Category Archives: Supreme Court

SCOTUS frontrunner Ketanji Brown Jackson was an Advocate for Terror Suspects Housed at Gitmo

Posted on by

Supreme Court frontrunner Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was an active and dedicated advocate for terror suspects housed at Guantanamo Bay, contrary to press accounts and her own representations.

woman speaking at microphone while gesturing with left hand Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson speaks in February 2020 while being honored at the University of Chicago Law School’s Parsons Dinner. (Lloyd DeGrane via Wikimedia Commons)

Jackson has portrayed her work for the detainees as that of a disinterested professional fulfilling an assignment. But a Washington Free Beacon review of court filings dating back to 2005 indicates that Jackson was deeply committed to equal treatment for accused terrorists. Her advocacy was zealous and often resembled ideological cause lawyering, even in her capacity as a public defender. At times, she flirted with unsubstantiated left-wing theories that were debunked by government investigators. On other occasions, she accused Justice Department lawyers of egregious misconduct with little evidence.

As a federal public defender, Jackson represented a Guantanamo detainee accused of attacking a U.S. military base in Afghanistan. She continued to advocate on behalf of detainees and attack Bush-era detention policies in the Supreme Court after she left public service for private practice.

President Joe Biden’s approval numbers tumbled after the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer. A retread of the War on Terror could be unwelcome for the administration, especially as new developments reveal the extent of the government’s ineptness. Leaked Situation Room documents released by Axios Wednesday show that top administration officials were scrambling to plan a mass evacuation of civilians as late as Aug. 14, the day before Taliban forces reached Kabul. The White House did not respond to the Free Beacon‘s request for comment.

Jackson’s public defender unit was charged with representing Guantanamo inmates who challenged their incarceration in a federal court in Washington, D.C. Jackson’s client was a detainee named Khiali-Gul, who maintained that he was an innocent man wrongfully detained.

“I had a job in Mr. Karzai’s government and I have done personal favors for the Americans and helped them,” Gul said in a 2005 court filing.

U.S. investigators reached quite different conclusions about Gul. A 2008 Defense Department assessment states that Gul was a Taliban intelligence officer and the likely leader of a terror cell near the city of Khost. The cell met at his home on Dec. 1, 2002, to plan a rocket attack on a coalition forward-operating base, which took place just hours after the gathering. A separate Defense assessment flagged a possible meeting with Osama bin Laden in November 2001.

In written exchanges with Republican lawmakers ahead of her confirmation to an appeals court last year, Jackson emphasized that she represented Gul in her capacity as a government lawyer duty-bound to advocate for all indigent defendants. She implied but did not say she did so under orders. The Washington Post presented the facts along those lines in a Jan. 27 story about her prospective nomination.

But filings Jackson submitted for Gul were hardly perfunctory. In 2005 she filed a petition on Gul’s behalf that went well beyond the particulars of his case to broadly assail Bush administration War on Terror policies. For example, she accused the government of pioneering torture tactics used at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq on Guantanamo inmates.

“Many of the most egregious interrogation techniques used in the Abu Ghraib detention center and other detention facilities in Iraq—such as the use of aggressive dogs to intimidate detainees, sexual humiliation, stress positions, and sensory deprivation—were pioneered at Guantanamo,” she wrote, by way of arguing her client was subject to inhumane confinement conditions.

Such allegations were common among Democratic lawmakers and left-wing advocacy groups. But a 2005 report of the Pentagon inspector general, much of which remains classified, rejects that assessment. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2005, Vice Admiral Albert Church rejected any such Abu Ghraib-Gitmo nexus.

Jackson also criticized the “extraordinary rendition” program, through which detainees were secretly transferred to countries where prolonged detention and torture could be practiced. Gul was never subject to the program, making the criticisms afield of the dispute. He was ultimately repatriated to his native Afghanistan.

Later in the course of Gul’s case, Jackson would accuse government lawyers of serious ethical breaches. In 2006, she asked the judge who presided over Gul’s case to sanction Justice Department lawyers over the government’s response to a rash of detainee suicides. Sanctions are reserved for serious misconduct and are always embarrassing to those involved. Penalties range from remedial classes to suspension or disbarment in the relevant court.

Three Guantanamo detainees committed suicide on June 10, 2006, by hanging themselves in their cells. Rear Admiral Harry Harris, who then commanded at Guantanamo, called the incident a coordinated protest act. The suicides followed a May uprising in which inmates attacked guards with fan blades and broken light fixtures, as well as revelations that some inmates were hoarding prescription medications.

