KAMALA HARRIS: Trump a ‘Predator’; AOC’s Squad ‘Desperate in Need of Help’

Ben Sellers
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‘The thing about them is, by their very nature and character and instinct they prey on the vulnerable…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Despite claiming she would be a unifying force as president, Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., simultaneously launched an ad hominem attack on the current president while managing a backhanded smack-down of far-left freshman Democrats in the House of Representatives.

During an appearance Wednesday on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” Harris unloaded on Trump, who during a rally in North Carolina had extended his ongoing feud with “The Squad,” including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, D-NY, and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.

Trump earlier in the week had suggested the freshman congresswomen—known for expressing anti-American and pro-socialist sentiments—should leave the country, spurring a feeding frenzy of liberal media to accuse the president of racism.

Remarkably, Harris—whose own race-baiting was evident in a recent attack on Democratic front-runner Joe Biden during a June primary debate—tiptoed around that issue, instead attempting to characterize Trump as a “predator.”

Harris explained that Trump’s purpose in “preying” on the freshman congresswomen while largely ignoring her at the rally was that they were less capable of defending themselves.

“The thing about [predators] is, by their very nature and character and instinct they prey on the vulnerable,” she said. “They prey on those they believe to be weak. They prey on those who are in need of help, and often desperate in need of help.”

Echoing Trump’s call that the congresswomen should “go back” to the countries and cultures they preferred over America, Harris said that Trump himself should “go back” to being a reality television host.

“He obviously achieved success there; he has obviously achieved very little success here, so he should just go back to that.”

Ironically, after launching her attack, Harris went on to call for national unity, suggesting that she—despite having promoted extremist positions on issues such as slavery reparations—would be the candidate to achieve this.

“People may not agree with all my policies, people may not vote for me, but I’m gonna tell you this: We have got to get to a place where we as Americans agree,” she said. “We have got to unify as a country around our commonalities, around our collective priorities.”

Harris went on to elaborate on some of her priorities. After having flip-flopped several times over whether she endorsed a Medicare for All bill that would force an end to private insurance, Harris downplayed the radical plan while reaffirming her support.

“The vast majority of doctors will be in that system,” she said, “and you can keep your doctor under that system, and it will be that when you walk into that hospital, when you walk into the doctor’s office, you don’t have to fill out all those forms and give your credit card—you just give your Medicare card and then you walk in and you walk out when you’re done.”

Harris told Kimmel the plan would permit supplemental private insurance, although that point has been widely disputed by analysts of the actual bill that Harris is co-sponsoring with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

Even though she claims she intends to unify the country, Harris also has announced that she would pursue many legislative and policy changes through executive orders—including a sweeping restriction of Second Amendment gun rights.

She told Kimmel that she would seek such unilateral action to allow U.S. citizens to purchase drugs more cheaply from across the border, referring to her plan to go after pharmaceutical companies.

“If we can’t get Congress to act on that, then what I’m prepared to do as president is take executive action to, one, allow people to buy their drugs from Canada,” she said.

Additionally, Harris said she would force drug companies to lower their prices while appointing an attorney general “who will prosecute pharmaceutical companies for predatory practices.”

Detractors have said such moves may dramatically suppress research and innovation within the private medical sector.

Harris’s appearance came on the same day as a Quinnipiac poll of California Democrats revealed only 9 percent of her home-state’s party loyals thought she had the best policy ideas among Democratic primary contenders.

Although Harris narrowly edged out national front-runner Biden as the top choice in the state, where she currently serves as U.S. senator and was previously attorney general, she trailed Biden in a question on who was the best leader and another on who was best equipped to defeat Trump.

She was fourth in the policy ideas question, behind Biden, Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

Harris told Kimmel, however, that the polls were meaningless to her.

“The only poll that matters to me is on Election Day,” she said.

MSNBC/RINO Bush/McCain Staffer Nicolle Wallace Criticizes ‘Racist’ Tweets

Ben Sellers
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‘We might get it wrong sometimes, but whatever that gut reaction to him is, in this instance, it is textbook racism…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Resident RINO Nicolle Wallace on Tuesday gave her NBC network bosses what they desperately sought—a NeverTrump critic from the Right to repudiate President Donald Trump’s recent tweets.

“Whether you love him or hate him, he’s a racist,” she said during an appearance on “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”

Wallace, a former communications director for the George W. Bush administration, first bailed on the Republican Party during the 2008 election, when she refused to support the John McCain candidacy because of his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate.

