I am a retired Navy lieutenant commander who served our nation for nearly two decades in the intelligence community. My wife, Sharon, and I spent years running a successful software company serving federal agencies. We were living peacefully on our small family farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley when, in a pre-dawn SWAT raid, armor-clad FBI agents shattered our lives following the January 6 protest at the nation’s Capitol.

What followed was my arrest for a crime I never committed, solitary confinement in what I can only describe as an icy dungeon, and a battle through a politically driven legal system determined to crush everything Sharon and I had built together.

The thought consumed me: I’m never getting out of here. Why not take control?

There are moments in life when everything you thought defined you simply ceases to exist. For me, that moment came in a Virginia supermax solitary confinement cell, lying on cold concrete after being struck in the spine by a guard, unable to draw a full breath, watching uniformed backs disappear through a steel door that slammed with finality.

In that cell, I had no pride, no dignity, no vanity, no vitality, no ambition, no joy, no self-respect, no ego, no hope. I was reduced to what I can only describe as the rapidly hammering heart of human anguish.

I've spent considerable time thinking about whether places of extreme suffering have the power to trap a person's essence — whether dungeons and passageways can hold people captive by imprinting upon them the heartache, grief, and distress endured, replaying that wretchedness and pain in a perpetual loop across time itself. In those solitary confinement catacombs, I felt that I was living in exactly such a place.

The darkest thought came to me with unexpected clarity: As a Christian, I know I am going to heaven. This knowledge, when I thought too much about it, formed an excellent argument for suicide. Why endure this abuse when I could be with Jesus, with friends and family, with my puppy in heaven? I wouldn’t shake there. I wouldn't hurt or ache any more. It would stop the pain. In the depths of my hopelessness, this thought gave me a feeling of relief. My suffering would end, and Sharon could live and be free.

I was so far gone that I let the enemy put these thoughts in my head. Death, which should have come to me many years from now as a benevolent old friend bringing gifts of peace and rest, instead clung to my being like a fungus rooted in desperation and despair. I heard other inmates talk of it through the walls and in the passageways — to no one in particular, or at least to no one somebody else could see.

The thought consumed me: I’m never getting out of here. Why not take control?

So I told the Lord then and there that I wanted to come home to Him, to end all of this, and I asked Him to make it so. My will to go on had fled me. Unless you have reached the point of total physical and emotional collapse, I'm not sure I can make you understand. In a way, I was already dead.

That might have been the first and only time this confessed control freak had ever said “Your will be done, Father,” and really meant it.

I had no control over anything in my desiccated world, but I had the ability to relinquish control of my life that day. Nothing that I owned or that I thought was a part of me existed in that hell. Was this “dying to self”? Those curious Bible words suddenly made sense.

It had something to do with my idea of the sum of me as a human being — my personal, selfish desires, the things I wanted or ever thought I did, my plans for a happy future with Sharon. I couldn’t clearly picture them any more. They were lost like last night’s dreams, forgotten with the free man's morning coffee.

Right now, they counted for exactly nothing.

I didn't know how to pray at that moment. I was too beaten down, and I didn't have the tongue for it. All I could offer was: “Whatever You have planned is much better than this, Lord. Let's try that, please, because this place totally sucks.”

With the warning lights on the remnant of my life force glaring a constant red, He took me in.

Gary Hershorn/Getty Images

That surrender — that complete, desperate relinquishment of control — was the moment my faith stopped being something I professed and became something I lived. Not in victory, but in total defeat. Not in strength, but in absolute weakness. It was there, in that place of utter brokenness, that I discovered what faith actually means: trusting God when you have nothing left, not even yourself.

Through years of persecution, Sharon and I were repeatedly pulled from the brink by what I can only describe as miraculous events. Our marital bond and our enduring faith in God sustained us through a battle against overwhelming odds. In a federal courtroom where I faced slander, perjury, and falsification of evidence, it was that moment of complete surrender in solitary confinement — when I finally meant “Your will be done” — that gave me the strength to endure what seemed unendurable.

I am living proof that faith isn't found in our strength, but in God's strength when ours has completely failed.

Watergate was amateur hour compared to Arctic Frost

The FBI’s Arctic Frost investigation is confirmation that the left sees conservatives as enemies of the state and is fully intent on treating them as such.

Arctic Frost began in April 2022, with the approval of Joe Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, along with Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco and FBI Director Christopher Wray. In November 2022, newly appointed special counsel Jack Smith took over the probe. Smith declared he was focused on the allegations of mishandling classified documents, but Arctic Frost shows he was much more ambitious. He helped turn the investigation into an effort to convict Donald Trump and cripple the Republican Party.

The report indicts Smith for failing at lawfare, not for the lawfare itself.

It was revealed last month that by mid-2023, the FBI had tracked the phone calls of at least a dozen Republican senators. Worse still, with the imprimatur of Justices Beryl Howell and James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Smith issued 197 subpoenas targeting the communications and financial records of nine members of Congress and at least 430 Republican entities and individuals.

The organizations targeted were a “Who’s Who” of the American right, including Turning Point USA, the Republican Attorneys General Association, the Conservative Partnership Institute, and the Center for Renewing America.

Not content with active politicians, these subpoenas also went after advisers, consulting firms, and nonprofits. One subpoena targeted communications with media companies, including CBS, Fox News, and Newsmax. Normally, a telecommunications company should inform its clients and customers about subpoenas. But Howell and Boasberg also ordered nondisclosure orders on the dubious grounds that standard transparency might result in “the destruction of or tampering of evidence” — as if a U.S. senator could wipe his phone records or a 501(c)(3) could erase evidence of its bank accounts.

The scale and secrecy of Arctic Frost are staggering. It was a massive fishing expedition, hunting for any evidence of impropriety from surveilled conservatives that might be grounds for criminal charges. One can see the strategy, typical among zealous prosecutors: the threat of criminal charges might compel a lower- or mid-level figure to turn government witness rather than resist.

But Smith had an even grander plan. By collecting financial records, he was trying to establish financial ties between those subpoenaed and Trump. Had Smith secured a conviction against Trump, he could then have pivoted to prosecuting hundreds of individuals and entities under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. This would have led to asset freezes, seizures, and further investigations.

Smith laid out a road map for crushing conservative organizations that was supposed to be implemented throughout a prospective Biden second term or a Harris presidency.

Fortunately, voters foiled Smith’s efforts.

A false equivalence

The meager coverage of Arctic Frost thus far has compared the scandal to the revelations of Watergate. But the comparison doesn’t hold. Arctic Frost involved significantly more surveillance and more direct targeting of political enemies than the Senate Watergate hearings of 1973 and 1974 managed to expose.

Setting aside campaign finance matters and political pranks, the most serious crimes the hearings exposed pertained to the Nixon administration’s involvement with break-ins and domestic wiretapping.