The Defense Department on Dec. 20, 2014, announced Gul’s repatriation to Afghanistan under an executive order from then-president Barack Obama that required the intelligence community to determine whether Guantanamo detainees should be released, transferred, or prosecuted. The 2008 assessment predicted he would resume his extremist activities without close supervision.

The Free Beacon was unable to determine whether Gul reenlisted with the Taliban ahead of the terrorist group’s rapid conquest of Afghanistan in 2021. Other Guantanamo prisoners did so. Ex-detainee Gholam Ruhani maintained that he was “a simple shopkeeper who helped Americans” in court papers while fighting his five-year detention at the naval base. He was among the commandos who last August stormed the presidential palace, and he appeared on camera in former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani’s office cradling a machine gun and reciting the Quran.

Free Beacon has more details here.

Another source here has a very detailed resume.

Simply put, she is trouble and if nominated, you can bet the confirmation hearing will be wild.

Will Justice Sotomayor Recuse on the Mandate Cases?

Posted on by

If Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor reads the New York Times and watches CNN, then we clearly understand how her alleged knowledge of all things vaccines and mandates are so wrong and exaggerated. This Judge made statements during oral arguments that were wildly wrong. Yeesh. The Justices do gather after arguments are presented and confab on the cases and then collaborate with their clerks. We can only hope Sotomayor gets the memo on how wrong she is or she must recuse from the case(s) dealing with OSHA, vaccines and mandates.

If the Supreme Court rules on the side of the Federal government then the power of the government over all citizens is limitless and tyranny is in stone.

As noted by The Federalist in part for more details –>

Brian Fletcher, U.S. Principal Deputy Solicitor General, representing the federal government in Biden v. Missouri, told justices that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra should be allowed to keep the mandate. Challengers, however, noted that the rule forces a medical procedure on healthcare workers who could leave the workforce, and leave rural and poor populations in need of care vulnerable.

“Exercising this kind of power to force the individual to submit to a medical treatment has never ever been something that has been authorized by Congress or done by an agency on an emergency basis,” Louisiana Solicitor General Elizabeth Murrill said. “But I don’t think in this case that justifies them co-opting a quintessential state police power. In fact, the opposite is true.”

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch all seemed skeptical of the vaccine mandate on the grounds that the federal government was extending its reach into state issues. In his questioning, Gorsuch emphasized that the mandate seems less effective as a health and safety protocol and is more of an issue of control.

“Could CMS also implement regulations about exercise regimes?” Gorsuch asked, wondering if “substances that must be ingested by hospital employees” could be implemented “in the name of health and safety?”

Part of this control, Gorsuch hinted, is coming via funding threats.

“These statutes sometimes constitute, we’re told, 10 percent of all the funding state governments receive. This regulation affects, we’re told, 10 million healthcare workers and will cost over a billion dollars for employers to comply with. So what’s your reaction to that? Why isn’t this a regulation that effectively controls the employment and tenure of healthcare workers at hospitals, an issue Congress said the agency didn’t have the authority, that that should be left to the states to regulate?” Gorsuch asked.

In response, Sotomayor asserted her belief that “if you want my money your facility has to do this.”

“This is not an issue of power between the states and federal government. This is an issue of what right does the federal government [have] to dictate what it wants to buy,” Sotomayor said.

“Your Honor, it is a vaccine requirement masquerading as a condition of participation,” Jesus Osete, Missouri Deputy Attorney General, replied.

During the arguments, Justice Elena Kagan, Justice Stephen Breyer, and the counsel arguing in favor of the mandate continued to spew misinformation about COVID-19 and the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines. Kagan repeatedly lied that vaccinated workers couldn’t transmit the virus despite numerous admissions from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the jab doesn’t stop viral spread and data showing a significant number of breakthrough COVID cases.

“All the Secretary is doing here is to say to providers, you know what? Basically, the one thing you can’t do is to kill your patients. So you have to get vaccinated so that you’re not transmitting the disease that can kill elderly Medicare patients, that can kill sick Medicaid patients,” Kagan said. “I mean, that seems like a pretty basic infection prevention measure. You can’t be the carrier of disease.”

She later claimed, without evidence, that “people are not showing up to hospitals because they’re afraid of getting COVID from staff.”

Breyer, who used rising COVID-19 case numbers to justify his support for the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for the private sector, also lied about the shot and COVID hospitalizations.

“There are 750,000 people got this yesterday, but the hospitals are full to overflowing, that there is a problem worse than diptheria,” Breyer said. “They’re filling up hospital beds and others are dying because they can’t get in. Okay. Now public interest, call it something else, call it what you might, but it seems to me, it’s hard for me to believe, but it seems to me that every minute that these things are not in effect, thousands of more people are getting this disease. And we have some discretionary power.”