As the current anchor of “Deadline: White House” on MSNBC, she has made a full-on conversion to the far-Left during the Trump administration, explaining that she refused even to read the president’s controversial tweets on air.

“We, as a show, have made a lot of choices about not repeating the most hateful things that come out of the White House,” she told Meyers, “and having worked there, I think I’m particularly triggered by the use of the White House property … for spewing hate speech, for spewing lies.”

Wallace said her show also had refused to cover media briefings by former Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

As policy, she added, it does not broadcast live speeches from Trump, which would force her sensitive audience to hear him without any filtration through the left-wing echo chamber.

“We feel like we’re fire-hosing our viewers by doing that” Wallace said, perhaps intending to invoke imagery from the 1960s civil rights movement.

Since subtlety is not what the Peacock pays her for, Wallace went on to make explicitly clear that she was in line with the Left’s narrative regarding Trump’s weekend attack on Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, D-NY; and other freshman Democrats who have dubbed themselves “The Squad.”

Trump elicited media hysteria by tweeting that the anti-American congresswomen should “go back” where they came from, even though Somalia-born Omar was the only non-native member of the group.

Wallace validated the deranged leftists’ emotional response—which has led to several recent hoaxes and false reports in the media.

Echoing the debunked Jussie Smollett conspiracy and other recent panics, she continued to stoke fear that the president’s tweets signaled imminent danger for his opponents.

“We might get it wrong sometimes, but whatever that gut reaction to him is, in this instance, it is textbook racism,” Wallace said. “And it’s racism on purpose, it’s racism out loud—and I think there’s a lot of concern in Washington, growing concern, that someone’s gonna get hurt.”

Such unsubstantiated claims have become a common trope among Trump adversaries, who reflexively have accused him of xenophobia and Nazism throughout his presidency—much as they did for Wallace’s former White House boss, George W. Bush.

Like others in the press who have demanded—largely without success—that Trump’s fellow Republicans denounce the president’s comments, Wallace also attempted to link the tweets to his supporters, insisting that they take ownership.

After griping that she had received no return phone calls from Republicans to come on her show, Wallace said that the reluctance to criticize Trump was, itself, harmful to the country.

“We didn’t hear back from anybody,” she said. “I obviously still talk to a lot of Republicans—I worked in the last Republican administration before this one—and it’s, it’s, it’s searing. Um, their silence is almost as damaging to this country as Trump’s conduct.”

Democrats, likewise, have faced heavy criticism for their ongoing refusal to condemn anti-Semitic comments made by Omar and fellow “Squad” member Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.

After scuttling a resolution in March that directly criticized Omar’s anti-Semitic tweets, the House—facing a revolt by the Congressional Black Caucus—watered it down to condemn all forms of hate speech.

Ocasio–Cortez’s accusations last week of racism within her own party leadership also ignited infighting within the Congressional Democrat ranks and questions as to whether the extreme Left might be deploying the “race card” too freely.

But those compunctions went by the wayside after Trump goaded the socialist-spouting House freshmen.

“You cannot look your children … in the eye and say this is anything other than racism,” Wallace said. “And when we stop calling black ‘black,’ white ‘white,’ up ‘up,’ down ‘down,’ he’s won.”

OUTED: Dems Use Courts to Award Districts They Could Have Won on Their Own

Ben Sellers
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‘They lost at the ballot box under maps their own analysis proves were fair, and they’re now trying to convince a court to hand them a majority they couldn’t win for themselves…’

Dem. Attorney Marc Elias Used Activist Court Rulings to Redraw GOP Districts 1
North Carolina’s Congressional districts/IMAGE: USA Today via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A trial in North Carolina over partisan gerrymandering revealed that hypocrites on the Left who are challenging the current electoral map had, in fact, used big data to try to clinch their own victory through court-forced redistricting.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court determined in Rucho vs. Common Cause that it was outside the jurisdiction of federal courts to rule on partisan gerrymandering, both in North Carolina and nationwide.

However, it left open the possibility that state courts could use their own constitutional bylaws to forcibly redraw districts they deemed to favor one political party—even if the courts themselves were blatantly partisan.

Democrats, who already in 2017 had forced the GOP state legislature in North Carolina to redraw what it claimed were racially biased districts, brought both federal and a state-level cases challenging the previously-approved redrawn districts after they failed to change the outcome of the 2018 election.

While the Democrats in that election were able to undo GOP super-majorities in the NC state legislature, they could not secure an outright majority, instead demanding that the unfairly “partisan” maps must again be redrawn.