In the summer of 1971, the White House formed a unit to investigate leaks. Called the “Plumbers,” this unit broke into the offices of Dr. Lewis Fielding, who was the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Transferred over to the Committee to Re-elect the President at the end of the year, the unit then broke into the Democratic National Committee’s offices in the Watergate complex. The hearings exposed the burglars’ connection to CRP — and to the White House.

Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

The administration also authorized warrantless wiretaps. From May 1969 until February 1971, in response to the disclosures of the secret bombing of Cambodia, the FBI ran a 21-month wiretap program to catch the leakers. This investigation eventually covered 13 government officials and four journalists. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover submitted the wiretapping authorizations, and Attorney General John Mitchell signed them.

As a matter of optics, it was the surveillance of the members of the media that provoked the scandal. Since they were critical of the Nixon administration, it looked like the administration was targeting its political enemies. As a criminal matter, the issues were less about the actions themselves, as it was at least arguable that they were legal on national security grounds. Instead, it was more about the cover-up. When these wiretaps came up in the hearings, Mitchell and others deceived investigators, opening themselves up to charges of obstruction of justice.

A troubling parallel

One aspect revealed during the Watergate hearings could be compared to Arctic Frost. The hearings exposed extensive domestic spying that preceded the Nixon administration. The tip of the iceberg was the proposed Huston Plan of June 1970, which became one of the most sensational pieces of evidence against the Nixon administration. Named for the White House assistant who drafted it, the Huston Plan proposed formalizing intelligence coordination and authorizing warrantless surveillance and break-ins.

Nixon implemented the plan but rescinded it only five days later on the advice of Hoover and Mitchell.

Who were those Americans who might have had their civil liberties affected? It was the radical left, then in the process of stoking urban riots, inciting violence, and blowing up government buildings. The plan was an attempt to formalize ongoing practices; it was not a novel proposal. After Nixon resigned, the Senate concluded in 1976 that “the Huston plan, as we now know, must be viewed as but one episode in a continuous effort by the intelligence agencies to secure the sanction of higher authority for expanded surveillance at home and abroad.”

For years, ignoring the statutes that prohibited domestic spying, the CIA surveilled over three dozen radicals. The military and the Secret Service kept dossiers on many more. The FBI operated COINTELPRO, its surveillance of and plan to infiltrate the radical left, without Mitchell’s knowledge. And as the Senate discovered, “even though the President revoked his approval of the Huston plan, the intelligence agencies paid no heed to the revocation.” This was all excessive, to say the least.

Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Watergate helped expose a far larger and longer surveillance operation against left-wing domestic terrorists. Comparing this to Arctic Frost suggests that the shoe is now on the other foot: the state regards right-wing groups as equivalent to domestic terrorists. Once, the national security state was abused to attack the left. Now, it’s abused to attack the right. This is hardly an encouraging comparison.

Lawfare for thee, not for me

There’s a third reason that the comparison to Watergate doesn’t hold. In the 1970s, abuses generated a reaction. The Huston Plan, for instance, was squashed by the head of the Department of Justice. Controversial surveillance plans wound down eventually. Wrongdoing was exposed, and the public was horrified, worsening the people's growing mistrust of government. Lawmakers passed serious reforms to rein in intelligence agencies and defend Americans' civil liberties.

Survey today’s landscape, and it doesn’t look like there will be any similar reaction. If you’re a conservative staffer, activist, contract worker, affiliate, donor, politician, or lawmaker, you’ve learned about the unabashed weaponization of the federal justice system against you without the presence of any crime. What’s even more disturbing is that this investigation went on for 32 months, longer than Mitchell’s wiretaps.

During that time, no senior official squashed the investigation, and no whistleblowers leapt to defend conservatives. There wasn’t a “Deep Throat” leaking wrongdoing, as there once was in Deputy Director of the FBI Mark Felt. There weren’t any scrupulous career bureaucrats or political appointees in the Justice Department or elsewhere ready to threaten mass resignations over a legally spurious program, as happened to George W. Bush in the spring of 2004.

No telecommunication company contested the subpoenas, as happened in early 2016 when Apple disputed that it had to help the government unlock the iPhone of one of the terrorists involved in the December 2015 San Bernardino shootings. Neither bureaucrats nor corporations are coming to the rescue of the civil liberties of conservatives.

Public opinion won’t help, either. Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) has called for “Watergate-style hearings.” But they wouldn’t work. Watergate was a public-relations disaster for the presidency because it spoke to an American public that held its government to a moral standard of impartial activity. Television unified this audience while also stoking righteous fury over the government’s failure to meet that standard.

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

The hearings were effective only because they reached a public sensitive to infringements of civil liberties and hostile to the weaponization of the state against domestic targets. But 2025 is not 1975. Even if one could unite the American public to watch the same media event, televised hearings on Arctic Frost wouldn’t bring about a major shift in public opinion. In fact, many voters would likely approve of Arctic Frost’s operations.

For one part of the country, lawfare happens and it’s a good thing. Jack Smith’s lawfare does not embarrass or shame the left. If anything, he is criticized for insufficiently weaponizing the law.

To date, the largest exposé of his methods to reach the legacy media, published in the Washington Post, criticizes Smith for prosecuting Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents in Florida (where the alleged crime occurred) rather than in the District of Columbia. It’s an impressive investigative report, assembling aides and experts to showcase Smith’s mistake. Left unstated is the answer to the naïve question: If the offense was committed in Florida, why was it a mistake not to pursue the case in D.C.? Because that was the only district where Smith could guarantee a favorable judge and jury.

To the conservative mind, most Americans still believe that protecting civil liberties matters more than attacking one’s enemies.

The report indicts Smith for failing at lawfare, not for the lawfare itself. In this environment, where lawfare is already taken for granted as the optimal strategy to defeat the enemy, exposing the details of Arctic Frost is like publicizing the Schlieffen Plan's failure in 1915 and expecting the Germans to be ashamed enough to withdraw. They already know it didn’t work.

Exposing the plan won’t change anything. The election of Jay “Two Bullets” Jones as Virginia’s attorney general is an indication not only of the presence of a fanatic at the head of Virginia’s law enforcement but also of what a good proportion of the Democratic electorate expects from the state’s most vital prosecutor. His task is to bring pain to his enemies.

The 1970s saw the abuses of the national security state generate a forceful public reaction. That turned out to be a rare moment. Instead of a pendulum swing, we have seen a ratchet effect. The national security state has acquired more weapons over the intervening decades, and the resistance to it has grown weaker. This has hit conservatives hardest, because many still imagine that our constitutional culture remains largely intact.

To the conservative mind, most Americans still believe that protecting civil liberties matters more than attacking one’s enemies. From that point of view, American politicians operate under electoral and self-imposed restraints that will impel them to take their opponents' due process rights seriously or risk being shamed and losing elections. But these restraints are now ineffectual and hardly worth mentioning.

Unlike in the 1970s, there will be no cultural resolution to the problem of lawfare. The problem will only be solved by political means: using power to punish wrongdoers, deter future abuses, and deconstruct the weaponized national security state.

