Free Republic

The president signals his enthusiasm for amnesty. Why would immigration activists give an inch? This was supposed to be about how all of yesterday’s heated rhetoric, all the defiant “Stand by Your Dreamer” talk from Harvard and from tech CEOs, was just so much theater. In truth, no one — at least no one law-abiding — is going to be much inconvenienced, let alone deported, over President Trump’s supposed “rescission” of President Obama’s unconstitutional Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA) program. As I explained yesterday, a proper application of prosecutorial discretion would place young aliens who were brought to this...

The thing to understand, what has always been the most important thing to understand, is that Jim Comey was out in front, but he was not calling the shots. On the right, the commentariat is in full-throttle outrage over the revelation that former FBI Director Comey began drafting his statement exonerating Hillary Clinton in April 2016 – more than two months before he delivered the statement at his now famous July 5 press conference. The news appears in a letter written to new FBI Director Christopher Wray by two senior Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans, Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senator Lindsey...

The thing to understand, what has always been the most important thing to understand, is that Jim Comey was out in front, but he was not calling the shots. On the right, the commentariat is in full-throttle outrage over the revelation that former FBI Director Comey began drafting his statement exonerating Hillary Clinton in April 2016 – more than two months before he delivered the statement at his now famous July 5 press conference. The news appears in a letter written to new FBI Director Christopher Wray by two senior Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans, Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senator Lindsey...

Yesterday, we wrote about new developments in an exceptionally strange case involving a circle of former IT staffers for House Democrats who are caught up in a federal criminal investigation.  We noted that the New York Post's sources say that the FBI is now looking into whether the Awan cabal may have sold off sensitive data collected from the House servers they maintained to foreign intelligence services in Islamabad, Moscow, and potentially elsewhere.  Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy, whose summary of bizarre imbroglio mess we linked, knows a thing or two about how federal indictments work.  He's the man who...

Let’s say you’re a prosecutor in Washington. You are investigating a husband and wife, naturalized Americans, who you believe have scammed a federal credit union out of nearly $300,000. So . . . what’s the best evidence you could possibly have, the slam-dunk proof that their goal was to steal the money and never look back? That’s easy: One after the other, the wife and husband pulled up stakes and tried to high-tail it to Pakistan after they’d wired the funds there — the wife successfully fleeing, the husband nabbed as he was about to board his flight. The indictment...

Intriguing, as the three main figures in the probe until now have been Susan Rice, John Brennan, and Samantha Power. It stands to reason that Rhodes would end up as a “person of interest,” though. As Obama’s deputy NSA, he surely did some “unmasking” in the course of his routine review of surveillance. The question Devin Nunes has is how much of that was proper, for valid national security reasons, and how much was partisan politics. The House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-CA, sent the letter to the National Security Agency requesting the number of unmaskings made by...

In Washington, it’s never about what they tell you it’s about. So take this to the bank: The case of Imran Awan, Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s mysterious Pakistani IT guy, is not about bank fraud. [Snip] Awan and his family cabal of fraudsters had access for years to the e-mails and other electronic files of members of the House’s Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committees. It turns out they were accessing members’ computers without their knowledge, transferring files to remote servers, and stealing computer equipment — including hard drives that Awan & Co. smashed to bits of bytes before making tracks. [Snip]...

**SNIP** Hina had also been on the House payroll. I want to draw attention to a detail about her apparent flight. According to the aforementioned complaint, agents of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) found $12,400 in cash when they searched her belongings. Yet, “ALVI was permitted to board the flight to Qatar and she and her daughters have not returned to the United States.” Her husband, Awan, appeared to be headed to join her when he was arrested yesterday. Why was Hina Alvi permitted to leave? Why was she not arrested? Under federal law, a person may carry as...

There’s more than bank fraud going on here. In Washington, it’s never about what they tell you it’s about. So take this to the bank: The case of Imran Awan, Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s mysterious Pakistani IT guy, is not about bank fraud. Yet bank fraud was the stated charge on which Awan was arrested at Dulles Airport this week, just as he was trying to flee the United States for Pakistan, via Qatar. That is the same route taken by Awan’s wife, Hina Alvi, in March, when she suddenly fled the country, with three young daughters she yanked out of...

The report is replete with references to Russian “cyber espionage,” “covert intelligence,” “false-flag,” “propaganda,” and “influence” operations by which Vladimir Putin is alleged to have tried to put his thumb on the electoral scale. Very sinister stuff, to be sure. But when the public hears these terms, it thinks of spies, misdirection, disinformation campaigns — i.e., schemes intended to deceive the target audience. People don’t instantly think, “Oh, you mean an effort to publicize true but embarrassing information”; they don’t read “covert operation” and say to themselves, “That must mean they subjected only one side of a political contest to...

