If the Justice Department won’t execute Trump’s orders, who’s in charge?



The wounds of Biden-era weaponization still ache. Many patriots still live with financial ruin, reputational damage, and cancellation campaigns stemming from the Biden-era Department of Justice. President Trump’s Department of Justice could do much more to make things right. It hasn’t.

Millions happily voted for Trump because he promised to de-weaponize government and restore election integrity. That mandate remains unfulfilled. He risks losing some of his strongest supporters, who may disengage on the country’s biggest fights — or sit out the midterms entirely — because they fear the cycle will repeat. We’re heading into another pivotal election season on a tilted field, without even fielding a full team.

Not everyone inside the Justice Department agrees with the president’s decision to issue these pardons — and that disagreement is showing up as deliberate drift.

Nothing illustrates this failure more clearly than the case of the 2020 contingent electors. To this day, some continue to face charges for assembling slates of electors contingent on ongoing fraud investigations or litigation in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. Preparing contingent slates for congressional consideration has long existed in American politics. The attempt by the Biden administration and allied prosecutors to treat a bipartisan practice dating back more than a century as criminal conduct represents weaponization at its purest.

In November, I wrote about the president’s historic pardons for individuals charged in state court for offenses tied to the 2020 election. A presidential pardon touching state proceedings is unusual, but the reasoning was straightforward: Conduct tied to a federal election implicated constitutionally protected activity, and the state prosecutions functioned as a cat’s paw for a broader, coordinated campaign. President Trump made the right call — legally, prudentially, and politically. “Leave no MAGA behind” should apply most of all to the people who took the greatest risks and paid the steepest price.

What happened next — or, more to the point, what didn’t — turned “unusual” into “bizarre.”

After the president issued the pardons late on a Sunday night in November 2025, the Department of Justice went silent. Outside of comments from pardon attorney Ed Martin, the department has said virtually nothing. When reporters asked for comment, the department even referred Axios back to the White House. In Washington, that translates to “not our problem.”

It should be their problem.

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Silence is bad enough. Inaction is worse. The government should be moving aggressively to shut down the remaining state proceedings and use the pardons as a lever to defeat prosecutions that collide with federal authority and constitutional protections. We know that approach can work because it already did: Shortly after the pardons, Georgia dropped its charges against President Trump, explicitly citing the complications the pardons created.

The more uncomfortable truth is that not everyone inside the Justice Department agrees with the president’s decision to issue these pardons — and that disagreement is showing up as deliberate drift.

We’ve seen the same dynamic elsewhere: President Trump declares Biden’s autopen commutations null and void, yet the government continues releasing violent felons under those questionable pardons. Lawyers can disagree. They cannot refuse to execute the president’s lawful directives.

If the Justice Department can’t deliver even basic follow-through on the low-hanging fruit, it becomes hard to believe it will ever deliver the more challenging outcomes. Over a year into the Trump administration, we should be talking about real accountability for weaponized actors and real relief for the people they targeted.

The accountability train needs to get back on track. The first step is simple: The Department of Justice should do what the president publicly ordered it to do.

If Congress can’t oversee the FBI, who can?



The Federal Bureau of Investigation remains a crime scene.

Recent reporting by John Solomon and Jerry Dunleavy adds more evidence that a once-vaunted law enforcement agency was used for overtly political purposes for nearly a decade, starting in 2016. Documents and interviews cited by Just the News describe four consecutive code-named countersurveillance operations that cast a dragnet around President Trump and his supporters.

The time for mean tweets and angry letters is over. If the republic matters, fundamental reform must happen now.

The files for these operations — Crossfire Hurricane, Round River, Plasmic Echo, and Arctic Frost — were reportedly tucked into “prohibited access” files, shielding them from routine disclosure and keeping them under the control of senior FBI leadership and those who knew where to look.

This reporting reopens a question Washington keeps trying to close: What does real FBI reform look like?

We are not dealing with a handful of discreet scandals. We are dealing with a pattern that was enabled by a systemically broken and corrupted agency. A scalpel won’t fix it. Only a sledgehammer will do — followed by a rebuild.

The fork in the road

The road to FBI reform is long, and the last year has been bumpy — with more than a few premature victory laps. This moment offers an opportunity to get the agenda back on track.