When you’re presumed to be an enemy of the state, the only important question is who will fight back on your behalf.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at The American Mind.

If it’s ‘worse than Watergate,’ then why the media blackout?

In a sense, this is old news. In December 2021, CNN reported that the House’s January 6 committee had subpoenaed phone records of more than 100 people.

But that was mostly Trump officials, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. No surprise there. After all, the January 6 Select Committee was empaneled for the specific purpose of turning President Donald Trump into a criminal for supposedly aiding and abetting the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the Capitol.

It is well past time for the Republican Congress to fulfill its promise to hold accountable those who weaponized the federal government against Trump and his allies.

But when this story resurfaced earlier this month, there was something new, too. For one thing, the scope of the investigation was almost unbelievable — it turns out those subpoenaed phone records consisted of a staggering 30 million lines of phone data.

And when the select committee’s investigation went nowhere, one of the members — GOP malcontent and former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) — informed the FBI about the phone data in Dec. 2023 when it was becoming apparent that Trump was the favorite to win the Republican nomination in 2024.

Greater than Watergate

More revelatory than the numbers of the phone records hauled in by the J6 committee was the news that the FBI had gone after these same records — and possibly more — in an effort to target Trump and his conservative allies. Not only did the agency have its eyes on Trump, it also went after nine Republican members of Congress — eight senators and a stray congressman, in an obvious effort to sweep up accomplices in the coup that never was.

Whether the FBI obtained the same phone records as the J6 committee is unclear. Kinzinger’s tip may have been moot, because an FBI memo released by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) shows that by September 2023, the agency had already “conducted preliminary … analysis” on the call data of several members of Congress, including Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.).

According to CNN, “The FBI, as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 investigation, used court orders in 2023 to obtain the phone records of nine GOP lawmakers.” These were not actual phone calls or text messages, but rather information about who called or texted whom and when.

Grassley posted the memo to his X account, with the message:

This document shows the Biden FBI spied on 8 of my Republican Senate colleagues during its Arctic Frost investigation into "election conspiracy." Arctic Frost later became Jack Smith's elector case against Trump.

He concluded, in all caps: “BIDEN FBI WEAPONIZATION = WORSE THAN WATERGATE.”

Which raises the question: Why did the story turn out to be a one-day wonder? Here we have the discovery of a partisan investigation seeking to uncover dirt on fellow members of Congress (if the records did indeed start with the J6 committee), or at the very least a rogue element of the executive branch targeting political enemies in the legislative branch.

As Johnson said:

They’re casting this net, this fishing expedition against members of the Senate and the House. There is no predicate. There’s no reason for this other than a fishing expedition, which, again, should outrage and shock every American.

Once again, a member of Congress implied that we are witness to a political scandal (one of many in the Biden administration) that is among the worst in our history. Yet when you do a Google search for stories related to phone toll records being subpoenaed by either the J6 committee or the FBI, virtually nothing comes up beyond Oct. 7, the day after Grassley released the memo.

Crickets …

A few news outlets reported in the following days that FBI Director Kash Patel had fired agents involved in the Arctic Frost investigation. In addition, scattered reports surfaced on Hagerty questioning why Verizon released his phone records without informing him.

Verizon told Fox News Digital:

Federal law requires companies like Verizon to respond to grand jury subpoenas. We received a valid subpoena and a court order to keep it confidential. We weren't told why the information was requested or what the investigation was about.

Grassley and Johnson followed up with their own letter to Verizon and three other telecommunication companies demanding to be supplied with the same data that was provided to the FBI or special counsel Jack Smith. In addition, the senators expressed their belief that the records should have been privileged because they concerned the official constitutional duties of certifying the 2020 presidential election.

It seems like a real story — one that deserves the full attention of the press — but where are the special investigation teams at the New York Times and the Washington Post? What have you heard about this story on CBS, NBC, and ABC newscasts? Very little if anything. Certainly nothing in comparison to the coverage provided to Watergate.

Most recently, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Smith demanding a transcribed interview and documents along with communications related to his investigation of Trump. Well and good, but that interview will be conducted in secret, as were the interviews of Smith’s subordinates — one of whom, according to Jordan, “invoked the Fifth Amendment approximately 75 times.”

Photo by Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images

Time for Congress to step up

It is well past time for the Republican Congress to fulfill its promise to hold accountable those who weaponized the federal government against Trump and his allies. Press releases and secret interviews won’t do the job. We need public televised hearings, with witnesses ranging from members of the J6 committee, including Kinzinger, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), and now-Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), to former FBI Director Christopher Wray and Jack Smith.

Would the legacy media networks cover it? Probably not, because as we all know by now, those outfits are still after Trump’s scalp, and they will only seek to discredit Jordan and the other congressional investigators who want to know the truth. That doesn’t mean Republicans should give up.

Watergate started as a one-day story about a botched break-in. But even without Woodward and Bernstein, the famous team of reporters from the Washington Post, the story would never have been kept quiet unless Senate Democrats and congressmen didn’t do their job.

Now it’s time for Jordan, Grassley, and Patel to do theirs.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

The Democrats’ convenient case of political amnesia

Joe Scarborough just rediscovered the Constitution.

On MSNBC, the “Morning Joe” co-host warned last week of the grave dangers of Donald Trump using government power against political enemies. Nodding journalists agreed. Scarborough cautioned that Trump and his team would face a “wicked cycle” of retaliation and retribution after leaving office if they pursued politically motivated prosecutions.

One problem: Democrats already did exactly that.

After years of weaponizing the law against Trump and his staff, the left now pleads for “restraint.” With Letitia James, James Comey, and John Bolton all facing charges, the same people who cheered every politically driven indictment now claim to fear the abuse of justice. They are suffering from sudden, selective, highly political amnesia.

Faced with the blowback they earned, Democrats are pleading for a truce they don’t intend to honor.

The classic argument against weaponizing state power goes like this: Don’t use the system against your opponents, because one day your opponents will use it against you. It’s a reasonable principle — assuming both sides still share the same rules. But once one side has crossed the line, the warning loses its force. You can’t tell your enemy not to fight back while you’re still swinging.

For decades, liberals held conservatives in check by preaching against escalation. Republicans, as the self-styled party of small government, were inclined to agree. They saw the use of political power itself as dangerous, so the threat of mutual destruction kept them compliant. But that restraint vanished the moment Democrats arrested protesters, jailed administration officials, and prosecuted a president they impeached not once but twice.

Warnings against escalation work only while both sides respect the boundary. Once the first blow lands, the only way to restore order is to make the aggressor regret crossing the line. Like a street fight, it’s not easy to stop mid-swing. The longer it continues, the less likely anyone is to walk away peacefully.

Democrats justified their abuse of power with the same excuse they use for everything: Trump is different. He’s a “unique threat,” a proto-dictator, the embodiment of every dark impulse in Middle America. The system, they insisted, had to “make an example” of him to save democracy. Somewhere deep down, they knew they were opening Pandora’s box. They just didn’t think they’d ever have to live with the consequences.

