“The individual mandate is unconstitutional because it can no longer be read as a tax, and there is no other constitutional provision that justifies this exercise of congressional power,” the opinion by Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod reads, pointing back to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2012 opinion upholding the Affordable Care Act.
Elrod wrote that the “decision breaks no new ground,” as the mandate was “originally cognizable as either a command or a tax. Today, it is only cognizable as a command.”
I think this is what the judges believe moved it out of the “tax” column (which it should never have been in anyway).
The Justice Department inspector general said Wednesday that his team will take a closer look at Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant applications involving counterintelligence and counterterrorism in order to determine whether the “basic errors” the FBI made in applications to surveil the Trump campaign are widespread within the agency.
…
“This was a counterintelligence FISA, and we’ve heard a lot of concerns about counterterrorism FISAs, about targeting and other issues there. We’re going to take a sampling,” Horowitz said. “We’re going to look and compare and see how the Woods Procedures played out in those FISAs by comparing the Woods binders to the FISAs and see if the same basic errors are occurring there.”
The inspector general emphasized that the FISA probe is new territory since the close examination the Page FISA received is “the first-ever deep dive anyone has taken in a FISA.”
So…nobody really cared if a regular person got the same treatment they gave President Trump — which may be one reason they had the gall to try it.
Horowitz noted in his report that a lot of agents apparently did not even know what the Woods Procedures were.
Also this — which I think some of the commenters interpret correctly.
There is a virtual media blackout of Horowitz’s testimony because the fake news media is obsessing over the sham impeachment vote.
Horowitz told Senator Ron Johnson that he found political bias.
“In both of these investigations you found political bias,” Johnson said to Horowitz referring to the FBI’s investigation into Hillary’s emails (MidYear Exam) and Trump’s camp.
“We found through the text messages evidence of people’s political bias,” Horowitz said to Senator Johnson.
ComradeAdam Corn Pop • 2 hours ago
His report was worded carefully. It said he did not find testimonial or documentary evidence of bias in the initiation of the investigation, ie no one admitted they were bias. He didn’t reach any conclusion, just reported what he found. Basically he reported that he found 2 and 2 but did not make the conclusion that 2 and 2 is 4.
If you look at the methodology that Horowitz laid out in his report you see that he felt his job as IG was to not make any conclusions, to remain completely neutral in laying out the facts. He felt it was the job of Durham to take the facts and come to conclusions like bias.
* * *
Amor Terra Corn Pop • an hour ago
He NEVER said in the report that he found political bias was not a factor. What he said was he found no testimonial or documentary evidence of political bias, but that the excuses offered for all the errors and omissions were unsatisfactory. The first part isn’t surprising at all. An IG can only compel evidence from his own agency–the people he’s investigating–and people being investigating rarely write down or admit their biases. He couldn’t make a determination because he only presents the evidence–that’s his job. He testified in the House that, because the explanations were inadequate for why they did all what they did, the reason was either 1) intentional misconduct or 2) gross negligence.
This is a long post by JE Dyer, but she connects a lot of the dots that show up in several different areas, connecting the Crossfire Hurricane “investigation” of the Trump campaign, Mueller’s report, Horowitz’s reports, unauthorized data mining, press malfeasance, hyping the social media threat, and the impeachment farce — and the connections to Ukraine, Russia, Iran, nuclear weapons, uranium & the Clintons, banking aka laundering money, especially missing money from the US government, and lots of other things.
Believe it or not, this is a short excerpt. Get a drink and some popcorn before you start reading the post itself.
The question is whether Durham’s investigation will satisfy what the nation really needs after the genuine political trauma of the Russiagate hoax. Criminal convictions are important, to the extent we can get them. But the basic problem here is much too big to be adequately addressed by convicting a comparative handful of people for statutory crimes.
The problem goes even beyond what the U.S. federal government now has the power to do to us, and the lack of restraints on that power.