The fork in the road is simple: Continue with a piecemeal approach — or revive the demand for total accountability, not only for individuals but for the institution itself.

Yes, good people work there. That’s not the issue. The problem lies in the parts of the bureau most capable of using FBI authorities for political ends — federal public corruption, counterintelligence, and domestic terrorism — where ideological activism too often becomes a job requirement.

A decade-long pattern

Over the last 10 years, the FBI has engaged in an unbroken series of ideologically driven investigations targeting conservatives. That includes scorched-earth investigations of President Trump on the thinnest of pretexts — while, at the same time, the bureau appeared to show far less urgency toward well-documented questions involving the Biden family’s foreign-influence and money-trail allegations, including reports of millions of dollars routed to multiple Biden family members through a network of 20 shell companies.

The bureau also deviated from law, policy, and investigative procedure in ways that protected Hillary Clinton from the full consequences of her misconduct, while applying a very different standard to President Trump and those around him.

Worse, recent reporting suggests a sweeping, coordinated effort — more reminiscent of the old East German Stasi than a constitutional law enforcement agency — to suppress politically damaging evidence under laughable pretexts.

RELATED: The next big Supreme Court shift might not be abortion or guns

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Far beyond a single case

The pattern extends well beyond these investigations.

  • The FBI interfered in elections on a scale Americans had never seen.
  • The bureau helped censor First Amendment-protected speech at industrial scale.
  • FBI directors and senior officials routinely misled Congress.
  • The FBI stonewalled congressional oversight demands.
  • The bureau smeared peaceful dissenting groups — including faithful Catholics — as potential domestic extremists, as if disagreement with progressive orthodoxies amounts to a predisposition to violence.
  • The FBI routinely slow-walked or obstructed transparency obligations, including FOIA-driven document production.
  • The bureau benefited from a stable of media stenographers at legacy outlets whose livelihoods depend on illegal leaks and unchallenged talking points that reliably advance the same ideological narratives.
  • The FBI abused its authority in ways that look less like policing and more like intimidation: targeting families, punishing speech, and applying radically different enforcement standards depending on the target’s politics.

The FBI cannot fix itself

The FBI has not meaningfully corrected itself after repeated exposures. In case after case, the bureau offers the same ritual: Mistakes were made; things are not as bad as they look; reforms are under way; no one should worry. Then nothing changes.

One recent example says it all: A deputy assistant director of counterintelligence had the audacity to advise Congress that she had not read — or even been briefed on — the Durham report’s findings. That posture is not reform. It is contempt.

As of today, FBI senior leadership includes people who participated in these abuses or watched them unfold and did nothing. How many are now subverting efforts to expose the truth by slow-walking document production, limiting evidence releases, and dribbling out incomplete records?

The time for mean tweets and angry letters is over. If the republic matters, fundamental reform must happen now.

Start with the sacred cow

The first step is taking on the FBI’s most protected function: counterintelligence.

Israel’s Shin Bet and Britain’s MI5 offer an important contrast. Their governments separate intelligence collection from law enforcement power. Those agencies gather intelligence. They do not carry routine arrest and prosecution authority. That structural separation limits the risk of domestic spying on political dissidents and helps prevent the rise of an unaccountable secret-police state.

The FBI has repeatedly proven itself incapable of maintaining that boundary. It has refused congressional oversight, abused its powers, and used intelligence authorities to subvert a duly elected president. That cannot continue.

Reform means separating intelligence collection from domestic law enforcement. Strip the FBI of its counterintelligence function and reassign it to an intelligence agency that lacks routine police powers and is subject to tighter controls.

RELATED: Trump promised ‘retribution.’ Congress keeps funding the machine.

Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Reform that imposes consequences

This step should set the tone for what follows.

There must be prosecutions for civil rights violations committed under color of law. There must be large-scale reassignments for those involved — not only the shot-callers but the enabling middle management that kept the machinery running.

Transparency and oversight need a full overhaul. Selective briefings to a handful of congressional offices have become a substitute for systemic reform. That approach has trained the public to tune out. People can’t absorb yet another “shocking” revelation that produces nothing but hearings and headlines.