Now they’re living with them.

Progressives can sense the danger but won’t admit it. Having normalized political prosecutions, they’re trying to erase the record. They pretend the last eight years never happened — that Trump wasn’t convicted on a stack of bogus charges, that administration officials weren’t arrested, that meme-makers and protesters weren’t jailed.

“Be careful about jailing your political opponents — they might jail you.”

That warning rings hollow when your political friends and allies have already gone to prison.

Democrats’ gamble seemed safe because they assumed Republicans would never retaliate. They counted on the party’s traditional cowardice. And for years, they were right. The GOP has rarely shown the will to wield power even when it wins elections.

But Donald Trump is not a typical Republican. He doesn’t forgive, he doesn’t forget, and he really doesn’t like to lose. If you give him the chance to settle the score, he will.

Even now, as the political pendulum swings against them, Democrats have learned nothing. They insist that every prosecution of Trump was legitimate and every case against their own is tyranny. Their warnings about “political retribution” sound empty because they are. The reckoning they unleashed was inevitable.

mediaphotos via iStock/Getty Images

They disturbed the equilibrium. Now the balance returns.

Deprived of moral credibility and electoral power, the left is turning to the only weapon it has left — violence. Having lost the White House, progressives no longer believe in the system they once claimed to defend. They spent years calling Trump “Hitler,” his voters “Nazis,” and his administration “fascist.” When you’ve already declared your opponents subhuman, how do you climb down from that?

You don’t. You take to the streets.

The rhetoric has reached its natural conclusion. If Trump is Hitler and the country re-elected Hitler, then democracy itself is illegitimate. By that logic, terrorism isn’t a crime — it’s justice. And that’s exactly where the left is headed.

The party that claimed to fear tyranny created the conditions for it. The people who warned of political persecution perfected the art. Now, faced with the blowback they earned, Democrats are pleading for a truce they don’t intend to honor.

They wanted a world without restraint. They got it.

The government finally uses the FACE Act on real thugs, not praying grandmas

In 1994, 17 Senate Republicans — including Mitch McConnell — lined up behind the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. They thought they were cutting a clever deal: In exchange for criminalizing anti-abortion protesters outside clinics, the law would also apply to anyone blocking access to churches.

Like every “bipartisan compromise,” the results were anything but balanced. For decades, pro-life activists — grandmothers singing hymns, young people praying on sidewalks — faced years in prison for nonviolent protest. Meanwhile, not a single violent leftist or Islamist was prosecuted under the FACE Act for harassing or assaulting people of faith.

Mitch McConnell and company signed on to the FACE Act thinking they were being clever and instead saddled conservatives with decades of one-sided prosecutions.

Until last week.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, under Harmeet Dhillon, filed civil charges against two radical groups — the Party for Socialism and Liberation and American Muslims for Palestine — along with six individuals. Their crime: violently blocking Jewish worshippers from entering Congregation Ohr Torah in West Orange, New Jersey.

A mob at the synagogue

In November 2024, about 50 agitators linked arms outside the synagogue, blasting bullhorns and physically charging congregants. Several Jews were attacked.

New Jersey authorities, true to form, looked the other way. In fact, the Essex County prosecutor charged two congregants — including one who fought to defend a 65-year-old man being choked unconscious — with aggravated assault and bias intimidation. Not one of the attackers was indicted.

The message was clear: When radical Islamists or communists attack Jews, the state shrugs. Imagine the reverse — 50 Christians or Jews storming a mosque. Washington would have treated it like January 6 all over again.

This time, the Justice Department did not look away. The government’s civil complaint details how defendant Altaf Sharif broke through a police line, blocked worshippers, and used a vuvuzela as a weapon, blasting it into a man’s ear to cause permanent hearing loss. He then grabbed another congregant by the throat, placed him in a chokehold, and tackled him down a hill — all while screaming anti-Semitic slurs.

The kicker: The congregant who intervened to save the victim was indicted by local prosecutors, while Sharif skated free. That’s blue-state Jim Crow in favor of Islamic radicals.

AMP’s terrorist roots

American Muslims for Palestine, one of the groups charged, is no harmless civic association. It is the successor to the Holy Land Foundation, Hamas’ old fundraising arm in the United States. When the Holy Land Foundation was forced to pay $156 million to a terror victim’s family, AMP was born in its place.

As the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals noted in 2021, AMP inherited its leadership, its conferences, and its mission. In other words, Hamas simply changed its letterhead.

The Islamic-communist axis

This case exposes a dangerous reality: Radical Islamists and communists are not just funding terror abroad; they are carrying it out here at home. That is why President Trump must follow through on his pledge to formally designate both the Muslim Brotherhood and Antifa as terrorist organizations.

Photo by Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images

And it is why state attorneys general should continue investigating the “charitable” and “civic” groups that serve as their domestic cover. Just two weeks ago, a Virginia judge found AMP in contempt for failing to comply with an order from Attorney General Jason Miyares requiring the group to hand over documents related to terror finance.

Using a bad law for the right reasons

The FACE Act remains a terrible law. It was written to criminalize prayer and hymn-singing, not protect churches. It should be repealed.

But if old ladies can face 10 years in prison for praying outside Planned Parenthood, then yes — the law must be used against mobs who choke Jews outside synagogues. For once, the Justice Department is pointing the weapon in the right direction.

And let’s be clear: Republicans built this weapon and handed it to the left. McConnell and company signed on to the FACE Act thinking they were being clever and instead saddled conservatives with decades of one-sided prosecutions. If they want to show their repentance, they should join the fight now to repeal the law — or at the very least, stop pretending that “bipartisanship” ever serves our side.

From lawfare to ‘barfare’: Another way to target Trump allies

When Jeffrey Clark was tapped to lead the second Trump administration’s chief regulatory review office, it marked an astonishing redemption.

For years, congressional investigators and prosecutors had pursued the former Department of Justice official primarily over an unsent letter he drafted in support of President Donald Trump’s 2020 election challenge, calling for Georgia to consider launching a last-minute legislative session to review its results.

The president’s adversaries who weaponized the justice system through ‘lawfare’ have opened another front in their war through ‘barfare.’

Trump’s return to power has not ended Clark’s troubles. Washington, D.C.’s legal disciplinary authority has recommended that he be disbarred over his conduct from five years ago. Lawyers for Clark claim that the effort seeks to punish “thought crime” regarding their client’s belief in potential irregularities in an election that authorities declared devoid of widespread fraud.

Even as Trump’s critics now claim he is engaging in retribution against a wide range of past assailants, including former FBI Director James Comey, his supporters say Clark’s case reveals there is an ongoing, politically motivated push to punish MAGA advocates. In their telling, the president’s adversaries who weaponized the justice system through “lawfare” have opened another front in their war through “barfare.”