The even deeper problem is that government, as organized and chartered today, offers so much power that people will go to the lengths we are seeing in the Horowitz IG report to take down a political candidate who is likely to reduce that power, and change the course it has been on for the last 30 years.
What is called the “deep state” consists of people who are so invested in the current scope and course of government that they cannot endure seeing it change – no matter how lawfully and constitutionally the change is brought about.
…
Voting money out of other people’s pockets is a bad and dangerous temptation regardless of how it’s done. Many people want to do it straightforwardly to benefit themselves. But some – who think like Cass Sunstein – see it as a way of “nudging” their fellow humans, with negative incentives, to adopt behavior that wouldn’t occur to them voluntarily. The impulse is equally evil in both cases.
The point of going through that brief litany is to illustrate concretely the reality of investment in big government. It’s important to keep that in mind, because almost all statements about why there’s been such an unrestrained frenzy to get rid of Trump are much too shallow and situational.
… What the anti-Trump “resistance” can’t accept is losing the power tool and source of sustenance that big government is today.
The question about that is what exactly the “deep state” of 2016 had in mind, when it surveyed what it would lose if Trump became president.
That is what we need to know. For our safety, for the security of our rights and liberties, for hope and a future – that is what we have to find out and understand. What were they getting out of it? Why could they not bear to let it change, when the voters demanded it? Indeed, why can they still not bear it, and therefore refuse to accept it?
…
It took all of the agencies involved in Spygate to bring off the Big Data spying. That’s because of the legal firewalls that are intended to protect Americans’ rights. There are things each agency can do – the FBI, the CIA, potentially the NCTC – that the others can’t. There are also forms of collaboration they are either not supposed to engage in, or only engage in under strict procedural regulation and supervision.
To get around the latter limitation, the solution in Spygate was to do it at the NSC level, and call the spying on Trump a national security matter under the purview of the president. We essentially know that’s what happened. It had to happen, when the White House interagency task force on “Russian interference” was formed in August 2016, with an FBI that claimed to be investigating Trump for collusion in that interference, and a CIA that claimed to have received warning signs of such collusion from foreign sources.
If the Obama administration actually had a solid, reasonable case for why that arrangement was appropriate, we would already have heard it.
Instead, we have heard years of denials that spying on Trump, under the aegis of the NSC, was even what was done. That’s a huge red flag.
… In fact, on the periphery of Russiagate and Spygate, there’s a whole lot of stuff going on with banking, and indeed with other money-making enterprises, that raises serious questions about what financial maneuvers are being used for by governments – starting, but by no means ending, with ours.
…
We move on now from the activities of government agencies, to two very significant and problematic categories in the means of attack on Trump and his campaign. The categories are interrelated today, to a historically unprecedented extent.
The first we can group as the phalanxes of consulting and lobbying firms that now form the effective foundation of Washington, D.C. These firms for decades were mostly about lobbying for policy, which in effect meant developing expertise in writing policy and selling it to the public. As Conservative Treehouse laid out in a superb series of articles in 2017 (see here for further discussion and all the links), that had especially significant import for the relationship of these firms with Congress and the federal agencies. It meant the expertise in the latter’s jobs – the jobs of those government entities – actually migrated to the consulting and lobbying firms.
…
But in the last 25 years or so, government consulting and lobbying has become much more about literally authoring the political narrative by which the whole of our national polity navigates. In the case of something like Obamacare, for example, it isn’t just about writing thousands of pages of regulations. It’s about preparing the whole political mindset for urging massive changes in their daily lives on the people.
…
To a great extent, the mechanics of politics have been outsourced to armies of private-firm specialists, inherently acting as advocates for points of view because they are writing narratives to justify their and their clients’ proposals.
If this consulting-firm apparatus can be used to write the narrative making health care a national emergency, and Obamacare the only solution, why can’t it write a narrative making a specific president a national emergency – with impeachment and/or at least some form of summary removal the necessary “solution”?
Well, manifestly, it can be used for that purpose. Between 2015 and today, that’s exactly what has happened.
