Sunday, April 20, 2025

Watchdog: Civil Rights Report on Minority Voting Riddled with Errors, Bias

Ben Sellers
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‘The report reads more like a ‘Get Out the Vote’ flyer designed to benefit partisan turnout than a careful and credible report on voting…’

USCCR Chair Catherine Lhamon
USCCR Chair Catherine Lhamon/IMAGE: Roland S. Martin via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A nonprofit dedicated to maintaining election integrity says the latest report from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights serves no purpose but scaremongering.

According to the Public Interest Legal Foundation, the voting report from the “nonpartisan” eight-person panel—which contains only two conservatives—is riddled with errors and intent on discrediting the GOP.

“The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights isn’t living up to its historic standards,” said J. Christian Adams, PILF president and general counsel. “The report on voting and elections is full of errors, exaggerations, and outlandish efforts to scare minorities into thinking they won’t be able to cast a ballot.”

The USCCR has limited authority of its own and has been subject to partisan squabbling since at least the Reagan era, when it went to its current configuration with four members appointed by the president, two by the Senate and two by the House of Representatives.

However, members may be called to address Congress on the findings, which then may be used both to set a policy agenda and sway public perception.

The members are appointed to six-year terms and cannot be fired except for reasons of misconduct. Despite strict rules governing the number of party members who can be appointed to the commission, appointees have been able to circumvent restrictions by registering as independents.

All four of the current presidential appointees are holdovers from Barack Obama, with two of those being twilight appointments issued in December 2016.

Last year, the USCCR announced that it was launching a two-year probe into whether President Donald Trump was preventing civil rights offices from performing their duties by cutting their budgets and staffing.

Among the recommendations the report, titled An Assessment of Minority Voting Rights Access in the United States, makes is to pursue more aggressive enforcement measures addressing states’ efforts to limit minority voters. The reasons it cites for disfranchisement are: voter identification laws, voter roll purges, proof of citizenship measures, challenges to voter eligibility, and polling places moves or closings.

Many of these are issues that PILF has fought against due to the rampant abuses in voter registration and polling verification, which have allowed thousands of illegal immigrants and other non-eligible citizens to cast ballots.

“The [USCCR] report reads more like a ‘Get Out the Vote’ flyer designed to benefit partisan turnout than a careful and credible report on voting,” Adams said. “That’s a shame, and President Trump will have to very carefully examine who serves on and works for this Commission when he has the ability to appoint replacement Commissioners.”

California DMV line
IMAGE: CBS News Los Angeles via Youtube

In a previous lawsuit, PILF estimated that a ‘glitch’ in the “Motor Voter” registration through Pennsylvania’s Department of Transportation had put more than 100,000 ineligible voters on the rolls. However, many jurisdictions actively resist providing data about suspected voter fraud.

In a press release disputing many of the USCCR report’s details, PILF listed seven major errors, including a false claim that the board voted unanimously on its recommendations and its use of a George Soros-funded “news” operation to support claims that there was no substantial evidence of voter fraud.

Adams said that the brazen partisanship on the commission risked undermining its credibility and damaging overall public perception of civil rights and the Voting Rights Act.

“One of the most effective ways to preserve the viability of civil rights laws is to remove partisan politics from civil rights enforcement. As soon as a sizeable segment of the public believes that civil rights laws are being leveraged for partisan ends, a sizeable segment of the public will stop supporting civil rights,” he said.

“The Voting Rights Act has enjoyed broad bipartisan support for decades. But if enforcement of the law is hijacked by partisan interests, the law will lose this bipartisan support.”

Facebook, Twitter Censor Terms Like ‘Illegal Alien’

Ben Sellers
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‘The new policy is needed to clear away the progressive efforts to hide the identities of illegals [who] break the law inside the United States…’

Social Media Giants Appear Before Congress, Refute Allegations of Political Bias
Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey/IMAGE: Fortune Magazine via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Even as the chief officers of social media giants Facebook and Twitter denied under oath before Congress that they showed bias toward conservatives, a preponderance of evidence suggests the contrary.

Aside from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s acknowledgement of the site’s political leanings, and the complaints coming from hundreds of Facebook workers about company culture, one way the sites have stacked the decks is in the language that they use to define ‘hate speech’ on their respective ‘community standards.’