But in the course of discovery for the state-level case, it was revealed that the Democrats not only thought they would win the last election, they had a deep-data analysis of every voter to back it up.

According to GOP state Sen. Ralph Hise, one of the Republican legislators who is fighting the left-wing activists, the Left spent thousands of dollars to keep this data secret and waited until only after the election results to begin complaining.

“The Democrats analyzed the 2017 maps, which showed they could win Democratic majorities,” Hise said in a press release.

“They successfully kept this information secret—until now,” he said. “They lost at the ballot box under maps their own analysis proves were fair, and they’re now trying to convince a court to hand them a majority they couldn’t win for themselves.”

The so-called ‘support scores’ drew on data purchased from a group called Break the Majority.

That information culled not only past voting habits but also consumer spending and other habits to form a somewhat accurate profile of how each voter in the district might lean.

Although Democrats have cried foul at Republicans’ reliance on big data in elections—for example, their claims that the Facebook profile information gathered by the nonpartisan Cambridge Analytica and purchased prior to the 2016 election constituted a privacy breach—they have surreptitiously done the same.

The effort has national implications as former Attorney General Eric Holder and his National Democratic Redistricting Committee lead the charge to “sue till blue” by asking left-leaning courts to redraw GOP districts across the country.

The NDRC—which recently merged with former President Barack Obama’s campaign arm, Organizing for Action, believed to have some of the most sophisticated voter-profile databases around—has declared a dozen vulnerable red-leaning states to be in its cross-hairs prior to the 2020 election.

Those elections, in turn, will determine the legislative makeup that will oversee the next round of redistricting.

This means that despite a federal Supreme Court ruling against them, left-wing activists may use the state courts—along with their immense financial resources and databases—to sway state legislatures, which will then legally redraw the U.S. congressional districts in their favor.

“For too long, the Democratic Party has failed to focus on the state and local elections that impact the lives of American citizens on a day-to-day basis and determine who has a seat at the redistricting table,” Holder wrote in a recent op-ed for The Washington Post.

He called on his billionaire friends—such as George Soros, Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg—to help undo the will of the voters by any means necessary while targeting state-level races.

“Democrats must invest in—and win—state and local elections in 2019 and 2020 to make sure that Republicans do not retain total control in the remaining states and manipulate the process again during 2021 redistricting,” Holder wrote.

North Carolina state Sen. Phil Berger—another of the GOP legislators fighting the state court case to re-redraw the districts—was among those who condemned Holder’s brazen political ambitions.

“That’s not democracy. It’s judicial usurpation of democracy,” Berger said. “Mr. Holder wants to repeat this across any state where he can promote a liberal judicial majority if he can’t elect a liberal Legislature or Governor.”

9th Circuit Lets DOJ Withhold Funds for Sanctuary Cities

Ben Sellers
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‘Cooperation relating to enforcement of federal immigration law is in pursuit of the general welfare, and meets the low bar of being germane to the federal interest…’

Watchdog Group Publishes List of Los Angeles 'Problem Cops'
Photo by Rennett Stowe (CC)

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A federal appeals court in California overturned the lower court’s injunction that said officials could not withhold funds to so-called sanctuary cities for their refusal to cooperate with immigration authorities.

The ruling, filed last Friday by a three-judge panel in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, specifically reversed a challenge from Los Angeles to the Justice Department‘s Community Oriented Policing Services.

The program gives points for enforcement of illegal immigration laws among a multitude of factors in awarding grant funding to local jurisdictions.

The decision is the latest in a series of surprise court victories for the Trump administration in the 9th Circuit, a once notoriously liberal stronghold that has become more ideologically balanced after recent judicial appointments.

The randomly selected panel comprised two George W. Bush appointees and one Bill Clinton appointee, who dissented.

The Immigration Reform Law Institute celebrated the ruling as an encouraging sign from the once activist bench.

“We are gratified that the Ninth Circuit showed common sense in this case,” said Dale L. Wilcox, executive director and general counsel of IRLI, in a press release.

The court “did not buy the bizarre argument that keeping criminal aliens in a city actually makes people safer, because it supposedly makes illegal aliens trust the police more,” Wilcox said.

“It is refreshing that, instead, the Ninth Circuit accepted the obvious connection between public safety and getting criminals—including career criminals—out of our nation’s cities,” he added.

The decision, issued by Judge Sandra Segal Ikuta, affirmed that immigration enforcement was a relevant component in the program’s underlying purpose.