…
The second of these final two, interrelated categories in the means of attack is the role of the media. Going through the last section no doubt raised that point with many readers. The media merit their own mention because in the anti-Trump campaign, they have played such an integral role in instigation of the attack. They have by no means been duped or coopted bystanders. In company with the consulting firms that work hand-in-glove with them, the media are driving the train.
…
The final section of this treatment may in some ways be the most important. It is also the most obscure – opaque to the public – and the hardest to tie together neatly as part of the anti-Trump campaign.
But I believe it is indispensable to address the category of these issues, which I would call patterns of interest. Most of them map to the Obama administration. At least one goes back to well before it.
Most relate to the anti-Trump effort in both directions: i.e., they are motives to try to get rid of Trump (in order to preserve preexisting gains made in “transforming” America), but some are also means of getting rid of Trump.
It is mainly as motives that we are interested in them. That’s partly because they’re about transforming the political landscape, on the kind of long but finite timeline suggested by Raheem Kassam’s tweet thread.
But it’s also because, if such powerful levers of information and influence remain “transformed,” they can be used as often as necessary against inconvenient political figures – like Trump.
…
That brings us to the second sub-category in patterns of interest: the recurrence of connections with the nuclear industry. In considering these connections as a general matter, the focus has always been on how political figures were lining their pockets. The Clintons and the sequence of donations, payments for speeches, and the regulatory outcome for the Uranium One deal is the most prominent example. (Including those factors, and the point that a whistleblower who had information straightforwardly implicating the Clintons in a pay-for-play scheme in that incident later had his home raided by the FBI.)
But there are reasons to ask if there’s more there. Specifically, to ask if at least some of what we’ve seen is about the nuclear industry itself, and where the levers of power over it are located – beyond the simple identification of Russia as the purchaser of Uranium One.
…
There is one more major sub-category in patterns of interest attending the anti-Trump drama. This one goes back even more years than the arresting developments in the nuclear industry, In terms of specifically known activity, it has only a couple of links to the developments of Russiagate-Spygate, in the form of the transactions surrounding human assets (Stefan Halper, Charles Tawil and George Papadopoulos), and through peripheral actors known to have an interest in taking down Trump (more below).
But it is virtually certain to be a window-opener on what the anti-Trump campaign is about; i.e., on what the motives are.
The pattern involved has been identified for a long time, but was especially pronounced in the Obama years. I have reported on it before under the general heading of “Funny Money.”
Some of the money is funny because there are enormous chunks of it that appear to have gone missing, especially in the Department of Defense. Over the years, these apparent losses, reflected largely in the accounting for equipment inventories, have mounted into the trillions of dollars. The Pentagon is currently undergoing a series of long-overdue audits (started under Trump, when Secretary Mattis was at the helm), and we can be encouraged by that to wait and see what comes out of it.
The possibility that at least some of the apparently missing money has been siphoned off for illicit use can’t be discounted, however. And there are an awful lot of opportunities for such outcomes in the current operation of government.
Another form of funny money is the pockets of poorly audited spending represented by things like the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment and the payments to Stefan Halper.
But those pockets also include the Obama-era practice of distributing court-settlement fines to Obama’s political cronies: people with non-profits who advocated for his political agenda, and raised money and marshaled votes for his political operations.
A key concern with court-settlement fines, as with other forms of non-tax income to the U.S. Treasury, is that the administration of such money has little accountability to Congress.
…
But wait! There’s more!!
Seriously, RTWT.
Two points:
1.
I find the term/concept “Deep State” a very troublesome one and think that one has to try to define it as accurately as possible.
I believe that while the idea of “Deep State” does include and can refer to bureaucrats at many levels (but particularly higher up the pole) who would do as much as they can to maintain their power and influence, using, however, the same term to refer to POLITICAL OPERATIVES who strong-arm, manipulate, suborn—and weaponize—their power and influence over government agencies to subvert their political opponents, and the law/Constitution as “Deep State” (even if there is overlap) is a distinct PROBLEM because it conflates two separate things.