 

Rigged: The Other Facts About the 2020 Election

Posted on by

Two of the most dangerous people of the 2020 election were Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Elias. We all know Zuckerberg but many need to be reminded who Marc Elias really is.

Marc Elias the Democratic National Committee’s election lawyer and legal adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, filed more than 50 lawsuits around the country challenging state election laws in advance of the 2020 presidential election.

In a 2018 Tweet, President Donald Trump referred to Elias as the Democrats’ “best Election stealing lawyer.”

Marc Elias

Though most of the state laws he challenged have been on the books for years, Elias went full steam ahead asking courts to overrule state election laws, force states to count ballots that came in after Election Day, or force states to have unattended ballot collection boxes.

Elias chairs the political law group for the progressive, Seattle-based firm Perkins Coie, “which has had a stranglehold on Democratic legal work for years,” National Review noted in a Nov. 3 analysis.

Since 2019, Perkins Coie has been paid at least $41 million for its political work by Democratic-affiliated organizations, according to Federal Election Commission records. Republican lawyers say that is likely just a fraction of what Perkins Coie has received, because it doesn’t include legal work for many left-wing nonprofits.

Elias was also a key player in the Russia collusion hoax. As the attorney for both the DNC and Clinton campaign, he helped bankroll research by Fusion GPS that created the bogus “Steele dossier” used by the FBI to obtain FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign during the 2016 race. source

***

In “Rigged,” author Mollie Hemingway lays out what amounts to a fascinating alternative to the “stolen” charge. She presents a strong case that the $419 million that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg ostensibly spent to get out the vote was actually used by Democrat activists to infiltrate local election operations and take over jobs government workers were supposed to do.

Hemingway, a senior editor at The Federalist and a Fox commentator, shows how two Zuckerberg nonprofits used their unprecedented deep pockets to line up left-wing groups in key cities that in turn hired poll workers, collected absentee ballots and cured those with errors.

In Green Bay, Wisconsin, the Democratic mayor outsourced the planning and managing of the election to these activists. Hemingway cites an e-mail from the mayor’s chief of staff saying, “I am taking all of my cues” from one of the Zuckerberg groups.

The city clerk, nominally in charge of the election, was reportedly unhappy with the changes, went on leave shortly before election day and soon resigned.

As Hemingway puts it in excerpts published by The Post, “It was a genius plan. And because no one ever imagined that a coordinated operation could pull off the privatization of the election system, no laws were built to combat it.”

Texas researcher William Doyle crunched the numbers showing how the nonprofits concentrated in areas Biden won, often spending three or four times as much money per voter as they spent in districts Trump won.

“The 2020 election wasn’t stolen,” Doyle concluded. “It was likely bought by one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men pouring his money through legal loopholes.”

***Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized ...

Back in December of 2020, this site published two items exposing these operations.

Georgia/The Fulton County Board of Commissioners voted to accept a $6.3 million grant from the Mark-Zuckerberg funded Center for Technology and Civic Life “Safe Elections” project at a September 2, 2020 board meeting. It proceeded without asking a single question about the name of the group providing the funding, the origin of the funding, or the details of what the funding would be used for.

Here is the report on the clawback provisions Zuclerberg demanded if his money was not used as he required.

It begins with the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL), which received nearly $400 million from Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg began the sizeable donations is September boost resources for local election officials, such as additional polling places and ballot drop boxes. Four federal lawsuits were filed in late September by Michigan’s Election Integrity Fund, by the Wisconsin Voters’ Alliance, by the Minnesota Voters’ Alliance, and by two Pennsylvania congressional candidates and several state house members. The lawsuits contend federal law prohibits local governments from accepting private federal election grants. Zuckerberg won the lawsuits in each case, so far.

The lawsuits focus on the Center for Tech and Civic Life spending about $26 million in grants across 12 cities in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Wisconsin, which combined cast over 75% off their two million votes in favor of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, according to the plaintiffs. source

Then in June of 2021, is the other item:

In exchange for the money, elections divisions agreed to conduct their elections according to conditions set out by the CTCL, which is led by former members of the New Organizing Institute, a training center for progressive groups and Democratic campaigns.

A CTCL partner, the Center for Civic Design, helped design absentee ballot forms and instructions, crafted voter registration letters for felons and tested automatic voter registration systems in several states, working alongside progressive activist groups in Michigan and directly with elections offices in Georgia and Utah.