“[C]ooperation relating to enforcement of federal immigration law is in pursuit of the general welfare, and meets the low bar of being germane to the federal interest in providing the funding,” Ikuta wrote.

Opponents argued that immigration enforcement flew in the face of “community-oriented” policing by discouraging cooperation with local authorities.

But the court cited previous decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress, acknowledging that illegal immigrants “are reported to be responsible for a disproportionate share of serious crime.”

Since there was no codified legislative definition of what “community-oriented” policing entailed, the court ruled that the determination was entirely within the purview of Attorney General William Barr and his department.

Echoing a recent Supreme Court decision that validated the Commerce Department’s authority to include a citizenship question on the national census, Ikuta chided the district court for attempting to substitute its own judgment for that of the agency.

The DOJ “need not demonstrate to [our] satisfaction that the reasons for the new policy are better than the reasons for the old one,” she said. “[I]t suffices that the new policy is permissible under the statute, that there are good reasons for it, and that the agency believes it to be better.”

GOP Sens. Urge FTC to Launch Probe into Big-Tech Censorship Efforts

Ben Sellers
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‘By controlling the content we see, these companies are powerful enough to—at the very least—sway elections…’

Facebook: ‘Type With Your Brain’ Tech Coming 1
Photo by clasesdeperiodismo (CC)

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Despite a $5 billion fine on Facebook last week over its data-privacy violations, two GOP senators said Monday that the Federal Trade Commission must do more to rein in the site’s electioneering efforts, along with those of other web utilities like Google and Twitter.

Of particular concern is anti-conservative bias and censorship, which all three of the major tech companies—and many others in the left-leaning Silicon Valley area—have openly engaged in.

Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, wrote the FTC encouraging it to take a deeper look at the tech sites’ practices, even if there was not an explicit law-enforcement purpose t0 such an investigation.

“The vast majority of internet traffic flows through just a handful of these companies,” Hawley and Cruz said in their letter, addressed to all five FTC commissioners.

“They control the ads we see, the news we read, and the information we digest. And they actively censor some content and amplify other content based on algorithms and intentional decisions that are completely nontransparent,” the senators said. “Never before in this country have so few people controlled so much speech.”

While the “more salient” examples of censorship practices, such as account suspensions, have been well documented, the senators said they were worried about the more subversive efforts to suppress voices they disagreed with.

Conservative advocacy groups like Project Veritas and the Daily Caller have published a number of whistle-blower testimonials, and their insights figured largely into a social-media summit hosted last week by President Donald Trump.

“[N]obody knows who or what these companies censor or amplify,” said the letter. “Most content curation occurs in ways impossible for outsiders to detect.”

Even as the corporations claim to be themselves protected by free speech and private-enterprise regulations, their efforts at social engineering have exposed the partisan underbelly.

Google was revealed to have at least considered blacklisting and burying content that was favorable to Trump’s ban on immigrants from terrorist-sponsoring countries.

Facebook recently acknowledged that it had blocked pro-life ads during recent Irish elections to repeal a constitutional amendment and legalize abortion.

Twitter has threatened to apply its subjective—and constantly shifting—community standards even to the tweets of politicians—despite recent court rulings that define it as a public platform and prevent elected officials from blocking other users.

“By controlling the content we see, these companies are powerful enough to—at the very least—sway elections,” wrote the senators. “And we’re told we have to be satisfied simply with trusting them not to abuse this immense power.”

Cruz has been a longtime advocate for subjecting the tech companies to greater scrutiny and accountability.

During a recent hearing before the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation, and the Internet, he grilled a Google representative over a Project Veritas investigation that revealed how the search-engine powerhouse, which also owns YouTube, had downgraded conservative outlets when recommending additional content.

Bloomberg Scheme Embeds Agents in State AG Offices to Sue Over Climate Change

Ben Sellers
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‘There is no limiting principle on partisan appropriation of public legal offices other than that the donor and the cause be acceptable in certain polite circles…’

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Michael Bloomberg / IMAGE: CNN via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Public records requests have revealed the extent to which former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is corruptly using state attorneys general to advance a political agenda by embedding attorneys in their offices.

Now, lawyers representing the federal Government Accountability Office are pushing back with lawsuits of their own to expose the crooked—and likely illegal—arrangements.

Bloomberg, one of the top donors to the Democratic Party, established the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center, which is technically operated by and housed in New York University’s law school.

The organization’s stated mission is to provide ““direct legal assistance to interested attorneys general on specific administrative, judicial or legislative matters involving clean energy, climate change and environmental interests of regional and national significance.”