In the current case, Democratic Party operatives (including many in the Obama administration) who flout the law/Constitution for the political gain of their party at the expense of the Republican Party and those American citizens who support the GOP—as well as the American people, generally, because of the lawlessness, general skepticism, disrespect and civil havoc that such behavior engenders—are NOT NECESSARILY “Deep State” but are criminals pure and simple (even if by trying to ensure there is NO CHANGE, they may fall within the definition of “Deep State” and thus be considered a “subset” of it).
Once again: They are criminals pure and simple, motivated PURELY by larger, more comprehensive POLITICAL considerations, not merely by personal gain (or conversely, the prevention of personal—in terms of power/money/influence—advantage).
IOW, referring to the Democratic Party operatives in the current extraordinary scandal as “Deep State” seems to me to mitigate, to lessen their political crimes AND to obfuscate their precisely political (as opposed to personal) motivations.
(To be sure, I would include “personal” motivations as the desire to cover up things they have done and which they know to have been highly illegal, as well as the desire to stay out of jail—for those who know that they deserve to be there.
2.
Regarding “…a lot of agents apparently did not even know what the Woods Procedures were”, I believe that such a claim is an absurd excuse to escape illegal behavior and hope for “understanding” and leniency—though I have, of course, no way of actually proving this.
Let me explain:
Far better (for such agents) to plead ignorance—and hope for the best (while perhaps weathering the ridicule that such an excuse might generate)—rather than to admit a conscious decision to flout the law and standard FBI procedures.
It makes absolutely no sense that these agents were clueless of the Woods Procedures; moreover, after everything they did, such a denial (along with most anything that they say that might somewhat exonerate their behavior) MUST be treated with extreme skepticism.
Just imagine a police officer saying, “Miranda rights? What’s that?”….
The problem is that as a society, we operate—and maintain ourselves as a decent society—by, GENERALLY, operating on the principle of “giving benefit of the doubt” (which once that disappears from the public discourse, is the beginning of the end of decent society).
And these bastards know it.
Correction:
Should be “…(or conversely, the prevention of personal…DISADVANTAGE.”)
MSM thought there was too much news too, so they left some of it out.
Good one, AesopFan.
Barry Meislin,
I too am uncomfortable with the expression “Deep State”, even though it is apt in some ways. Somehow, the expression smacks of “conspiracy theory” fanaticism.
In my mind, there is a Deep State, but it is not an organized entity. It is simply the collective Federal bureaucracy acting collectively to promote it’s own interests.
Any bureaucracy, unchecked, will grow and consume all the available resources. In a corporation, the need to generate profits for the shareholders and competition from other companies prevents the organizational bureaucracy from expanding without limits. In government, there is no profit motive and the accountability to the public is too tenuous. This is the weakness of representative democracy.
So, the Deep State is not a conscience conspiracy any more than a virus’s mechanisms to propagate itself are conscious. Just like billions of unconscious viruses following their own genetic code to propagate are dangerous, the collective force of millions of federal bureaucrats all protecting their own individual interests is also dangerous. And that danger doesn’t require a conscious conspiracy.
I believe that a solution is possible utilizing Game Theory to create and install the appropriate negative feedback systems to prevent unchecked growth in the size and power of government bureaucracies. I am not so certain that the current USG bureaucracy is fixable. Perhaps in his second term, Trump can start a wholesale reduction in federal bureaucracy and scope. For all of our sakes, I hope so.
… doesn’t require a conscious conspiracy.
Neither does it doesn’t exclude one (actually, many), which is precisely what we’ve been seeing these last number of years.
… the appropriate negative feedback systems …
Running woodchippers. Just the ticket.
sdferr,
Yes, I agree that there are many small conspiracies. The group at the FBI who promoted the Steele Dossier is one of them. My point is that it is not a single conspiracy led from the top down. It is an amorphous grouping of common interests that collaborate to persue a common goal.