The Center for Immigration Studies, a pro-enforcement nonprofit, said in a press release Wednesday that Twitter had rejected four of its tweets to be used in an ad campaign, alleging hate speech for their use of the terms “illegal alien” and “criminal alien.”

While the tweets were permitted on the platform, the ad campaign would have amplified their reach to a broader audience.

“Organizations of all kinds pay Twitter to promote specific tweets in order to drive traffic to an organization’s website,” said the press release.

“Twitter advertises that the ads ‘can get you more likes, amplify your message, and get more people talking about the things that matter to you most – your cause, project, business, or brand.’ This is exactly why the Center selected these specific tweets to be placed as ads.”

Twitter’s guidelines do not mention immigration status as being grounds for violation.

However, the company states in its “hateful conduct” policy that it bans “behavior that incites fear about a protected group.”

By most logical accounts, illegal aliens would be the opposite of a “protected group” since they are, by definition, those who have violated federal immigration law.

After first unveiling its codified community standards in April, Facebook has recently  promoted them on the platform, as if to put on users on notice about an imminent censorship push.

It begins its “hate speech” definition by essentially listing all of the protected categories in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (along with a few extra, 21st-century, politically correct flourishes): “We define hate speech as a direct attack on people based on what we call protected characteristics — race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, caste, sex, gender, gender identity, and serious disease or disability.”

Then, as an afterthought, it tosses out one more: “We also provide some protections for immigration status.”

Because the language is made perfectly vague, who could blame one for assuming terms like “illegal alien” that are defined and used by the government, would be acceptable language on social media?

The company has attempted to dodge the question by contracting with independent “fact checkers,” ignoring the fact that they also have demonstrated anti-conservative bias.

Although PolitiFact, a leftwardly skewed site that Facebook consults to justify its censorship, has qualified the government’s use of  the term “illegal alien” as a “half truth,” the Justice Department pointedly clarified the meaning of the phrase and explained its function as legal terminology in a July memorandum from the DOJ public information office.

As Breitbart pointed out, the Obama-era push by media outlets to induct “undocumented resident” into the politically correct canon has less legal precision than the term “illegal alien.”

Said the Breitbart article: “The new [DOJ] policy is needed to clear away the progressive efforts to hide the identities of illegals [who] break the law inside the United States. For example, in March 2017, an illegal immigrant killed three Americans in an auto crash, but the Associated Press merely described the migrant as ‘A man arrested in an Ohio van crash.'”

Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg
Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg/IMAGE: WH.gov via Youtube

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who struggled to define “hate speech” in an April Senate hearing, has been particularly zealous in his pro-immigration activism.

He may be exercising Facebook’s prerogative as a private company to establish and enforce his own guidelines, but doing so nevertheless leads down a slippery slope toward suppressing conservative speech in favor of politically correct doublespeak.

Because Facebook also maintains a secret rating system for its users based on how others flag their content, the “hate speech” policy could also mean that using statutory immigration language would provide justification not only for censorship of a specific post, but also for shadow-banning or outright banning users as a result.

Both Facebook and Twitter recently used their nebulous and subjective community standards to oust InfoWars host Alex Jones over accusations of “hate speech” and “inciting violence.”

Many now see them as setting the stage for more Draconian purges, particularly if Zuckerberg were to throw his hat into the political ring.

Group Criticizes DHHS for Contracting with Fetus Harvesters

Ben Sellers
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‘It is unconscionable that the United States government is still paying top-dollar in taxpayer money for the freshest, most high-quality dismembered baby hearts, lungs, livers, and brains…’

NOTE: Contains graphic content.

Networks Censor Justice Department Investigating Planned Parenthood(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) One of the leading organizations in the fight against Planned Parenthood’s fetus-harvesting operations issued a special report Monday in response to news that the Department of Health and Human Services was continuing to do business with companies that collect and sell aborted infants’ body parts.

The Center for Medical Progress, which became famous for releasing a series of undercover videos showing horrific practices at the government-funded abortion clinics, said its new report used primary-source evidence to expose San Fransisco-based Advanced Bioscience Resources.

In one of the videos, CMP said it had shown ABR’s procurement manager describing the process of collecting a fully developed fetus: “I literally have had women come in and they’ll go in the [operating room], and they’re back out in 3 minutes, and I’m going, ‘What’s got’ on?’ ‘Oh yeah, the fetus was already in the vaginal canal, whenever we put her in the stirrups, it just fell out.’”