The center uses grants to provide state AG’s offices with litigators who are not only financed by Bloomberg’s philanthropy arm, but also  report back directly to it.

A recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal shed additional light on the scheme, which has placed at least 11 “special assistants” expressly for the purpose of thwarting President Donald Trump’s environmental policies in eight state offices—including New York, Massachusetts, Maryland and Virginia.

After the operation was exposed, Virginia’s GOP-led legislature passed a law that prevented the state agency from making outside hires without approval.

However, considerable outside money now is being directed at making the Virginia legislature blue in its upcoming state elections, which would likely lead it to dial back the law or else refuse to enforce it.

Additionally, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey was sued last month by the Government Accountability Office for using the privately funded attorneys to embark on a legal crusade against ExxonMobil—despite their having ties to an anti-Exxon activist campaign, the Daily Caller reported.

“State legal officers taking money from private funders to pursue policy outcomes desired by those funders is inherently suspect” wrote GAO board member Chris Horner and attorney Victoria Toensing in the WSJ op-ed.

“It also raises questions about the laws governing gifts, campaign contributions and bribes,” they wrote. “To the extent these Bloomberg-funded lawyers are involved in prosecutions, it raises serious due-process concerns as well.”

Not only are the far-left attorneys general involved in the shady operations, but some also have attempted to cover up their tracks.

While Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring was candid in his request about his unabashedly partisan effort “to advance the agenda represented by” Bloomberg and his cronies, Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh returned a heavily redacted application in response to public records requests.

That prompted another GAO lawsuit to force the full disclosure of the application.

It later revealed that even though the Bloomberg lawyer was appointed on a “pro-bono” basis the lawyer was receiving $125,000 plus benefits as compensation, noted the WSJ piece, which said under Maryland law he “had no legal authority to enter this arrangement.”

Bloomberg also offered millions to support the political campaigns to elect both Frosh and Herring.

While the brazenness of the operation was concerning in and of itself, the legal implications and potential precedent established by allowing it was even more frightening.

“If no other state joins Virginia in standing up to Mr. Bloomberg’s scheme, there is no limiting principle on partisan appropriation of public legal offices other than that the donor and the cause be acceptable in certain polite circles,”said the WSJ op-ed.

“These agreements to serve a donor-driven agenda threaten the legitimacy and important work of attorneys general offices,” the article continued. “This apparent trade in buying and selling official functions demands a full public airing and unbiased reckoning.”

Rumors Swirl over Trump’s Plans for Citizenship Question

Ben Sellers
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‘The court actually invited Trump to take it at its word and to try to put the question back on again…’

Big-Money Leftists Going After Control of Census
Photo by US Census Bureau (CC)

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) President Donald Trump planned a news conference Thursday afternoon to address the citizenship question that he hoped to add to the 2020 census—over the objections of Democrats who fear it will diminish their political power.

Prior to the Thursday announcement, questions swirled as to whether the president would declare executive action to force the question onto the census—possibly ignoring activist judges’ efforts to block it through injunction—or whether he might instead abandon the fight.

With the census already facing delays in its printing schedule, supporters of the question had hoped a presidential directive would speed the process through the courts and circumvent the bureaucratic blockages facing the Commerce Department, which oversees the Census Bureau.

SCOTUS’s Open Invitation?

In a previous ruling on a challenge brought by New York state officials, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower court after determining that a “contrived” reason for adding the question was in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had attempted to argue that the question would help with enforcement of the Voting Rights Act by ensuring that citizens in minority communities received sufficient access to polling places.

Despite rejecting that reasoning, though, Chief Justice John Roberts left open a clear pathway for the question to be included, ruling on several other points in favor of the Trump administration.

“The court actually invited Trump to take it at its word and to try to put the question back on again,” former deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo told Fox News’s Shannon Bream this week.

SCOTUS Set to Rule on Landmark Cases in Census, Gerrymandering
PHOTO: Fred Schilling, Supreme Court Curator’s Office

Roberts rebuked the lower court for its overreach in substituting its own value judgments for the law, and he said it was within the authority of the Commerce Department—not the judges—to determine what questions went on the census.

The court’s opinion also upheld the administration’s right to include the question for political or other agenda-related reasons.

“Essentially, he said, ‘come back.’ We’ll see what happens,” Trump told reporters last week, according to USA Today.

On Wednesday, 19 members of Congress—many belonging to the conservative Freedom Caucus—sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr in support of the question.