Is there an enduring American character? For those who view our nation as at a tipping point, the question is urgent. Others scoff, “Why?” After all, if the American character is truly enduring, it will endure — the ship eventually will right itself to the extent it is off course. And if not, history will inevitably evolve it into something better, right? My friend Mark Levin would counter that this is the wrong way to look at it. The foundation of Americanism, he posits, is natural law. That does not just spontaneously appear, nor passively persevere. Understanding our natural-law roots,...

Maybe Trump objected to the fraudulent notion, which Comey led the world to believe, that Trump was under investigation for collusion. On March 30, 2017, by his own account, then-FBI director James Comey told President Donald Trump that Trump himself was not under investigation — the third time he had given him that assurance. In fact, Comey told Trump that he had just assured members of Congress that Trump was not a suspect under investigation. Think about that. This was fully six weeks after the then-director’s Oval Office meeting with the president, during which Comey alleges that Trump told him,...

President Trump should not dismiss Mueller, but the Justice Department must revise the special counsel’s jurisdiction. snip Bottom line: Trump should not dismiss Mueller, but the Justice Department must revise the special counsel’s jurisdiction. Maybe this time, it could be conformed to, you know, the law . . . specifically, the law that limits special counsels to criminal investigations, not counterintelligence probes. snip Rosenstein should issue a directive superseding his original appointment of Mueller in order to more tightly and appropriately define Mueller’s jurisdiction. The new directive should describe, in writing, the potential crimes that have been uncovered in the...

I have argued that Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s recusal from the so-called Russia investigation was a mistake. The attorney general’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday afternoon bolstered this conclusion. Sessions says that he recused himself, on the advice of career ethics experts at the Justice Department, because he thought this was required by the federal regulation controlling “Disqualification arising from personal or political relationship” (28 CFR Sec. 45.2). But judging from the public testimony that former FBI director James Comey has given about the investigation into Russia’s election-meddling, the regulation did not mandate recusal. Section 45.2 states...

His leaking, at the very least, was improper. snip One major issue is whether these documents belonged to Comey, in the sense of being his property rather than the government’s. That is the position he took in his testimony. Like Turley, I think the former director is wrong. snip There is also a claim floating around that the memo(s) should not be deemed to have been “leaked” because they were, it is asserted, not classified. We need to unpack this errant suggestion in three steps because it is so wrongheaded. snip Nevertheless, as Turley observes, Comey never sought a classification...

He believed that the FBI director misled the public to think that the president was under investigation. At last, at least for your humble correspondent, this week’s big hearing brought clarity. I now believe President Donald Trump fired Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey because he believes Comey intentionally misled the public into believing Trump was under investigation by the FBI. There is enough support for this theory that, had the president been forthright in explaining it when he dismissed Comey on May 9, there might have been considerably less uproar. Instead, Trump dissembled, as he seems hardwired to...

Islamists want to impose sharia law on the West — which means all Islamists are ‘extremists.’ The Western schizophrenia about radical Islam is on full display in Britain, in the aftermath of the latest jihadist atrocity, the third in just the past three months. Three terrorists rammed a van into a crowd on London Bridge and then went on a stabbing rampage, brutally assaulting pedestrians while braying that each blow was struck “for Allah.” A duly outraged Theresa May donned her prime-minister hat to announce that her government is “leading international efforts to take on and defeat the ideology of...

It’s not all about Russia. The House Intelligence Committee has reportedly issued seven subpoenas in connection with its investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and of the Obama administration’s potentially illegal use of the government’s foreign-intelligence-collection power for the purpose of monitoring Americans — in particular, Americans connected to the Trump campaign and transition. The news was broken Wednesday afternoon by the Wall Street Journal. The most intriguing detail of the subpoenas is the demand for any information related to requests for unmasking by Samantha Power, President Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations. *snip* Were there to be...

The NSA intentionally and routinely intercepted communications of American citizens in violation of the Constitution. During the Obama years, the National Security Agency intentionally and routinely intercepted and reviewed communications of American citizens in violation of the Constitution and of court-ordered guidelines implemented pursuant to federal law. The unlawful surveillance appears to have been a massive abuse of the government’s foreign-intelligence-collection authority, carried out for the purpose of monitoring the communications of Americans in the United States. While aware that it was going on for an extensive period of time, the administration failed to disclose its unlawful surveillance of Americans...

At National Review last weekend, I addressed the Democrats’ loopy claim that the FBI became a Trump partisan in the 2016 election. The claim is worth more examination in light of President Trump’s dismissal of FBI Director James Comey. In Clinton World, self-absorption always triumphs over self-inspection, so nothing could be more predictable than Hillary Clinton’s scapegoating of Comey, a diversion from acknowledging what really cost her the election: her own manifest flaws. Congressional Democrats are along for the ride: those who were swooning over Comey in July when he announced that Clinton would not be charged, then ripped him...