In addition to the practices themselves, CMP said it collected evidence in emails and interviews that ABR was price-gouging the government, purchasing fetuses at a cost of around $60 and then reselling them for $6,000.

Despite the evidence against ABR, which is currently under federal investigation by the Department of Justice, CMP said that at least two HHS-run agencies, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health were continuing to contract with them and spend millions on projects that relied on aborted fetus experimentation.

“It is unconscionable that the United States government is still paying top-dollar in taxpayer money for the freshest, most high-quality dismembered baby hearts, lungs, livers, and brains,” CMP head David Daleiden said.

Daleiden called on both HHS and the DOJ to step up their roles in holding the fetus harvesters accountable for their practices.

“By custom-ordering late-term aborted baby body parts for sale from Planned Parenthood partners like ABR, the FDA is directly complicit in these abortions and implies that these kids are worth more to the U.S. Government dead than alive,” he said.

“HHS must provide full transparency and immediately terminate any and all such contracts, and the U.S. Department of Justice needs to do their job and hold ABR, Planned Parenthood, and those like them accountable to the law.”

NFL Sees Lowest Season Opener TV Rating Since 2008

Ben Sellers
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Only one player remained seated during national anthem…

NFL Sees Lowest Season Opener Since 2008 McCain Speech
Image: CBfromNC via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Some are blaming the 45-min. weather delay, others a slow-paced first half in the matchup between the Eagles and the Falcons on Thursday, to kickstart the 2018 NFL season.

However, the ongoing controversies generated in the week prior by Nike and former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick certainly didn’t help matters when it came to the league’s continuing struggles with viewership.

Ratings indicated that it was the lowest draw in 10 years–the last time numbers were so low being when the game was pushed up to 7 p.m. to accommodate John McCain‘s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.

Sports Media Watch said the season-opener’s overnight returns gave it a 13.4 share, down 8 percent from last year’s Chiefs-Patriots matchup and 19 percent from the previous year’s Panthers-Broncos game.

The highest rated share was 2015’s Steeler’s-Patriot’s game, according to a tweet from Sports TV Ratings:

Not surprisingly, NBC, which broadcast the game, tried to put a positive spin on the numbers by tweeting that it was the network’s best rating for any sporting event since the, uh, 2018 Olympics. (It should be noted that Fox Sports and Telemundo held the broadcasting rights to the summer’s World Cup soccer tournament.)

Ironically, given many viewers were likely put off by the kneeling during the national anthem–which the Eagles’ head coach Doug Pederson openly endorsed–none of the players took a knee on Thursday.

The one exception, according to Newsmax, was defensive lineman Michael Bennett, who remained seated as Boys II Men sang the “Star-Spangled Banner.”

As the cameras panned through shots of a nearly empty stadium in pouring rain, Philly defensive end Chris Long, a vocal Trump critic and advocate for kneeling, was shown on camera enthusiastically standing with his hand over his heart.

Long had tweeted his support for Nike earlier in the week:

Safety Malcolm Jenkins, who had participated in the protest during preseason games, was reportedly also standing on the sidelines.

The Eagles beat the Falcons 18-12.

Burt Reynolds Among a Rare Breed of Fearless Hollywood Conservatives

Ben Sellers
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‘ He took upon himself the most thankless task of the event: reading aloud the pledge of support that the hated Republican President, Ronald Reagan, had generously sent from Washington…’

burt reynolds photo
Burt Reynolds/PHOTO: Alan Light (CC) via Pixabay

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) While it’s often speculated that celebrity passings come in clusters, those following along may have noted the relatively little fanfare that accompanied the surprise death of Burt Reynolds, 82, after a heart attack on Thursday.

It may be that the obit writers had longer to prepare content following the extended illnesses of Sen. John McCain and “Queen of Soul” Aretha Franklin.

Maybe it’s that Reynolds, despite a film career spanning 60 years, maintained a more checkered resume; while often a cult favorite in films like “Smokey and the Bandit,” “Deliverance” and “Boogie Nights,” he was more tabloid fodder than leading man in his latter years. However, he still maintained a busy working schedule, with his final movie, “Defining Moments,” set for release in April.