“Inclusion of such a citizenship question is clearly constitutional and lawful,” said the group, led by Rep. Chip Roy, D-Texas. “… [I]t is critical that the President do so as quickly as possible as we prepare for the coming census.”

The administration had previously told courts that it needed to begin printing census forms by July 1, and the Commerce Department announced last week that it had begun printing the forms without the citizenship question.

Rather than face a protracted court battle that could pose further delays to the printing schedule, Trump said he may sign an executive order or other presidential directive, thus forcing opponents to come up with a rationale for blocking it.

A ‘Ridiculous’ Challenge

The effort to include the question touches on an issue at the heart of many of Trump’s policies and campaign promises.

Illegal Aliens Assault Border Patrol While Human Smuggling, Reentering After Deportation
IMAGE: Fox News via Youtube

The “sanctuary” policies enacted by blue states like New York and California have tacitly—and sometimes openly—encouraged the flood of illegals across the border by the thousands every day.

Those states stand to benefit tremendously from flouting federal immigration laws and enforcement efforts if importing non-citizens enables them to gain legislative seats and additional federal funding by raising population counts on the census.

Questions also have arisen as to whether these jurisdictions have enforced their own election laws in good faith or have allowed illegal immigrants to vote by declining to check citizenship status at polling places—instead leaving the would-be voters (many facing a language barrier and limited understanding of election laws) to vouch for their own status.

Trump this week sent out an email to supporters calling it “totally ridiculous that our Nation’s government cannot ask a basic question of citizenship in our very EXPENSIVE, very important Census.”

Dissent in the Ranks?

Trump’s shifting legal strategies have flustered some of the attorneys attempting to argue the cases before several radically left-wing federal judges appointed by Barack Obama, who have been openly dismissive of the efforts.

Maryland District Judge George Hazel—overseeing a case that claims the question is “racist”—ripped the attorneys for confusion caused by mixed signals from Trump and the Commerce Department over whether they would continue the fight.

Hazel demanded last week that the legal team clarify whether it intended to proceed with the case.

Hazel also indicated that Trump’s past comments on immigration may factor into his final decision, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Poll: 78% Support Citizenship Question on Census
Jesse Furman, a federal judge in New York whose brother was a top Obama policy advisor, blocked the Census Bureau from including the citizenship question. / IMAGE: NYU School of Law

Both Hazel and New York Judge Jesse Furman—presiding once again over the remanded Supreme Court case—blocked efforts by the Justice Department to swap the entire legal team working on the census issue for new lawyers—possibly signaling dissent or frustration within the ranks.

 

But even with the uphill battle, Newsmax founder Chris Ruddy said Trump and those close to him were confident that their efforts to include the question would prevail.

“I do believe it’s a simple… it’s a winning issue for the president,” Ruddy told CNN’s Don Lemon.

“I do know that the president thinks he’s on very safe ground,” Ruddy added. “He and I chatted about it over the weekend.”

Reporting by the Los Angeles Times’s Noah Bierman also contributed to this article.

Congressmen Expose Obama’s Shady Land Grab & Trump Smear

Ben Sellers
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‘I just wanted a fair process based on science that told us the truth. That is not how this feels…’

GOP Reps. Expose 'Shady' Obama Scheme to Oust Minnesota Mining Co., Smear Trump
Minnesota mining communities rally in protest of an Obama-era ploy to oust a mining company from its longtime lease of federal lands. / IMAGE: Mesabi Daily News via Youtube

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The GOP-led Congressional Western Caucus hoped to shed light on Democrats’ corrupt effort to ruin a Minnesota mining company and then smear the Trump administration for supporting it.

Although the Bear Ears land grab in uranium-rich Utah during the waning days of the Barack Obama administration received more attention, Obama also made other twilight efforts to block industries from excavating natural resources.

Among those was a mineral-rich tract of federal land in northeastern Minnesota—just south of Duluth, at the edge of Lake Superior—that Obama sought to prevent Twin Metals Minnesota from mining.

After decades of allowing the mining company to renew its government leases, the Interior Department under Obama reversed course to appease eco-activists, delaying the leases while it claimed to conduct studies, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“It was an Obama extralegal classic: The opinion ignored precedent, existing rights and regular procedure,” wrote WSJ‘s Kimberley Strassel. “In a midnight kiss to green activists, the department officially blocked the leases on Dec. 15, 2016.”

But after the Trump administration reviewed and sought to undo the move, partisan Democrats attempted to claim that it was he, not his liberal predecessor, who was corrupting the process.