Instead, the government should dump documents directly to the public — at scale — so that independent investigators can mine them. What a few gatekeepers do now should be done by many. The oversight and FOIA machinery is broken by design, and bureaucrats use delay as a veto.

One example should alarm every American: the FBI’s cozy relationship with Netflix. If the country’s dominant cultural propaganda machine coordinated with federal law enforcement, the public has a right to know. Those documents should not be trapped in the decaying Hoover Building.

This won’t be easy. It was never supposed to be.

The first year has been rocky. Now comes the test: whether the people in charge will rediscover the courage to destroy what is broken — before it can be turned back against Americans again.

The next big Supreme Court shift might not be abortion or guns



Qualified immunity, a doctrine the Supreme Court created in 1967, bewilders ordinary citizens who run headlong into it after government officials trample their constitutional rights. In plain English, the doctrine often blocks lawsuits against officials unless a prior court decision “clearly established” that the specific conduct at issue violated the Constitution. That standard leaves many victims without a remedy and lets many constitutional wrongs go unanswered.

That is not right. The Constitution exists to protect individual rights, not to insulate officials who violate them from accountability.

Qualified immunity can turn constitutional protections into paper rights — recognized in theory, unavailable in practice.

Recent years have also supplied fresh reasons to question the doctrine’s scope. Abuses tied to the weaponization of law enforcement and the criminal justice system have come to light with unsettling regularity. Think of Crossfire Hurricane, where senior officials used a discredited dossier — commissioned by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and funded through political channels — to pursue surveillance warrants and to monitor an opposing campaign before and after the 2016 election.

Or consider Arctic Frost, the childishly named operation (Arctic Frost is a type of orange, as in “Orange Man Bad”) that targeted hundreds of Americans, including one of the co-authors (Eastman) and relied on sweeping demands for private communications and records in search of a predicate offense in hopes of derailing President Trump’s 2024 campaign.

Episodes like these, and others, zero in on a basic question: When government power crosses constitutional lines, who answers for it?

Qualified immunity often supplies the answer: nobody.

Now the Supreme Court appears to be taking an unusual look at the doctrine — at least if its recent handling of three qualified immunity petitions offers any clue.

What’s different this time

In prior years, the court has frequently disposed of qualified immunity petitions quickly, sometimes through summary action with no explanation. This term looks different. Three cases involving qualified immunity have sat on the court’s docket far longer than the usual pattern would suggest. The justices have repeatedly requested responses and, in several instances, called for lower-court records. The court has also rescheduled cases for conference after conference without issuing a decision.

That process does not prove the court plans to revisit the doctrine. But it does suggest heightened attention.

Case 1: Smith v. Scott

The petition for writ of certiorari in Smith v. Scott was filed nearly a year ago. The case arises from a tragic encounter that began as a call for help. A 65-year-old man contacted police because he believed intruders lurked outside his apartment. Officers arrived, found no intruders, and then attempted to handcuff him. The encounter escalated. Officers restrained him on the ground, and an officer allegedly applied pressure that impeded his breathing until he died.

Both the district court and the Ninth Circuit denied qualified immunity. The officers then asked the Supreme Court to intervene. The respondent (Scott’s estate) initially waived a response, which commonly happens in cert-stage litigation. The court did not let the waiver stand. It called for a response after the case’s first conference last May. After a later conference, the court requested the record. Since then, it has repeatedly relisted the petition — an astounding 13 times — without resolving it.

Case 2: Zorn v. Linton

Zorn v. Linton involves a protest at the Vermont State House. Demonstrators occupied the chamber floor to protest government policy. Most left when the building closed. Shela Linton stayed and refused to leave. Officers removed her using a rear wristlock. She sued, alleging unreasonable force that caused pain, injury, and trauma.

The district court granted qualified immunity. The Second Circuit reversed and denied qualified immunity. The petition reached the Supreme Court in September. Once again, the respondent waived a response, and once again the court requested one. The case then cycled through conference after conference before the court requested the lower-court record on February 27.

This case matters for another reason. Many qualified immunity disputes involve fast-moving encounters where officers make split-second judgments. This one involves an interaction with warnings, time, and repeated opportunities to comply. It tees up an issue courts often sidestep: the obligations citizens assume when they knowingly violate a lawful order and force officers to escalate to removal. Does a protester’s refusal to leave reduce the scope of what counts as “unreasonable” force, so long as officers use measured escalation? Put differently: Were Linton’s rights even violated?