According to CBS, Reynolds also was in discussions about a forthcoming Quentin Tarantino project.

Then again, Reynolds’s reputation as a man’s man, what would now be classified as “toxic masculinity,” might also be to blame.

He rode the wave of Southern renaissance and, to some degree, 70s kitsch, that also produced the likes of “The Dukes of Hazzard,” “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and “Nashville”–not to mention such musical gems as C.W. McCall’s “Convoy” and Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy.”

Reynolds later expressed remorse for one act of 70s excess permanently etched into the collective conscious of any who have seen it: his nude photo shoot for Cosmopolitan lying on a bear-skin rug.

Yet, the mustachioed heartthrob continued to embrace his machismo through rocky romances with Sally Field and Loni Anderson in the 1980s and 90s.

His political life was, perhaps, as complicated as his love life, although he played the former closer to the vest.

A 1989 dispatch from the Orlando Sentinel says Reynolds skipped out on a weekend barbecue he had been invited to with Vice President Dan Quayle, sending his regrets that he was busy taping his “B.L. Stryker” television series. “In fact,” it continued, “The Palm Beach Post reports he hasn’t voted since 1980 and is a registered Democrat.”

But whether he was politically active or not, Reynolds at least harbored some conservative sympathies, as well as a heart of gold.

A 2009 tribute in Breitbart recalls that Reynolds was one of the few actors to agree to participate in an AIDS fundraiser for his friend Rock Hudson being organized by Elizabeth Taylor.

“Not only that, he took upon himself the most thankless task of the event: reading aloud the pledge of support that the hated Republican President, Ronald Reagan, had generously sent from Washington” said the article.

“Let it be noted for the record that, on September 19, 1985, actor Burt Reynolds stood up at Taylor’s event and read Reagan’s letter, while being roundly booed by a mass of angry activist attendees.”

Reynolds was a bit more reserved in supporting another friend of his, Donald Trump. He told the Western Journal in March 2016, “I don’t think there’s any question that Donald is going to be nominated. … You know, our current president has kind of messed things up the last four years. But I don’t know who I would vote for.”

Reynolds added that he worried about Trump’s blunt rhetoric leading to war. “I like him very much personally. I know him, and I like him. He’s always been nice and sweet and kind to me,” Reynolds said. “But he seems to be like a sheriff that’s quick on the draw.”

However, Reynolds strongly endorsed his “Deliverance” costar Jon Voight, a vocal conservative, in the same Western Journal piece.

“If any actor was going to run for office, it should be Jon Voight. I think he’s quite brilliant in terms of handling himself and he always knows what’s going on in politics.”

House Members Want Trump to Declassify FISA Memo & Ohr Documents

Ben Sellers
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‘The government has a responsibility to provide not only the best evidence to support its case… but also the best evidence against it…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A group of Republican congressmen on Thursday called on the White House to release several classified documents related to the FBI’s surveillance of Trump campaign officials under false pretenses while supposedly investigating ties with Russia.

The House members, led by New York Rep. Lee Zeldin and North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, first asked that the government declassify 20 pages of redacted information in the applications that the FBI made to spy on Trump adviser Carter Page.

Page was accused of being a Russian agent in the FBI petition and subsequent renewals issued by the FISA court, the shadowy tribunal which granted permission to wiretap him under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.

In addition, the group called for the release all of the FBI’s 302 interview memos from Bruce Ohr, a former deputy attorney general with the Justice Department, summarizing his meetings with Glenn Simpson, the head of D.C. research firm Fusion GPS, and Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent whose claims about the Trump camp were collected by Fusion.

The Fusion-generated report, now known as the Steele Dossier, was funded as opposition research by the Hillary Clinton campaign, and the FBI used the information to justify the FISA warrants without disclosing on its conflicts of interest—among them, the role that Ohr’s wife played in creating the dossier while employed by Fusion.

Many of the “salacious and unverified” claims made by Steele were later discredited, Zeldin said.

“Steele admitted [that he was] desperate Trump not get elected and passionate about him not being president,” he said.

Zeldin said that the discrediting of the information underscored the need for the full and unredacted FISA warrants to be disclosed, short of revealing any information about specific sources and surveillance methods.

“The government has a responsibility to provide not only the best evidence to support its case… but also the best evidence against it,” he said.

Meadows said that in his meetings with Trump, the president seemed supportive of the releasing the documents.