This hinged on the fact that Chilean billionaire Andrónico Luksic, who co-owned Twin Metals, also was the landlord of the ritzy property in Washington, DC’s Kalorama neighborhood that was being rented by the president’s daughter, Ivanka, and son-in-law Jared Kushner—both White House advisers.

Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., chair of the Congressional Western Caucus, called the Left’s deceptive actions scandalous in a press release issued Tuesday.

“Today, my colleagues and I demanded documents and communications related to this land grab as we continue to pull back the curtain on the unusually shady practices of the Obama administration’s final days,” Gosar said.

The caucus followed up on a recent Freedom of Information Act request to Interior Secretary David Bernhardt with a letter to Rep. TJ Cox, D- Calif., who chairs the House Committee on Natural Resources.

“Recent reporting suggests the decision to deny these previously renewed leases and withdraw the formerly leased areas from future mineral development were politically motivated,” Gosar said in the letter to Cox.

“… [H]ad the Trump Administration not reversed, [Obama’s effort] would have deprived northern Minnesota of an opportunity to generate thousands of well-paying jobs,” Gosar said.

He went on to elaborate in his press statement that “17,000 jobs, $3 billion for education, $1.5 billion in annual wages, $2.5 billion annually for our economy and a total of four billion tons of strategic-and-critical-mineral-containing ore were at risk if these political anti-mining actions by the Obama administration were not over overturned.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., a current 2020 presidential hopeful, acknowledged during a recent town hall event that she also had raised objections to the lame-duck Obama administration over its irregular proceedings—while leaving Minnesota Democrats to face the actual fallout.

“When you guys leave and are out talking about a job message for rural America, I will be left with the mess and dealing with the actual jobs,” Klobuchar wrote in a searing criticism emailed to then-Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

Although she said she didn’t oppose the end result per se, the questionable means by which the Obama administration had ousted Twin Metals ensured a reversal from either the incoming Trump administration or a court order.

“I am not for or against this project but I just wanted a fair process based on science that told us the truth,” Klobuchar wrote. “That is not how this feels.”

Klobuchar said the same callousness and arrogance with which the Obama administration had ignored her concerns over its Minnesota dealings was the reason Trump had been elected.

“Who cares about answering some pesky questions from a woman senator from the Midwest when you guys and the White House and the activists have all the politics down, right?” Klobuchar wrote.

Labor Sec. Acosta Defends Plea Deal for ‘Lolita’ Abuser Jeffrey Epstein

Ben Sellers
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‘We did what we did because we wanted to see Epstein go to jail…’

Labor Sec. Defends Plea Deal for Lolita Pimp Jeffrey Epstein
Alex Acosta / IMAGE: screenshot via CBS News

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Facing a firestorm of controversy over a 2006 plea deal that allowed billionaire sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein to walk free after 13 months, current Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta—then a U.S. attorney out of Florida—defended the decision to accept a compromise instead of “rolling the dice” on federal prosecution.

The case against Epstein—who is accused of sexually abusing young girls and making them available to other powerful figures on his “Lolita Express” private jet—resurfaced this week as federal prosecutors in New York brought charges against him.

“Each one of these cases is devastating and saddening,” Acosta said at a press conference Wednesday, “but I also think it’s important to realize that the prosecutors were trying to do the right thing.”

Acosta, who provided affidavits from investigators and attorneys in his former office, said the Justice Department took the rare step of invervening with a non-prosecution agreement to ensure Epstein faced some measure of accountability from state-level charges that would have otherwise resulted in no jail time.

“Simply put, the Palm Beach state attorney’s office was ready to let Epstein walk free—no jail time, nothing,” Acosta said.

By contrast, the plea deal brokered by Acosta’s office not only assured Epstein’s incarceration, but forced him to register as a sexual offender and provided the means for victims to seek financial restitution through civil trials, while arranging for Epstein to cover victims’ attorney’s fees.

Even so, Acosta called the New York prosecution a “very, very good thing” and encouraged more victims to step forward to assist any ongoing investigations.

“Epstein’s actions absolutely deserve a stiffer sentence,” Acosta said. “… He should be prosecuted in any state in which he committed a crime.”

Acosta expressed heartfelt sympathy for the victims in the case—some of whom have since come out publicly to say he and his office had failed them.

“I’m not here to try to say that I can stand in their shoes,” Acosta said. “… We did what we did because we wanted to see Epstein go to jail. He needed to go to jail … and that was the focus.”

But Acosta said a federal case was by no means a sure thing and that the plea deal assured at least some justice.