Case 3: Villarreal v. Alaniz

Villarreal v. Alaniz sits at the intersection of qualified immunity and the First Amendment. Police arrested journalist Priscilla Villarreal under a state statute that barred solicitation of nonpublic information. The reporter argued that the arrest violated her First Amendment rights.

The procedural history highlights the doctrine’s power. The district court granted qualified immunity. A Fifth Circuit panel denied it. The full Fifth Circuit later granted it en banc. The Supreme Court vacated and remanded the decision for further consideration. The Fifth Circuit again granted immunity.

Judge Andrew Oldham, in a concurring opinion, made an observation that cuts to the heart of qualified immunity’s justification. Courts often defend the doctrine by pointing to the realities of policing: officers must act quickly, sometimes under threat, with incomplete information. Oldham questioned whether that rationale “makes sense” in a case involving time to find a statute, plan an arrest, consult counsel, and investigate facts. Under those circumstances, why should immunity hinge on whether a prior case matches the fact pattern with near-photographic precision?

The cert petition was filed last July. The Supreme Court requested a response in August. It later requested the record after multiple conferences.

What the Supreme Court might do next

No outsider can know what the justices plan. But these three cases, taken together, give the Supreme Court a menu of options.

The court could reinforce qualified immunity, especially in excessive-force cases, and use the term’s docket to signal more protection for officers facing a rising tide of litigation.

The court could narrow qualified immunity — particularly in cases where officials have time to deliberate, plan, and consult — because the “split-second decision” rationale does not apply.

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The court could also recalibrate the doctrine without overruling it: clarify what counts as “clearly established” law, tighten the inquiry, or distinguish between scenarios that demand rapid judgment and those that involve considered decisions.

In the abstract, “immunity from liability for violating rights” begins to resemble artificial judicial indemnification. Modern society does not grant that kind of blanket protection to most other professions. A surgeon, an engineer, or a corporate executive cannot avoid accountability because no prior case warned that the precise mistake at issue would cause harm. The law often holds them to general standards of care, not hyper-specific precedent.

Qualified immunity operates differently. It can turn constitutional protections into paper rights — recognized in theory, unavailable in practice.

Whatever the court’s destination, the road looks different this term. The extended consideration, repeated relists, and requests for records in multiple cases point to sustained attention. That alone marks a change.

If the court means to revisit qualified immunity, even in part, the consequences will ripple far beyond these three cases. Federal courts hear thousands of civil rights claims each year. The doctrine shapes whether citizens can vindicate constitutional rights at all.

At minimum, one conclusion now seems hard to avoid: The Supreme Court is looking closely. And when the court looks closely, doctrine can move significantly.

The GOP can’t ‘wield’ the administrative state without being corrupted by it



Many Americans have watched Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy “The Lord of the Rings.” And many have read J.R.R. Tolkien’s books. Some can quote whole passages and trace Tolkien’s deliberate references to the life of Christ and the horror of modern war.

Maybe House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) live in that camp. If not, they should.

The Republicans’ plan cannot be ‘use federal power while we have it, then trust the next guys.’

A crucial scene comes early in the saga. The council debates what to do with the One Ring, the ultimate source of power. Boromir makes an understandable, dangerous suggestion — a perfect expression of fallen man’s temptation: “Give Gondor the weapon of the enemy. Let us use it against him.”

Aragorn stops him with two sentences rooted in humility and truth: “You cannot wield it. None of us can.”

That is the lesson Republicans must learn now, while they still hold majorities.

Dismantle the machine, don’t borrow it

Many supporters of President Trump want Congress to act boldly. They also want something more important: They want Republicans to roll back the reach and scope of the federal government while they can. If the GOP refuses, Democrats will inherit the same machinery and use it without restraint. Not someday. Soon.

If you think I exaggerate by calling Democrats the enemy or warning that we are doomed, consider a recent message from the second-highest-ranking elected congressional Democrat in the country, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York. Jeffries posted a video of White House adviser Stephen Miller on X.com and wrote: “Donald Trump will leave office long before the five-year statute of limitations expires. You are hereby put on notice.”