Still other groups with a progressive leaning, including the Main Street Alliance, The Elections Group and the National Vote at Home Institute, provided support for some elections offices.

“COVID-19 response” grants of varying amounts to  2,500 municipalities in 49 states.
Center for Tech and Civic Life

Facebook, with the CTCL, was also part of the effort, providing a guide and webinar for election officials on how to engage voters. Included were directions to report “voter interference” to Facebook authorities. The company also provided designated employees in six regions of the U.S. to handle questions. Together, the groups strategically targeted voters and waged a voter assistance campaign aimed at low-income and minority residents who typically shun election participation, helping Democratic candidates win key spots all over the U.S.

The little-explored roles of CTCL and other such groups emerged in emails and other records obtained by RealClearInvestigations and public documents secured by conservative litigants and groups, including the Foundation for Government Accountability, which has filed more than 800 public records requests with elections offices accepting the grants.

Previously, the Zuckerberg-funded effort has been described in generally positive terms, notably when NPR reported in December on “How Private Money From Facebook’s CEO Saved The 2020 Election” — in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, President Trump’s doubts about the legitimacy of the process and “Congress’ neglect.”

In 2018, RCI reported that a New York University School of Law program funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg had placed environmentally minded lawyers in the offices of Democratic state attorneys general to challenge Trump administration policies. And examples of private efforts to steer cash-strapped public education are numerous, from the Koch charities on the right to more recent race-conscious programs on the left emphasizing the legacy and centrality of white racism in society.

Zuckerberg did not respond to an emailed request from RCI for comment. In a post-election interview, he praised Facebook’s security work during the election and singled out its policing of “misinformation.” He noted working with polling officials to watch for information that might lead to “voter suppression” and said Facebook had strengthened its enforcement “against militias and conspiracy networks like Q-Anon.”

Biden is staffing a Supreme Court Cmte led by Bob Bauer

Posted on by

Supreme Court ends Trump emoluments lawsuits

You may remember Bob Bauer when he was a trusted Obama White House lawyer….and oh yeah he is married to Anita Dunn, famous for including in a speech that 2 of her most favorite people were Mother Teresa and Mao Zedong. Yeah, great couple right?

Mr. and Mrs. Triple Evils, Obama, Perkins Coie Law Firm And Fusion GPS ... It should also be noted that Anita Dunn was the top Biden campaign advisor.

Yeesh…meanwhile….

Bauer is Professor of Practice and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at NYU Law, and Co-Director of NYU’s Legislative and Regulatory Process Clinic. He served as White House Counsel to President Obama, and returned to private practice in June 2011. In 2013, the President named Bauer to be Co-Chair of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, which in January of 2014 submitted to the President its findings and recommendations in “The American Voting Experience: Report and Recommendations of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration.”

Bauer was General Counsel to Obama for America, the President’s campaign organization, in 2008 and 2012. Bob has also served as co-counsel to the New Hampshire State Senate in the trial of Chief Justice David A. Brock (2000) and counsel to the Democratic Leader in the trial of President William Jefferson Clinton (1999).

He is the author on books on campaign finance law and articles on various topics for law reviews and periodicals. He is a contributing editor of Lawfare and writes legal commentary for Just Security, and has published opinion pieces in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and other publications.

In part: Among those who will be on the commission are Cristina Rodríguez, a professor at Yale Law School and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Obama Department of Justice, who will join Bauer as co-chair. Caroline Fredrickson, the former president of the American Constitution Society, and Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and a former assistant attorney general in the Bush Department of Justice, will also serve on the commission, those familiar with discussions said.

Fredrickson has hinted that she is intellectually supportive of ideas like court expansion. In 2019, she said in an interview with Eric Lesh, the executive director of the LGBT Bar Association and Foundation of Greater New York: “I often point out to people who aren’t lawyers that the Supreme Court is not defined as ‘nine person body’ in the Constitution, and it has changed size many times.”

Rodríguez’s opinions on court reforms are less clear. Goldsmith’s selection, meanwhile, is likely to be the one to frustrate progressives. A senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Goldsmith did not support Trump and is a friend and co-author of Bauer. But he was a vocal advocate of Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the high court — an appointment that sparked Democratic advocacy for expanding the number of Supreme Court seats.

“He will also be an influential figure within the Supreme Court building,” Goldsmith wrote in 2018 about Kavanaugh in a Time article titled, “Brett Kavanaugh Will Right the Course of the Supreme Court.” “He is a brilliant analyst with a deep scholarly and practical knowledge of the law. His legal opinions are unusually accessible. He is a magnanimous soul.”