“There is a big gulf between sufficient evidence to go to trial and sufficient evidence to be confident in the outcome of that trial,” he said.

While a case in the post-MeToo era might see a different outcome, Acosta said prosecutors faced the concern that some of the child victims at the time were reluctant to testify to their traumatic experiences or that they may have faced additional trauma by having their credibility attacked.

“We now have 12 years of knowledge and hindsight and we live in a different world,” he said. “… Today’s world understands that when interviewing victims, when eliciting testimony, that testimony can be contradictory.”

Epstein’s wealth and political connections further complicated matters. Both President Bill Clinton (who reportedly flew more than two dozen times on the Lolita Express) and then-business mogul Donald Trump were on friendly terms with the financier, though both recently denied knowing about his crimes and said they had long since severed ties.

Acosta, facing down considerable speculation that he may resign or be forced out by the current president, said his relationship with both Trump and White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney remained strong.

However, Acosta added, because Cabinet members serve at the pleasure of the president, he would obligingly resign if Trump asked him to.

“If at some point he says, ‘Look, you’re not the right person for this now’ or ‘you’re standing in the way,’ I respect that,” Acosta said.

Acosta also noted that although he had avoided speaking out publicly prior to the press conference Wednesday due to the ongoing litigation, he would be open, when all legal matters had concluded, to meet with victims personally and hear them out.

While he strongly defended the decision that his team of experienced prosecutors had made in weighing the 2006 case against Epstein, Acosta said that after looking back on it and hearing the victims recount their experiences in interviews, he did regret that Epstein got off too easily.

“‘No regrets’ is a very hard question. … As you watch these victim interviews, it’s very obvious that the victims feel this was not a sufficient outcome,” he said.

“… You always look back and say ‘what if,'” he continued.  “What I can say is, at the time… this was the view of the office. There is a value to a sure guilty plea because letting him walk … would have been absolutely awful.”

Left Boycotts Home Depot to Protest Trump-Supporting Co-Founder

Ben Sellers
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‘Patriots! Time to go to buy some cool stuff…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) For conservative do-it-yourselfers who shy away from the long lines at big-box hardware stores, a left-wing boycott of Home Depot may be wonderful news.

So noted Rep. Devin Nunes, D-Calif., after Home Depot‘s 90-year-old co-founder, Bernie Marcus, recently declared his support for President Donald Trump.

That, in turn, triggered some social justice warriors—those who manage to balance their weekday activism with weekend home-improvement projects—to protest the chain.

According to The Atlanta Journal–Constitution, the Florida-based nonagenarian Marcus and his wife, Billi, have given more than $2 billion to philanthropic causes—including the Georgia Aquarium, and efforts supporting stroke victims, autism awareness and military veterans.

The self-made billionaire also has given heavily in the past to Jewish causes, having co-founded The Israel Democracy Institute.

Marcus said his philanthropic giving well eclipsed his political donations and that he planned to bequeath 80 to 90 percent of his wealth to charity causes.

Nonetheless, he was listed as the 20th-ranked on the Center for Responsive Politics’s list of top individual donors for the most recent election cycle, having given $6.5 million to conservative candidates in 2018 and $11.5 million in 2016.

Trump has called him a “friend” and sent a video message for his 90th birthday celebration that said, “You are a special man, a brilliant man … When I want advice I call you and you have plenty of advice…much of it I actually take, Bernie.”

Trump again tweeted his support on Wednesday as the #BoycottHomeDepot hashtag was trending.

The AJC profile last week that triggered the boycott—which largely focused on Marcus’s plans to give away much of his wealth—offered a less-flattering assessment of Trump, who, Marcus said, “sucks” at communication.

However, he also praised the president’s strong economic leadership and his firm foreign policy stances with China, Iran and North Korea.

The AJC said Marcus retired as chairman of Home Depot in 2002.

Home Depot Co-Founder to GOP: Pass Tax Reform or Lose Congress
Bernie Marcus/IMAGE: YouTube

Although the company has struggled financially due to the emergence of online warehouses like Amazon, Marcus said he was not concerned with its ability to adapt and survive.

“Home Depot is doing well because they understand the philosophy of reinventing themselves,” Marcus said.

“At one point, we had real concern that Amazon was going to put everybody out of business,” he added. “I don’t feel that is true today. … They are not going to run away with our business.”

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—who has publicly clashed with Trump and owns the left-leaning Washington Post—was listed as 10th on the list of top 2018 donors, having given more than $10 million for the midterm cycle.

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