Jeffries did not allege a crime. He did not explain what Miller did wrong. He did not argue facts or law. He issued a threat: We will punish you later because we can.

That is what Republicans keep forgetting. The federal government’s power does not idle in neutral. It exists to be used. If it remains in place, someone will use it — and progressives have already shown what they want to do with it.

Which raises the central point: Nobody can safely wield that power. Not congressional Republicans. Not any administration. The correct move is not to grab the weapon and promise better behavior. The correct move is to destroy the weapon.

Fraud stories shine a bright light

Start with something as basic as fraud.

Look at the unraveling of the Somali day-care scandal in Minnesota and the billions of stolen tax dollars. That story grew so large that it helped end Minnesota Democrat Gov. Tim Walz’s re-election ambitions. Yet the government did not uncover it.

Not the Government Accountability Office. Not the Congressional Budget Office. Not the Office of Management and Budget. Not House or Senate oversight committees. Not the IRS. Not the Small Business Administration. Not the armies of full-time staffers inside federal agencies reporting up to inspectors general whose job description exists for this very purpose.

All that government power — and it did nothing.

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The scandal came to light because of the tenacity of a 23-year-old guy with a camera. If the federal machine can miss fraud on that scale, imagine what else it misses.

Fraud saturates the system. Estimates run as high as $500 billion — roughly 7% of the $6.8 trillion federal budget. That budget still reflects COVID-era spending levels. In 2019, Washington spent $4.45 trillion. Why did we never return to pre-COVID levels?

Because money is power. And like Boromir, too many people convince themselves they can wield it.

Ethics are not enough

Energy policy shows the same temptation in real time.

My nonprofit organization, Power the Future, sent another letter to House and Senate oversight committees and to Attorney General Pam Bondi urging investigations into Biden’s energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm. In the final days of the Biden administration, Granholm awarded $100 billion in green-energy grants — more than the previous 15 years combined. Many recipients had previously supported her political campaigns.

Green money poured out of Washington through the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, which allocated $60 billion for “environmental justice” — a phrase so deliberately amorphous that it has no fixed meaning. Team Biden spent $1 trillion “going green,” a statistic Vice President Kamala Harris bragged about during her lone 2024 debate with Donald Trump.

That entire structure still stands.

Nothing prevents the current energy secretary, Chris Wright, from spending billions on his favorite projects except his ethics. I believe Wright has ethics in abundance. We should feel grateful. But one man’s ethics do not qualify as a system of government.

The next secretary could be worse than Granholm. If the power remains, someone will use it.

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Empty the arsenal

Just as in Tolkien’s masterpiece, our enemies do not wait quietly. They scheme. They train. They amass armies of lawyers, activists, operatives, and bureaucrats. They build institutional pipelines that outlast elections. They do not go home after losing once. They plan the return.

Republicans need to plan as well — and their plan cannot be “use federal power while we have it, then trust the next guys.”

One party will not hold Washington forever. When conservatives lose power, they should make sure the left inherits a reduced federal government: weaker, narrower, stripped of the patronage systems and enforcement tools that now function as political weapons.

That is why it is incumbent upon congressional Republicans to do everything in their power — everything — to destroy the Ring.

America’s founders envisioned a weak federal government for this reason. In America’s 250th year, Congress should act like it understands the danger of concentrated power. If Republicans keep the machinery intact, they will regret it. If the Ring finds its next master, it will not spare the people who once held it.

Trump promised ‘retribution.’ Congress keeps funding the machine.



Courts can block executive action, so Congress must cut funding. Yet Republicans refuse, leaving the Justice Department and FBI with the same tools Democrats will use again.

That gap between rhetoric and action now threatens to erase everything President Trump promised. In March 2023, he vowed, “For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” and pledged to “obliterate the deep state” and fire the bureaucrats who turned federal law enforcement into a political weapon. Those words land with force. Appropriations decide whether they mean anything.

Trump’s ‘retribution’ pledge will collapse into another campaign slogan if Republicans keep funding the same Department of Justice and FBI they claim to oppose.

But if Trump relies on executive action alone, courts will block key moves and the next Democrat in the White House will reverse the rest. Only structural reforms written into law can stop the next round of weaponization.