The rise of barfare

Since 2020, Democrat officials and progressive groups established specifically to target conservatives have lodged bar complaints against dozens of Trump-allied attorneys such as Clark. While supporters of these efforts say they are trying to hold officeholders and advocates accountable for actions that betrayed the canons of ethical legal practice, conservative opponents say the push to punish their political foes via bar complaints, often brought in politically partisan jurisdictions, threatens not only the ability of presidents to receive counsel but the American legal system itself.

“The most politicized situations are the ones where the bar should be the most reticent” to consider punishing attorneys over their work, James Burnham, former DOGE general counsel, said during a recent panel discussion on alleged bar weaponization hosted by the right-leaning Federalist Society. “That’s when lawyers are supposed to be the most creative and the most aggressive. ... But it’s not the kind of situation where we want lawyers to be afraid to even engage in advocacy in the first place.”

The Clark complaint concerned his activities in the final weeks of the first Trump administration, while he served in part as acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Division. Clark, an environmental and regulatory lawyer by background, believed that there were potentially election-altering fraud or irregularities in Georgia and other states, requiring resolution before the fast-approaching January 6, 2021, election certification date.

In response, he wrote a draft letter dated Dec. 28 and addressed to Georgia leaders recommending that the state legislature convene a special session to further probe potential irregularities and take remedial steps as necessary if they impacted the election outcome.

Clark circulated the letter to acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, who were responsible for probing 2020 election issues. Rosen and Donoghue disagreed with its thrust — especially the suggestion that there was potentially election-altering fraud — and declined to sign and deliver it.

Trump gets wind

As Trump’s election challenge proceeded, he got wind of Clark’s views. Apparently finding an ally, the president floated the idea of making Clark acting attorney general. Clark allegedly offered to decline any such appointment if Rosen would sign off on the letter, the then-Democrat-led Senate Judiciary Committee would later report — an allegation Clark would flatly deny. In opposition to a possible appointment, Clark’s superiors convened a Jan. 3, 2021, meeting with Trump and other officials, at which several said they and other colleagues would resign en masse should the president elevate him.

Ultimately, the president backed off, and Clark’s letter was consigned to the dustbin of history — until one or several ex-Trump administration officials leaked word of its existence and contents to the New York Times. The Times wrote about Clark’s efforts in a Jan. 22 article titled “Trump and Justice Dept. Lawyer Said to Have Plotted to Oust Acting Attorney General.”

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A flurry of probes pertaining to the president’s election challenge followed. Clark — a Harvard- and Georgetown-educated litigator who had spent the bulk of his career as a partner at white-shoe law firm Kirkland & Ellis — spent the next several years facing the scrutiny of congressional committees, including the Democrat-dominated Jan. 6 Committee, and prosecution in cases brought by Fani Willis in Fulton County, Georgia, and special counsel Jack Smith in Washington, D.C. In June 2022, he was forced to wait outside his home in his undergarments while federal investigators searched his suburban Virginia residence, seizing electronic devices in connection with their January 6 probe.

In July 2022, in response to a complaint lodged by the then-Democrat-led Senate, the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility charged Clark with violating the D.C. Rules of Professional Conduct. It accused him of engaging “in conduct involving dishonesty” by drafting the letter the board alleged contained false statements and for “attempt[ing] to engage in conduct that would seriously interfere with the administration of justice.”

The allegations against Clark rested in part on the argument that because his superiors disagreed with his views on potential election fraud in Georgia, Clark’s assertions in the letter were fraudulent.

Unprecedented case

In his defense, Clark invoked a slew of privileges and raised myriad procedural and substantive arguments — including that the local D.C. disciplinary board lacked jurisdiction over Clark’s conduct as a federal lawyer providing counsel to the president; that Clark enjoyed immunity from liability while rendering advice to the president; and that the purported false statements were merely proposed Justice Department positions for consideration by superiors — positions largely consistent, as his lawyers noted, with those raised by several U.S. Supreme Court justices and nearly 20 state attorneys general.

Clark’s lawyers argued during his trial that “no one has ever been charged by the D.C. Bar with attempted dishonesty in a draft letter that recommended a change in policy or position where that document was not approved and never even left the office.”

His lawyers made the point that sanctioning him for such conduct would lead to a limitless array of disciplinary actions against attorneys over private or internal deliberations on behalf of clients should they hold contrarian views.

Government “lawyers will be afraid to give their candid opinions for fear of losing their careers. Likewise, lawyers will not join government for the same reason,” Harry MacDougald, one of Clark’s lawyers, told RealClearInvestigations.

On July 31, 2025, despite acknowledging “that there are no factually comparable prior disciplinary cases,” a majority of the board recommended that Clark be disbarred. While rejecting Clark’s arguments, including that he was protected as a government lawyer giving advice, the nine-member board said that the charges against him “focus on the truthfulness of the factual assertions” in the letter that he authored.

Those who believe the bar is being weaponized against those who hold disfavored viewpoints — namely on the right — say corrective action is required.

Although Clark’s superiors had testified that Clark had “sincere personal concerns” regarding the integrity of the election, the board said, “they also agreed that the Justice Department had not identified potentially outcome-determinative issues in Georgia or other states.”

Therefore, his continued efforts to press officials to send the letter “constituted an attempt to make intentionally false statements about the results of the Justice Department’s investigation,” the board said.

The tribunal added that Clark “should be disbarred as a consequence and to send a message to the rest of the Bar and to the public that this behavior will not be tolerated.”

The disbarment decision is pending before the D.C. Court of Appeals, which has final say over such decisions in the nation’s capital.

Claims of unequal justice

In an August 2025 filing with the appeals court obtained by RealClearInvestigations detailing Clark’s exceptions to the board’s order, his counsel contrasted the disciplinary tribunal’s treatment of the Justice Department lawyer with that of FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith. He received just a one-year suspension for doctoring a document submitted to the FISA Court supporting the government’s FISA warrant application that enabled surveillance of Trump adviser Carter Page.

“The disciplinary process in the D.C. bar is radically disparate according to the political affiliation and views of the respondent attorney,” Clark’s lawyers charged.

A preliminary review of public records indicates that a majority of the board that made the Clark recommendation was composed of registered Democrats, individuals who had contributed to Democrat candidates, or public advocates of progressive causes. Only one board member was publicly identifiable as a Republican.

The board recommendation followed a trial before a separate three-member panel, at least two of whom were registered Democrats and had contributed financially to Democratic Party candidates, public records show.

The Office of Disciplinary Counsel, which handed down the original charges against Clark and effectively prosecutes such cases, is also headed by an attorney, Hamilton P. Fox III, who, according to public records, is a Democrat.

“D.C. voted Democrat more than 90% against Trump all three times he was on the ballot — the most lopsided margin in the country to have [its] own Bar,” MacDougald noted on X in a response to the disciplinary authority’s decision.

Many prominent Republicans also took issue with the actions of Trump and his confidants in challenging the 2020 election. This includes the sole publicly identifiable Republican board member, Margaret M. Cassidy, a member of the Republican National Lawyers Association who concurred in the recommendation that Clark be disbarred.