“In my conversations with president and the administration, he has been very consistent on wanting transparency, and I have not seen a major push-back,” he said.

One of the key objectives, Meadows said, in seeing the documents was to determine how bias may have played a role in the FBI’s decisions on how to pursue the case.

Fusion GPS Could Have Been Trying To Buy Access To DOJ
Bruce Ohr, Fox News screen shot (YouTube)

After Ohr’s meetings with Simpson and Steele, he reported the information back to several top FBI officials, including deputy chief Andrew McCabe, counterintelligence head Peter Strzok and attorney Lisa Page.

Their bias against Trump was documented in an Inspector General’s report released in April that resulted in McCabe’s firing.

“I’m here to tell you today that there is more than a reasonable doubt that those allegations [of bias] are true, so let’s declassify the documents,” Meadows said.

But Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs added that the bias was only part of the problem, as the officials involved also seemed to show little contrition for the ethical breaches, even after getting caught.

“If these folks continue to display a lack of conscience or remorse, it indicates that we may have a bigger problem than we perceive today,” Biggs said.

The group, which also included Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, later took questions from the press in attendance.

While most focused on the Steele Dossier and Russian collusion investigation, one reporter asked about an anonymous op-ed published the day prior in The New York Times, which suggested that members of Trump’s own staff were actively involved in undermining the president.

“That person should not be inside of the administration, and they should submit their resignation and move on to something else,” Zeldin said. “If they want to go join the resistance, if they want to fight President Trump, they should not do it from a position where it is very important for us to have the best people possible to protect American national security.”

Meadows said he was certain that the person would eventually be discovered.

“Nothing in this town stays secret forever, and ultimately we will find out who is the author,” he said.

Black CNN Reporter Plays the Victim to Trump Admin on ‘Daily Show’

Ben Sellers
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‘This is not traditional political game…. this is a street-gutter game…’

April Ryan and Trevor Noah
April Ryan and Trevor Noah/IMAGE: screenshot via cc.com

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) White House correspondent April Ryan spent much of her visit to “The Daily Show” sniping at Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Wednesday, while casting herself and her fellow journalists as victims of press oppression.

“The lack of respect for someone who understands Washington is evident in that briefing room,” she said, while also accusing Sanders of “pres-splainin‘” the comments made by President Donald Trump.

Although characterizing her relationship with past administrations as “friendly-adversarial” and calling herself “an equal-opportunity offender,” Ryan has not shied away from rude and disruptive conduct during recent press briefings.

“This administration, for some strange reason, they’re lumped into the same boat as the others…. but they’ve taken it to another degree,” she said.

A month into Trump’s presidency, Ryan asked former Press Secretary Sean Spicer if Trump was a racist for using the word “we” to describe those who built America.

After asking a loaded question about NFL kneeling and refusing to let Sanders answer, she complained about being called “rude.”

Ryan even became an internet meme after sending out a tweet demanding proof that Sanders had baked a pie for Thanksgiving.

But it seems Ryan, who works for the American Urban Radio Networks and is a CNN analyst, wants to have her pie and eat it to.

“What’s happened to me has not happened to many of the other reporters in the room. … They put a target on my head.”

Despite her assertion to “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah that “This is not traditional political game…. this is a street-gutter game,” she claimed to have been unfairly singled out by the White House because of her race.

“Washington has been—and still is—a white male-dominated town,” she said. “Even when Barack Obama was president of the United States, it was still a white male-dominated town, and for many, they don’t want to relinquish what has been tradition or history.”

Sanders has herself been subjected to unprecedented attacks, both from the increasingly partisan press and beyond.

Then-unknown comedian Michelle Wolf lampooned Sanders’s personal appearance at the White House Press Correspondent’s dinner in April.

Sanders also triggered a boycott and massive Yelp attack on a Virginia restaurant in June by tweeting that it had refused to serve her.

Ryan said she had attempted to mend fences with Sanders by dining with her.

“When we had dinner—we broke bread—we tried to come together on the commonality. We talked about church, we talked about ourselves, we talked about our death threats.”

However, she said the effort failed … through no fault of her own.

“The reason why we could never move past all of this animosity is because she’s playing to her boss, the president of the United States of America, who clearly tells her he does not like me, who clearly says things—you know, ‘Treat her this way.’”

