continued, “He can’t criticize the prosecutors, he can’t criticize witnesses, and special counsel Jack Smith just asked for this order to be expanded in an equally unconstitutional way and that has drawn the criticism even of the ACLU, which is a staunch critic of Donald Trump, but the ACLU has said look, this is flagrantly unconstitutional.”
Winning. Supreme Court to Hear NRA Free Speech Case.
The U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether an official violated the First Amendment when she encouraged companies to stop doing business with the National Rifle Association.
Maria Vullo, a former New York State Department of Financial Services superintendent, is accused of coercing companies to cut off their NRA connections following the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida.
According to prosecutors, Vullo leveraged government power in an illicit way when she asked whether banks and insurance companies should continue to provide services to the group.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who took to social media to tout the decision, had asked the judge to take quick action against the “disassembling, degrading, and tampering with” the concertina wire barriers after video came out that U.S. Border Patrol agents were using forklifts and heavy machinery to cut pieces of the razor wire along the Texas/Mexico border.
The razor wire, along with the controversial buoys in the Rio Grande, were installed as part of Governor Greg Abbott’s Operation: Lone Star, which was launched in March 2021 as a border security initiative to help battle the rising border crossings that Gov. Abbott blames on the Biden Administration’s lax immigration policies.