After the panel handed down its recommendation to disbar Clark, MacDougald told RealClearInvestigations that “the reason Jeff has been singled out is lawfare — straight-up political persecution.”

With the Clark disbarment decision now in the hands of federal judges, the lawyer may have just gotten a big boost. On Sept. 25, three former attorneys general submitted an amicus brief in support of his case. William P. Barr, Jeff Sessions, and Michael Mukasey — all Republican-appointed prosecutors, but not all supportive of Clark’s conduct — echoed his arguments in writing.

“The District of Columbia Board on Professional Responsibility … has no business — indeed, no authority whatever — in policing internal deliberative discussions and documents exchanged within the federal Executive Branch for containing purportedly ‘dishonest’ (yet somehow also ‘sincere’) ideas or assertions,” they said.

They added that “immunity for top advisors is necessary to ensure that the President may receive candid and necessary advice prior to acting.”

“Although we are not persuaded by Mr. Clark’s proposed legal strategy, and former Attorney General Barr has publicly criticized it in no uncertain terms, disbarring or otherwise disciplining Mr. Clark for those actions would set a dangerous precedent that would significantly interfere with Executive Branch functions,” while sending a “biting chill throughout the federal government,” they concluded.

Not alone in the dock

On the same July day that the D.C. tribunal formally made its recommendation to disbar Clark, three current Justice Department officials were hit with ethics complaints lodged with the bar disciplinary authorities where they are licensed to practice.

The parallel complaints — targeting Deputy Assistant Attorney General Eric Hamilton, special counsel Brad Rosenberg, and trial attorney Liam Holland — allege they made “intentionally and materially misleading statements” in litigation over the Trump administration’s attempt to curtail the work of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The complaints note that presiding Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the D.C. District Court upbraided the lawyers over certain representations made to the court.

Several ex-Justice Department staff members have defended their colleagues, writing that “our former colleagues took immediate steps to correct the record in response to plaintiffs’ evidence,” while noting that “leaving any such inquiry in the first instance to the court and the parties, who have intimate knowledge of the facts and circumstances that state bar authorities lack, would be a far better approach for determining whether sanctionable misconduct occurred.”

The Justice Department did not respond to RealClearInvestigations’ inquiries regarding the complaints against its employees.

The three complaints were filed by the Legal Accountability Center. The advocacy group’s executive director, Michael J. Teter, has said its efforts are aimed at “going on offense in defense of democracy” at a time when “the rule of law is under direct assault.” The organization maintains it is merely seeking to hold to account “attorneys who abuse their power and violate professional conduct rules.” Its financials are unavailable. A broken web link appears to tie the nonprofit to progressive tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund.

Among the Legal Accountability Center’s initiatives is the 65 Project. The “dark money” outfit was launched in the wake of the 2020 election to “shame” lawyers who represented Trump in some 65 lawsuits challenging the election and “make them toxic in their communities and their firms,” according to Democrat operative David Brock, founder of the partisan watchdog group Media Matters, who is one of the group’s advisers.

Billed as a bipartisan effort, the 65 Project is led by staffers with ties to Democratic Party campaigns and causes. Teter, who also serves as its managing director, has worked for candidates including John Kerry and counseled the liberal American Civil Liberties Union. Its senior adviser, Melissa Moss, is a former Clinton appointee and finance director of the Democratic National Committee.

The 65 Project was originally run through another nonprofit, Moss’ Law Works, which achieved notoriety for hosting a stage adaptation of the Mueller Report performed by Hollywood stars. According to archived websites, the 65 Project was sponsored by the Franklin Education Forum, a supporter of progressive causes previously chaired by Brock and a grant recipient of Omidyar’s Democracy Fund.

Neither Teter nor the organizations with which he is affiliated responded to RealClearInvestigations’ inquiries in connection with this story.

Justice or harassment?

More senior officials, as well, have gotten hit with bar complaints in recent months. In September, the center filed a bar complaint against Deputy U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, claiming, among other things, a conflict of interest in his interviewing of Ghislaine Maxwell. It also filed a complaint against Ed Martin, the former U.S. attorney for D.C., asserting he had abused his position and conduct rules by engaging in politically motivated investigations, among other matters.

Martin, now a Justice Department special attorney, also faces scrutiny from the D.C. disciplinary body. During his tenure as U.S. attorney, he had requested information of that office, citing in part the Clark case, indicating his concern that it might be biased against conservatives.

Elected Republican officials around the country, including Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen and Lawrence VanDyke, the former solicitor general in Montana and Nevada and a current judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, have also been targeted.

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Judging by their disposition, most of these accusations were of dubious legal merit. A recent analysis of nearly 80 complaints filed by third-party organizations like the 65 Project against attorneys who represented Trump or related causes — many of them Republican state attorneys general — found that in only three instances did attorneys face public discipline.

The conservative group America First Legal filed a bar complaint against Teter last fall for his 65 Project work, claiming he was abusing the bar disciplinary process in targeting attorneys associated with Trump. It is unclear whether the Utah Bar, which received the complaint, has taken any action.

De-weaponizing the bar discipline process

Those who believe the bar is being weaponized against those who hold disfavored viewpoints — namely on the right — say corrective action is required. They assert that beyond pursuing arguments regarding the immunity that federal lawyers ought to have from state and local authorities, there is a First Amendment right to viewpoint diversity that quasi-governmental entities, such as state bar associations, are currently violating.

Some, such as Michael Francisco, an appellate litigator who formerly clerked for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, believe that “attorneys are not capable of regulating themselves.”

America First Legal’s Gene Hamilton echoed these remarks, adding during the Federalist Society panel: “I really do think that each of the state bar associations need to take a really hard look at the rules and to modify them to prevent abuses of the disciplinary process.”

Clark’s lawyer, MacDougald, told RealClearInvestigations that ultimately, lawyers advocating for Republican and Democrat causes will be losers if the weaponization of discipline doesn’t end.

“Lawyers have a job to do and should be allowed to do it,” he said. “State legislatures and state bar associations must reform themselves and commit to political neutrality, or they will destroy themselves and the profession.”

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.

Peter Navarro’s book is a warning: If they can jail me, they can jail you

Blaze News readers know the script: agencies weaponized, media complicit, ordinary people crushed in the gears. “I Went to Prison So You Won’t Have To” follows that script with raw detail and a court docket.

Peter Navarro, once a senior economic adviser to President Trump, begins his account with a boarding-gate arrest worthy of a thriller: five armed agents, leg irons, and a cell once used for John Hinckley. He ends with a defiant claim — that a man can emerge unbroken after 120 days in what he calls a “lawfare gulag.”

The new gulag is not only a place. It is a habit. Navarro’s account shows how to break it.

Navarro doesn’t argue that America has become the USSR. His point is sharper: Bureaucratic impunity and political prosecutions can turn any free nation into a maze of petty tyrannies.