Bauer, who is not planning to go into the administration full-time, is himself a proponent of term limits for federal judges. He has been helping with the creation of the commission and, according to a person familiar with the deliberations, initially proposed the idea of forming a commission to study the issue of court reform.

Impeachment 2.0

Posted on by

195 lawmakers cosponsor articles of impeachment of President Trump.

Congressman Ted Lieu

Meanwhile, legal expert Jonathan Turley who is a Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University has this summary to offer Congress:

The author Franz Kafka once wrote, “My guiding principle is this. Guilt is never to be doubted.” Democrats suddenly appear close to adopting that standard into the Constitution as they prepare for a second impeachment of President Trump. With seeking his removal for incitement, Democrats would gut not only the impeachment standard but also free speech, all in a mad rush to remove Trump just days before his term ends.

Democrats are seeking to remove Trump on the basis of his remarks to supporters before the rioting at the Capitol. Like others, I condemned those remarks as he gave them, calling them reckless and wrong. I also opposed the challenges to electoral votes in Congress. But his address does not meet the definition for incitement under the criminal code. It would be viewed as protected speech by the Supreme Court.

When I testified in the impeachment hearings of Trump and Bill Clinton, I noted that an article of impeachment does not have to be based on any clear crime but that Congress has looked to the criminal code to weigh impeachment offenses. For this controversy now, any such comparison would dispel claims of criminal incitement. Despite broad and justified condemnation of his words, Trump never actually called for violence or riots. But he urged his supporters to march on the Capitol to raise their opposition to the certification of electoral votes and to back the recent challenges made by a few members of Congress. Trump told the crowd “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices be heard.”

These kinds of legal challenges have been made by Democrats in the past under the Electoral Count Act, and so Trump was pressing Republicans in Congress to join the effort on his behalf. He ended his remarks by saying a protest at the Capitol was meant to provide Republicans “the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.” He told the crowd, “Let us walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.” Moreover, marches are common across the country to protest actions by the government.

The legal standard for violent speech is found with Clarence Brandenburg versus Ohio. As a free speech advocate, I criticized that 1969 case and its dangerously vague standard. But even it would treat the remarks of Trump as protected under the First Amendment. With that case, the government is able to criminalize speech “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”

There was no call for lawless action by Trump. Instead, there was a call for a protest at the Capitol. Moreover, violence was not imminent, as the vast majority of the tens of thousands of protesters were not violent before the march, and most did not riot inside the Capitol. Like many violent protests in the last four years, criminal conduct was carried out by a smaller group of instigators. Capitol Police knew of the march but declined an offer from the National Guard since they did not view violence as likely.

So Congress is now seeking an impeachment for remarks covered by the First Amendment. It would create precedent for the impeachment of any president blamed for violent acts of others after using reckless language. What is worse are those few cases that would support this type of action. The most obvious is the 1918 prosecution of socialist Eugene Debs, who spoke against the draft in World War One and led figures like Woodrow Wilson to declare him a “traitor to his country.” Debs was arrested and charged with sedition, a new favorite term for Democrats to denounce Trump and Republicans who doubted the victory of Joe Biden.

In 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for a unanimous bench in one of the most infamous decisions to issue from the Supreme Court. It dismissed the free speech rights for Debs and held it was sufficient that his words had the “natural tendency and reasonably probable effect” of deterring people from supporting the international conflict.

That decision was a disgrace, but Democrats are now arguing something even more extreme as the basis for impeachment. Under their theory, any president could be removed for rhetoric that is seen to have the “natural tendency” to encourage others to act in a riotous fashion. Even a call for supporters to protest peacefully could not be a defense. Such a standard would allow for a type of vicarious impeachment that attributes conduct of third parties to any president for the purposes of removal.

Democrats are pushing this dangerously vague standard while objecting to their own remarks given new meaning from critics. Conservatives have pointed to Maxine Waters asking her supporters to confront Republicans in restaurants, while Ayanna Pressley insisted amidst the violent marches last year that “there needs to be unrest in the streets,” and Kamala Harris said “protesters should not let up” even as some of those marches turned violent. They can legitimately argue their rhetoric was not meant to be a call for violence, but this standard is filled with subjectivity.

The damage caused by the rioters this week was enormous, however, it will pale in comparison to the damage from a new precedent of a snap impeachment for speech protected under the First Amendment. It is the very threat that the framers sought to avoid in crafting the impeachment standard. In a process of deliberative judgment, the reference to a snap impeachment is a contradiction. In this new system, guilt is not doubted and innocence is not deliberated. This would do to the Constitution what the violent rioters did to the Capitol and leave it in tatters.