For anyone who works for the bureaucracy, contracts with the bureaucracy, or is nurtured by the bureaucracy, Donald J. Trump is an enemy and an existential threat. They are acting accordingly.
(But coincidence or not, we must all thank Susan Rice for her email to self—PROVING beyond the shadow of a doubt that everything the Obama administration did, sorry, didn’t do; sorry, did…oh, forget it was “above board”! Where would we be without Susan Rice…?)
On the other hand, not sure that Comey actually NEEDS fisking, seeing that he’s kind of self-fisking (though for sure it would be loads of fun).
The MSM thought there was too much news too, so they left some of it out.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/12/mainstream-media-ignore-fisa-court-slamming-fbi-over-trump-related-surveillance-applications/
Other exciting news today.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/12/breaking-federal-5th-circuit-court-overturns-obamacare-individual-mandate/
I think this is what the judges believe moved it out of the “tax” column (which it should never have been in anyway).
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/fifth-circuit-rules-obamacare-individual-mandate-unconstitutional/
“Texas and 17 other Republican-led states sued in 2017 after the GOP-led Congress cut the tax penalty for those who lacked insurance to zero.”
About that oddly scheduled Horowitz interview…
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/horowitz-examining-past-fisa-applications-to-determine-if-fbis-basic-errors-are-systemic/
So…nobody really cared if a regular person got the same treatment they gave President Trump — which may be one reason they had the gall to try it.
Horowitz noted in his report that a lot of agents apparently did not even know what the Woods Procedures were.
Also this — which I think some of the commenters interpret correctly.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/12/huge-doj-ig-horowitz-confirms-evidence-of-political-bias-in-fbi-text-messages-video/
This is a long post by JE Dyer, but she connects a lot of the dots that show up in several different areas, connecting the Crossfire Hurricane “investigation” of the Trump campaign, Mueller’s report, Horowitz’s reports, unauthorized data mining, press malfeasance, hyping the social media threat, and the impeachment farce — and the connections to Ukraine, Russia, Iran, nuclear weapons, uranium & the Clintons, banking aka laundering money, especially missing money from the US government, and lots of other things.
Believe it or not, this is a short excerpt. Get a drink and some popcorn before you start reading the post itself.
Welcome to the Deep State Zone.
https://libertyunyielding.com/2019/12/17/after-crossfire-hurricane-a-roadmap-for-wirebrushing-the-perpetrators-methods-and-motives/
But wait! There’s more!!
Seriously, RTWT.
Two points:
1.
I find the term/concept “Deep State” a very troublesome one and think that one has to try to define it as accurately as possible.
I believe that while the idea of “Deep State” does include and can refer to bureaucrats at many levels (but particularly higher up the pole) who would do as much as they can to maintain their power and influence, using, however, the same term to refer to POLITICAL OPERATIVES who strong-arm, manipulate, suborn—and weaponize—their power and influence over government agencies to subvert their political opponents, and the law/Constitution as “Deep State” (even if there is overlap) is a distinct PROBLEM because it conflates two separate things.
In the current case, Democratic Party operatives (including many in the Obama administration) who flout the law/Constitution for the political gain of their party at the expense of the Republican Party and those American citizens who support the GOP—as well as the American people, generally, because of the lawlessness, general skepticism, disrespect and civil havoc that such behavior engenders—are NOT NECESSARILY “Deep State” but are criminals pure and simple (even if by trying to ensure there is NO CHANGE, they may fall within the definition of “Deep State” and thus be considered a “subset” of it).
Once again: They are criminals pure and simple, motivated PURELY by larger, more comprehensive POLITICAL considerations, not merely by personal gain (or conversely, the prevention of personal—in terms of power/money/influence—advantage).
IOW, referring to the Democratic Party operatives in the current extraordinary scandal as “Deep State” seems to me to mitigate, to lessen their political crimes AND to obfuscate their precisely political (as opposed to personal) motivations.