Kafka behind razor wire

The book’s middle chapters read like Kafka with a side of commissary ramen. Navarro describes a prison “camp” wrapped in razor wire, a dentist prescribing sunscreen the commissary didn’t sell, and commissary prices triple those at Target. He recounts a sudden Special Investigative Services raid that smashed showers, flooded the dorm, and locked inmates down. A First Step Act loophole denied him time credits because his sentence included no supervised release.

Absurdities pile up, but the lesson is deadly serious. Systems that multiply rules and shrug at conflicts breed injustice.

Executive privilege on trial

Navarro anchors his refusal to testify in claims of executive privilege and Department of Justice-recognized testimonial immunity for senior presidential advisers. He dismisses the Jan. 6 committee as a political theater project designed to “expose for exposure’s sake.” A White House letter, he says, purported to waive a predecessor’s privilege — something he insists an incumbent president should not have the power to do.

Skeptics may doubt Navarro’s reading. But the incentive structure he highlights cannot be ignored. If an incumbent president can extinguish a former president’s privilege at will, and if Congress can punish disputes it should legislate, then the machinery exists to criminalize losing an election.

That is not a conspiracy theory — it is a theory of incentives. And it is what Navarro says happened to him after the Biden administration took power.

Survival notes

Blaze News readers will recognize the moral of Navarro’s ordeal. He refused to plead the Fifth — not because it wouldn’t have helped, but because, as he writes, he would not validate a process he viewed as punitive. He catalogs the system’s manipulations: “Potemkin” cleanups before the media arrived, choreographed delays that wiped out visiting hours, petty flexes of power designed to make people small.

Photo by Rebecca Noble/Getty Images

Americans long believed political imprisonment couldn’t happen here. Navarro insists it already has.

Why the book matters

Why should “I Went To Prison So You Won’t Have To” sit on every Blaze News reader’s shelf? Because it doubles as a manual. It maps how citizens can be dragged through the gears: investigations framed as oversight but prosecuted like warfare, constitutional disputes treated as crimes, prison terms leveraged as warnings to Trump and the MAGA movement.

The book’s title is both a promise and a dare. Learn the tactics. Resist them peacefully, locally, lawfully. Read it. Argue with it. Mark the pages that disturb you. And above all — stay awake.

The new gulag is not only a place. It is a habit. Navarro’s account shows how to break it.

The New York Times rewrites history while Jan. 6 families pay the price

The New York Times recently published an article attempting to recast the events of Jan. 6, 2021, through the lens of prosecutors who lost their jobs following President Donald Trump's return to the Oval Office. The piece depicts these lawyers as martyrs in a political purge, forced to leave behind diplomas and personal items as though they were casualties of injustice.

Yet this framing fundamentally ignores the real devastation that flowed from the government's handling of January 6: families destroyed, children traumatized, and ordinary Americans subjected to years of aggressive and politicized prosecution.

Prosecutors were not martyrs. They were the instruments of a system that made martyrs out of ordinary citizens.

Those of us who have worked directly with these families have seen firsthand the long-term impact of the Department of Justice's unprecedented approach. History cannot be rewritten to cast prosecutors as victims while erasing the lives they targeted from public memory.

The forgotten victims

The most overlooked victims of January 6 have been the children of defendants. These young people endured traumatic government raids that remain etched into their memories. Many remember predawn operations when flash-bang devices exploded inside their homes.

They recall doors being battered down, glass shattering, and heavily armed agents entering their bedrooms. They watched their mothers cry, attempting to hold families together as fathers were taken away in handcuffs. In certain cases, both parents were removed, leaving children to wonder if they would ever see their families whole again.

This was not a foreign dictatorship. It happened in the United States. These tactics, carried out against families who posed no threat, inflicted deep and lasting harm on innocent children. Yet the prosecutors who initiated these cases are now presented as political casualties.

That is an inversion of reality. They were not martyrs. They were the instruments of a system that made martyrs out of ordinary citizens.

The tragedy of Matthew Perna

The case of Matthew Perna illustrates the human toll of this prosecutorial overreach. Perna entered the Capitol, recorded video, and left without committing violence or destruction. Nevertheless, prosecutors pursued severe charges against him, including the application of a "terrorism enhancement" that would have drastically increased his sentence. Media outlets amplified the narrative, branding him as a threat to the nation.

The weight of this combined persecution proved too much for Perna. Before sentencing, he took his own life. His story exposes both the cruelty of the government’s approach and the complicity of media institutions that reinforced it. Today, prosecutors involved in such cases seek sympathy for their professional losses, while families like Matthew's continue to grieve irreparable personal losses.

An egregious double standard

The broader context highlights a political double standard. Democrats describe January 6 as one of the darkest days in American history. Yet the riots of 2020 — federal courthouses attacked, businesses destroyed, police assaulted, communities set ablaze — are routinely called “mostly peaceful.”

The murder of retired police captain David Dorn, killed on livestream while defending his community, generated little lasting outrage. Entire cities endured months of chaos, but few faced consequences comparable to the sweeping prosecutions unleashed against January 6 participants. Where were the terrorism enhancements then? Where were the years-long investigations, the solitary confinement, the relentless media coverage?

The truth is straightforward: Unrest associated with the political left is minimized or excused. Protests involving Trump supporters are magnified into terrorism. This inconsistency erodes public trust in equal justice under the law.

A critical course correction

Against this backdrop, the decisions by Attorney General Pam Bondi and special prosecutor Ed Martin should be recognized for what they are: efforts to restore fairness to a corrupt system. Bondi took decisive action to remove prosecutors who had shown an inability to separate justice from politics.

Martin, who himself witnessed the events of January 6, understood that Americans cannot be criminalized simply for supporting a particular political movement. His leadership in ending the ongoing persecution of defendants brought accountability to those who had turned prosecutions into a political weapon.

The New York Times calls this a "purge." A more accurate description is a course correction — an attempt to re-establish integrity in the Department of Justice and reaffirm that justice must not serve partisan ends.

The true victims of January 6 were not federal prosecutors. They were the more than 1,500 Americans caught in the dragnet of politicized charges. They were the families left bankrupt and broken. They were the children who still wake with nightmares of flash-bangs and broken doors. They were people like Matthew Perna, who lost hope under the crushing weight of unjust treatment.

They were also President Trump, the first lady, their son Barron, and allies who endured years of politicized investigations, predawn raids, tanks in neighborhoods, and heavily armed SWAT teams at their doors. These were the consequences of a government determined to use its vast powers not against criminals, but against political opponents.

Setting history straight

We must ensure that these truths are not forgotten. We cannot allow prosecutors to rewrite history by presenting themselves as martyrs. We cannot permit the suffering of families, the cries of children separated from their parents, or the suicide of Matthew Perna to be erased from public consciousness.

Photo by Suspended Image via Getty Images

Justice in America must return to its foundational principle: fairness for all citizens, regardless of political affiliation. Until that principle is restored, we must continue to speak out and to stand with those whose lives were devastated by the misuse of government power.