That reality hits hardest at the Department of Justice and the FBI. A Congress that keeps funding these agencies under the Biden-era architecture keeps the weaponization machine intact.

Yet Republicans just pushed through a Justice funding bill that drew more Democrat support than conservative support.

That vote captures the GOP Congress since 2017. Leadership passes budget bills with less resistance from Democrats than from Republicans. Spending is the battlefield. Everything else fades fast. If your own side opposes your funding bills more than the other side, you are not changing the country. You are managing the status quo.

Here’s the brutal truth: Congress has not structurally defanged the Justice Department’s weaponization or taken a sledgehammer to the FBI’s open-ended mandate. The same deep-state actors who drove January 6 abuses, FACE Act prosecutions of pro-life activists, and FBI operations like Arctic Frost still collect paychecks.

Republicans had one last chance to shrink this machinery before Democrats likely regain the House. The final Justice Department appropriations bill should have cut off funding for the most abusive programs and permanently reduced the department’s ability to target Americans. Instead, Republicans passed a status quo bill that effectively codifies Biden’s DOJ.

The vote breakdown exposes the scam. All but six House Democrats supported the minibus package that included full-year DOJ funding. Meanwhile, 22 House conservatives opposed it.

The package included three appropriations bills: Commerce-Justice-Science; Energy and Water Development; and Interior and Environment. Freedom Caucus pressure forced leadership to hold a separate vote on the Commerce-Justice-Science portion first, and even then, it drew 40 Republican “no” votes. Leadership tried to quiet the revolt by swapping out a $1 million earmark for a Somali-led nonprofit after a welfare fraud scandal in that state. That move changed nothing about the bill’s core failures.

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Democrats voted for this bill despite calling Trump a dictator because the bill left the regime’s tools in place. On the issues that matter most, it stayed silent.

It did not:

  • Bar funding for future January 6 prosecutions.
  • Bar funding for FACE Act prosecutions of pro-life activists.
  • Address the FBI’s Arctic Frost overreach.
  • Defund sanctuary cities, even though sanctuary policies endanger federal agents and courts have repeatedly blocked Trump’s efforts to punish them. If Congress refuses to codify enforcement policy, courts will keep neutralizing it.
  • Cut off grants to NGOs that help illegal aliens evade deportation. Other appropriations bills even fund refugee resettlement contractors.
  • End incentives for blue states to implement red-flag laws. The bill keeps the $740 million slush fund that bribes states to expand them. It also fails to defund Biden’s pistol brace ban, the “engaged in the business” rule, and the Justice Department’s Office of Gun Violence Prevention.
  • Fund an Election Integrity Office to implement Trump’s executive order on election integrity, even while the bill keeps money flowing to offices that persecute Americans.
  • Rein in the Office of Inspector General, which receives $139 million despite lacking an appointed inspector general and operating under an acting career bureaucrat.

The FBI budget barely took a haircut from its record Biden-era levels. Keep the scale in mind: The bureau has more than 35,000 employees, yet only 138 have been fired so far.

Republicans also promised fiscal discipline. This minibus package totals roughly $180 billion and rejects steeper cuts conservatives proposed in committee. It includes nearly $5.6 billion in earmarks for 3,030 projects. Leadership found room for parochial spending while refusing to squeeze the agencies that turned federal power against the public.

Congress holds one real lever to change the regime without begging courts for permission: the power of the purse. If Republicans won’t pass transformative legislation, they must at least defund odious policies through appropriations.

Trump’s “retribution” pledge will collapse into another campaign slogan if Republicans keep funding the same Department of Justice and FBI they claim to oppose. When Democrats vote happily to fund the very departments that targeted Americans under Biden, the conclusion writes itself. Washington will not dismantle the machine. It will keep it humming until Democrats take power again and aim it at us with even fewer restraints.

How faith sustained me in my darkest hour



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.

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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.

RELATED: Trump’s pardons expose the left’s vast lawfare machine

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.

RELATED: Damning new docs reveal who’s on Biden admin’s ‘enemies list,’ expose extent of FBI’s Arctic Frost

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.

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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.”

RELATED: Exclusive: House Republican seeks criminal investigation into Jack Smith's alleged surveillance scheme

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.

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

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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.

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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.