Trump-Hater Strzok Drafted Comey’s Weiner Letter

Ben Sellers
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‘When will the Sessions DOJ and Wray FBI finally begin a honest investigation of Hillary Clinton’s national security crimes?’

Huma, Weiner Call Off Their Divorce
Anthony Weiner & Huma Abedin/IMAGE: YouTube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A review by Judicial Watch of 424 pages of FBI records released under the Freedom of Information Act uncovered even more shocking details about the cover-up behind Hillary Clinton’s unsecured emails.

The emails show that it was disgraced counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok who initially drafted a letter that then-FBI director James Comey sent to Congress revealing the discovery of Clinton emails on the computer of former Congressman Anthony Weiner.

Weiner—then the estranged husband of Clinton’s personal assistant and campaign vice-chair, Huma Abedin, is currently serving a 21-month sentence in federal prison after sending sexually suggestive photographs of himself to a 15-year-old girl.

The re-opening of the Clinton email investigation shortly before the November election drew criticism from both sides and became a convenient scapegoat for Democrats to explain Clinton’s campaign failure.

The FBI discovered the cache of about 140,000 emails with possible connection to the Clinton case on Sept. 26, 2016. FBI second-in-command Andrew McCabe was made aware of them two days later. However, the agency sat on the information for a month before re-opening the closed investigation out of fear that doing so after the election might cast a pall over Clinton’s impending victory.

In August 2018, Real Clear Investigations reported that only 3,077 of the 694,000 total emails on Weiner’s laptop were reviewed by the FBI in a “single, 12-hour spurt” the day before Comey again cleared Clinton of any wrongdoing—the weekend before the presidential election.

Judicial Watch found that in at least 18 instances (based on 798 documents made public), Weiner, who lacked a security clearance, received classified information at his Yahoo account.

Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton/IMAGE: CBS News via Youtube

The latest Judicial Watch review confirmed that Comey effectively lied to Congress when he issued a Nov. 6 letter stating that the FBI had reviewed all the Clinton-related communications and found nothing new to justify further investigation.

“These new documents provide more details of the corrupt and dishonest FBI investigation of the incredible revelations that Clinton’s classified and other emails were present on Anthony Weiner’s laptop,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton in a press release.

“When will the Sessions DOJ and Wray FBI finally begin a honest investigation of Hillary Clinton’s national security crimes?”

Other recent reports have revealed that Clinton’s private server—the focal point of the investigation—was likely hacked by the Chinese, including many e-mails marked classified. Although the FBI’s own Inspector General’s office flagged the concern, the FBI again did nothing about it. The FBI continues to dispute having found any evidence that the server was compromised, although Comey has admitted that it likely was.

Comey, McCabe and Strzok were all subsequently fired for exhibiting bias and unprofessional conduct—although Comey’s firing has been a focal point in Democrats’ efforts to impeach President Donald Trump for obstruction of justice in his own investigation over Russian collusion.

CNN’s Cuomo Says Republicans Accept Trump to Get ‘White Male’ Judges

Ben Sellers
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‘You stack the courts…and you will have a generation of a certain kind of jurisprudence…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) What do you get when you cross a blatantly biased talk-show host and a blatantly biased news anchor?

“Late Night with Seth Meyers” sought the punchline to this query by hosting CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Tuesday, where Cuomo offered his “expert” analysis as to why Republicans continue to support Trump.

“When people say to me, why do the Republicans embrace the president when he doesn’t seem to be traditionally Republican or conservative—why do they embrace him when they’re supposed to be character people, evangelicals… Judges. The answer is one word … You stack the courts across this country with white, male, young judges and you will have a generation of a certain kind of jurisprudence.”

Naturally, Republican minority appointees like Justice Clarence Thomas—whose confirmation hearing also produced a Democratic sideshow—didn’t fit the narrative and were conveniently forgotten.

Nor did President Barack Obama’s reciprocal attempts to stack the benches with judicial activists like Merrick Garland who would circumvent Congress to advance his legislative agenda.

Employing a common trope of such shows, Meyers played the madcap, framing his wacky intolerance as the norm and allowing straight-man Cuomo to masquerade as the voice of reason, albeit interspersing his own hot takes with calls for more bipartisan dialogue.