This is not about revenge. It is about truth. It is not about politics. It is about families. And it is not about power. It is about ensuring that no American child ever again experiences the terror of waking to flash-bangs, shattered doors, and the loss of their parents over politics.

Biden freed killers with a pen he didn’t even hold

American politics still has the power to shock. Tuesday delivered one of those moments — the Oversight Project agreed with Joe Biden’s weaponized Department of Justice. That’s rarer than a blue lobster.

The issue is autopen pardons. Since March, we’ve exposed how Biden’s White House used an autopen — not the president himself — to issue thousands of pardons and commutations. The New York Times first dismissed the story as a “conspiracy theory,” only to later admit that Biden himself confirmed the scheme. Biden said he set “broad categories,” while staff picked names.

Trump has the chance to prove that the rule of law — not the autopen — governs the United States.

That delegation is flatly illegal. Only the president has the constitutional authority to grant clemency. Now we have proof that even inside Biden’s Justice Department, top officials knew it was illegal.

The smoking gun?

Ed Martin, head of the Justice Department’s Weaponization Working Group and the Trump administration’s pardon attorney, unearthed an email from Associate Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer dated January 18, 2025 — the morning after Biden’s clemency spree.

On January 17, Biden’s White House blasted out commutations for roughly 2,500 federal inmates. Biden bragged in a statement, “I have now issued more individual pardons and commutations than any president in U.S. history. I am proud of my record on clemency and will continue to review additional commutations and pardons.”

But he hadn’t personally reviewed a single case.

Weinsheimer warned his colleagues that the warrants didn’t describe specific offenses, which made them legally problematic. “Because no offenses have been described to the Department from the President, the commutations do not take effect,” he wrote, as one possible outcome of the problematic pardons. Without essential fixes, Weinsheimer advised, the pardons and commutations might not hold up. He also urged the White House to stop calling the inmates “non-violent drug offenders” because “it is untrue or at least misleading.”

He was right. These weren’t harmless marijuana cases. Biden’s “non-violent” list included cop-killers, witness-killers, crack kingpins who ordered shootings, and a man who torched an informant with a butane flame. One even shot a sleeping child. These are the criminals Biden’s autopen set loose.

Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Trump’s move

President Trump already declared these autopen pardons “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT.” He has cited them repeatedly, launched investigations, and signed an executive order. The Oversight Project has now handed him the easiest test case imaginable: Biden’s own DOJ admitted the warrants were defective.

Trump should order Attorney General Pam Bondi to rearrest the released criminals and restore the full sentences of those still in custody. The legal and moral case is open-and-shut.

Why it matters

The America First coalition came to Washington on two promises: mass deportations and real accountability. Ed Martin’s work has cracked open the door to deliver on the second. The longer the administration waits, the more it risks looking like Biden’s lawlessness will stand.

Biden abused the pardon power with a pen he didn’t even hold. Trump now has the chance to prove that the rule of law — not the autopen — governs the United States.

Trust the FBI? Not until it tells us about Thomas Crooks

During a press conference last week in the Oval Office, a reporter asked President Trump how it’s possible that we know more about a couple from a Coldplay concert just hours after their extramarital affair was exposed on social media than we do about Thomas Crooks more than a year after he came within centimeters of killing the president in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Despite thousands of interviews and hundreds of hours combing through photos and videos, the public still knows very little about the would-be assassin. Not his motive, not how he gained access to a nearby rooftop, not even how he built two remote-detonated bombs he ultimately never used.

Until any of us are given reason to believe transparency in any particular case is harmful to the constituents we serve, our duty is to demand it at every juncture.

Trump responded that he believed the FBI when the organization told him investigators didn’t find anything, clarifying that his conversation was with the “new” FBI leadership, not the corrupt organization led by James Comey or Christopher Wray — leadership he would never trust.

Old rot, new clothes

Though Trump has placed widely trusted figures within the FBI, six months is hardly enough time to place faith in the same institution that has been weaponized against him for nearly a decade. Institutional rot undoubtedly runs deeper than its top brass.

The ambiguity surrounding Trump’s failed assassin should be met with absolute scrutiny. The lack of information about Crooks is not an anomaly — it’s the signature of a bureaucracy that hoards information from the public under the pretext of “national security” or “ongoing investigations.”

This culture of concealment has infected Washington for decades. Bureaucratic elites, along with their stakeholders, have presumed the authority to decide what the public should know — if anything — and release only information that suits their agenda.

Americans have been promised transparency and accountability across generations. They almost never get it. Such entrenched power calls into question who truly holds the keys to power in Washington.

A history of ambiguity

Consider the John F. Kennedy assassination. For more than 60 years, the public has doubted the official narrative pushed by the intelligence community — and rightly so. Just days after President Kennedy’s funeral, a Gallup poll revealed that a majority of Americans didn’t believe that the shooter acted alone. The lack of transparency that still persists decades following the case has only fueled speculation.

In one of my first hearings on the Task Force on Declassification of Federal Secrets, experts confirmed what President Trump’s March declassification made undeniable: The CIA repeatedly lied to Congress about its ties to Lee Harvey Oswald.

Just days ago, the agency tacitly admitted that its 1963 testimony — claiming to have had only limited knowledge of Oswald — was a lie. Newly released documents show that the CIA’s liaison to Congress, George Joannides, not only concealed an “off-the-books” anti-Castro operation that had interacted with Oswald, but he also earned the CIA’s Career Intelligence Medal for stonewalling Congress’ investigation.

For nearly 62 years, a bureaucratic agency commissioned by Congress, funded by Congress, and subject to congressional oversight lied to Congress. And not only did it get away with it, it was rewarded.

CIA gone rogue

If the body that created the CIA can’t hold the agency accountable, who can?

Not even the executive branch has succeeded. Republican and Democratic presidents alike have failed to force full compliance with the 1992 JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. Under Trump’s first term, the public was given the familiar excuse from the intel community: “It’s a national security concern.”

Do the American people have to wait six decades — and for all involved to be long dead — before knowing the truth about what their supposed representative government has done? Who decides when and what we get to know? If not the people, if not Congress, if not the president — then who?

Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

This is why the Jeffrey Epstein case matters to the public and why it can’t be swept under the rug. The “files” and our inability to even learn who was involved in the crimes that placed Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell in jail are a testament to the ugly truth: In the words of James Madison, “A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both.”

Transparency is our duty

The American people have become several steps removed from the decision-making power in Washington. Information and the means of acquiring it — and thereby, the ability to even know whom to hold accountable — have been almost entirely lost. Perhaps our government is, as Madison asserts, “a prologue to a farce or a tragedy.”

As members of Congress, it is our duty to do everything in our power to uphold the Constitution and deliver to the American people the transparency that sustains trust in our democratic Republic. Until any of us are given reason to believe transparency in any particular case is harmful to the constituents we serve, our duty is to demand it at every juncture.