(To be sure, I would include “personal” motivations as the desire to cover up things they have done and which they know to have been highly illegal, as well as the desire to stay out of jail—for those who know that they deserve to be there.
2.
Regarding “…a lot of agents apparently did not even know what the Woods Procedures were”, I believe that such a claim is an absurd excuse to escape illegal behavior and hope for “understanding” and leniency—though I have, of course, no way of actually proving this.
Let me explain:
Far better (for such agents) to plead ignorance—and hope for the best (while perhaps weathering the ridicule that such an excuse might generate)—rather than to admit a conscious decision to flout the law and standard FBI procedures.
It makes absolutely no sense that these agents were clueless of the Woods Procedures; moreover, after everything they did, such a denial (along with most anything that they say that might somewhat exonerate their behavior) MUST be treated with extreme skepticism.
Just imagine a police officer saying, “Miranda rights? What’s that?”….
The problem is that as a society, we operate—and maintain ourselves as a decent society—by, GENERALLY, operating on the principle of “giving benefit of the doubt” (which once that disappears from the public discourse, is the beginning of the end of decent society).
And these bastards know it.
Correction:
Should be “…(or conversely, the prevention of personal…DISADVANTAGE.”)
MSM thought there was too much news too, so they left some of it out.
Good one, AesopFan.
Barry Meislin,
I too am uncomfortable with the expression “Deep State”, even though it is apt in some ways. Somehow, the expression smacks of “conspiracy theory” fanaticism.
In my mind, there is a Deep State, but it is not an organized entity. It is simply the collective Federal bureaucracy acting collectively to promote it’s own interests.
Any bureaucracy, unchecked, will grow and consume all the available resources. In a corporation, the need to generate profits for the shareholders and competition from other companies prevents the organizational bureaucracy from expanding without limits. In government, there is no profit motive and the accountability to the public is too tenuous. This is the weakness of representative democracy.
So, the Deep State is not a conscience conspiracy any more than a virus’s mechanisms to propagate itself are conscious. Just like billions of unconscious viruses following their own genetic code to propagate are dangerous, the collective force of millions of federal bureaucrats all protecting their own individual interests is also dangerous. And that danger doesn’t require a conscious conspiracy.
I believe that a solution is possible utilizing Game Theory to create and install the appropriate negative feedback systems to prevent unchecked growth in the size and power of government bureaucracies. I am not so certain that the current USG bureaucracy is fixable. Perhaps in his second term, Trump can start a wholesale reduction in federal bureaucracy and scope. For all of our sakes, I hope so.
… doesn’t require a conscious conspiracy.
Neither does it doesn’t exclude one (actually, many), which is precisely what we’ve been seeing these last number of years.
… the appropriate negative feedback systems …
Running woodchippers. Just the ticket.
sdferr,
Yes, I agree that there are many small conspiracies. The group at the FBI who promoted the Steele Dossier is one of them. My point is that it is not a single conspiracy led from the top down. It is an amorphous grouping of common interests that collaborate to persue a common goal.
For anyone who works for the bureaucracy, contracts with the bureaucracy, or is nurtured by the bureaucracy, Donald J. Trump is an enemy and an existential threat. They are acting accordingly.
“…amorphous groupings…”??
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1219/hanson121919.php3
Well, maybe just a coincidence.
(But coincidence or not, we must all thank Susan Rice for her email to self—PROVING beyond the shadow of a doubt that everything the Obama administration did, sorry, didn’t do; sorry, did…oh, forget it was “above board”! Where would we be without Susan Rice…?)
On the other hand, not sure that Comey actually NEEDS fisking, seeing that he’s kind of self-fisking (though for sure it would be loads of fun).
Sort of like a self-cleaning oven…or rather—and this is probably a better match—like a washing machine/dryer that’s self-immolating:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7803295/What-Whirlpool-models-affected-grave-danger.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7808887/Whirlpool-killed-PARROT-Father-claims-beloved-pet-Marlon-Dingle-died-arms.html )
Whatever, have fun. He’s been asking for it for a while now.