Responding to a question about why he continued to have White House officials and Republican newsmakers on his ‘news’ show, he called on viewers to ““Be open—who knows, maybe you’ll find some common ground on something. God forbid that our lawmakers are forced to act on something that’s good for the rest of us.”

From his ivory tower, the son of former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo and brother of current Gov. Andrew Cuomo then complained about the “silos” that members of Congress occupied during the first day of confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

The target, of course, was not the Leftist protestors who disrupted the proceedings for a full 80 minutes, nor the breaches in Senate protocol from partisans like Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), but rather Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley for attempting to call to order the hearing by pounding his gavel.

“You know, the Grassley thing was so funny, I almost popped one of the caps off my teeth,” he said.

In a moment of meta-irony, even Cuomo’s own dearth of self-awareness became a one-liner.

“Another thing that I constantly get told, including by my kids, is that I’m part of the problem. I get told that all the time, which, secretly, I have always believed.”

However, Cuomo did offer one nugget of wisdom for his audience about holding him and his network accountable:

“If I’m not doing my job, then don’t watch. You have great choices on at the same time as me, and if I’m not getting it done, that’s the price of performance.”

McCain, John Kerry Considered Becoming Running Mates

Ben Sellers
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‘We kind of flirted, but didn’t go on a date…’

Kerry Claims He Was For McCain Before He Was Against Him
John McCain and John Kerry/IMAGE: CBS News

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Remember when the press hated John McCain?

During his 2008 candidacy, the late Arizona senator was excoriated for slinging mud and committing acts of double-speak against the anointed candidate Obama, all while the media bandied around salacious charges about an alleged affair with a lobbyist 30 years his junior.

That was before McCain’s full-on conversion to the Democratic caucus, personally thwarting a GOP repeal of the Affordable Care Act and refusing to relinquish his Senate seat as his health declined.

His death has now turned McCain into a media darling (with most coverage pulling double duty as a backhanded slap against President Donald Trump).

Now, the king of political grandstanding, former Massachusetts senator and Obama Secretary of State John Kerry, has hopped on the bandwagon, saying he was for McCain before he was against him.

On Sunday, Kerry wistfully reflected that he had considered McCain as a running mate in his 2004 campaign against George W. Bush.

“We kind of flirted, but didn’t go on a date,” he told CBS News.

In retrospect, the career politicians, both failed presidential candidates who capitalized on their prominence as Vietnam “war heros” and weathered the shifting political trade-winds in D.C. by constantly revising their allegiances and positions, were two peas in a pod.

McCain, who bore a grudge against George W. Bush after a vicious 2000 primary battle, made common cause with Kerry during the 2004 campaign, as Kerry faced the incumbent Bush.

When Kerry, who had sold-out fellow Vietnam vets during his 1971 anti-war testimony before Congress, found his service record under attack by the group Swift Vets and POWs for Truth, McCain used his war-hero cachet to denounce the critics, calling their ad “dishonest and dishonorable.”

Unfortunately for McCain, Kerry didn’t return the favor three years later, using their past ‘flirtation’ instead to attack the Republican presidential contender.

In March and April of 2007, Democrats, including Kerry levied the charge that McCain had considered switching parties as a way of undermining his nascent campaign.

McCain denied the charge, and the two briefly went back and forth over who courted whom.

Kerry (ironically, given his own Iraq war waffling) would continue attacking McCain as a flip-flopper throughout the 2008 race.

For that, however, McCain would return the favor during Kerry’s failed Iran negotiations.

As Politico’s Michael Crowley reported, he branded Kerry a “human wrecking ball” and said he had “accomplished nothing except mileage as secretary of state.”

The article cited an anonymous Kerry associate discussing the on-again, off-again relationship between the two senators:

“This has always been a volcanic marriage of two strong willed, proud guys who deeply respect each other, but sometimes drive each other absolutely crazy. It’s a real friendship, unlike so many of the cliched Washington variety … But this phase has been jarring. Kerry has been surprised by McCain’s public tirades. It’s crossed some lines that Kerry himself is always careful never to cross.”

Conveniently, Kerry recently garnered headlines for floating, or at least refusing to rule out, the possibility of another run in 2020.

For McCain, whose feud with Trump has now become a pivotal part of his enduring legacy, the opportunity to “swiftboat” his own party one last time  could be no more fitting of a tribute.

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