Author: Andrew P. Napolitano

Last Friday, a federal grand jury sitting in Washington, D.C., indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian corporations for conspiracy and for using false instruments and computer hacking so as to influence the American presidential election in 2016. The indictment alleges a vast, organized and professional effort, funded by tens of millions of dollars, whereby Russian spies passed themselves off as Americans on the internet, on the telephone and even in person here in the U.S. to sow discord about Hillary Clinton and thereby assist in the election of Donald Trump. Though an indictment is a charge only, it presumably … Continue reading →

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Imagine you open the faucet of your kitchen sink expecting water and instead out comes cash. Now imagine that it comes out at the rate of $1 million a minute. You call your plumber, who thinks you’re crazy. To get you off the phone, he opines that it is your sink and therefore must be your money. So you spend it wildly. Then you realize that the money wasn’t yours and you owe it back. Now imagine that this happens every minute of every day for the next three years. At the end of the three years, you owe back … Continue reading →

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We remain embroiled in a debate over the nature and extent of our own government’s spying on us. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was enacted in 1978 as a response to the unlawful government spying of the Watergate era, was a lawful means for the government to engage in foreign surveillance on U.S. soil, but it has morphed into unchecked government spying on ordinary Americans. The journey that domestic spying has taken in 40 years has been one long steady march of massive increase in size and scope. The federal government now employs more than 60,000 people to spy … Continue reading →

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I have argued for a few weeks now that House Intelligence Committee members have committed misconduct in office by concealing evidence of spying abuses by the National Security Agency and the FBI. They did this by sitting on a four-page memo that summarizes the abuse of raw intelligence data while Congress was debating a massive expansion of FISA. FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which was written to enable the federal government to spy on foreign agents here and abroad. Using absurd and paranoid logic, the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which only hears the government’s lawyers, … Continue reading →

The post Lying, Spying, and Hiding appeared first on LewRockwell.

During the past three weeks, Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed into law vast new powers for the NSA and the FBI to spy on innocent Americans and selectively to pass on to law enforcement the fruits of that spying. Those fruits can now lawfully include all fiber-optic data transmitted to or in the United States, such as digital recordings of all landline and mobile telephone calls and copies in real time of all text messages and emails and banking, medical and legal records electronically stored or transmitted. All this bulk surveillance had come about because the National Security … Continue reading →

The post A Conspiracy of Silence appeared first on LewRockwell.

Late last week, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, repeated his public observations that members of the intelligence community — particularly the CIA, the NSA and the intelligence division of the FBI — are not trustworthy with the nation’s intelligence secrets. Because he has a security clearance at the “top secret” level and knows how others who have access to secrets have used and abused them, his allegations are extraordinary. He pointed to the high-ranking members of the Obama administration who engaged in unmasking the names of some people whose communications had been … Continue reading →

The post Did Donald Trump Change His Mind appeared first on LewRockwell.

Hidden beneath the controversy stirred up last week by the publication of a book called “Fire and Fury,” a highly critical insider’s view of the Trump White House that the president has not only denounced on national television but also tried to prevent from being published and distributed, are the efforts of the Trump administration and congressional leadership to bypass the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Here is the back story. After the excesses of the Watergate era, during which the Nixon administration used the FBI and the CIA unlawfully to spy without warrants on the president’s real and imagined … Continue reading →

The post Congress Is Plotting To Cut a Hole appeared first on LewRockwell.

1) In 2018, the Democrats will win control of the House of Representatives. the Republicans will retain control of the Senate. President Donald Trump will provoke the use of the 25th Amendment by his Cabinet to remove him temporarily from office. the key issue in the congressional races will be whether or not to impeach President Trump. 2) At the end of 2018, more American troops will be deployed around the world than are today. the United States will be directly involved in a land war in North Korea. the United States will renounce its membership in NATO. all American … Continue reading →

The post Office Pool 2018 appeared first on LewRockwell.

What if Christmas is a core value of belief in a personal God who lived among us and His freely given promise of eternal salvation that no believer should reject or apologize for? What if Christmas is the rebirth of Christ in the hearts of all believers? What if Christmas is the potential rebirth of Christ in every heart that will have Him, whether a believer or not? What if Jesus Christ was born about 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem? What if He is true God and true man? What if this is a mystery and a miracle? What if … Continue reading →

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Within hours of his victory in last year’s presidential election, Donald Trump dispatched his lawyers to establish a nonprofit corporation to manage his transition from private life to the presidency. This was done pursuant to a federal statute that provides for taxpayer-funded assistance to the newly elected — but not yet inaugurated — president. The statutory term for the corporation is the presidential transition team, or PTT. In addition to paying the PTT’s bills, the General Services Administration, which manages all nonmilitary federal property, provided the PTT with government computers, software and a computer service provider. During the course of … Continue reading →

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For the second time in two months, someone who has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State has plotted to kill innocents in New York City and has executed his plot. According to police, at the height of the Monday morning rush hour this week, in an underground pedestrian walkway that I have used many times, in the middle of Manhattan, a permanent legal resident of the United States named Akayed Ullah detonated a bomb he had strapped to his torso in an effort to kill fellow commuters and disrupt massively life in New York. The bomb was inartfully constructed, and … Continue reading →

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This is a tale of FBI power misused and presidential trust misplaced. Last week, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, President Donald Trump’s confidant on matters pertaining to national security from June 2015 to February 2017 and his short-lived national security adviser in the White House, pleaded guilty in federal court in Washington, D.C., to a single count of lying to the FBI. Under the terms of his plea agreement, Flynn, who had faced nearly 60 years in federal prison had he been convicted of charges related to all the matters about which there is said to be credible evidence of … Continue reading →

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In August, when President Donald Trump’s lawyers persuaded him to refrain from attacking independent counsel Robert Mueller publicly — he had many times called Mueller’s investigation a “witch hunt” — they also told him that the investigation was not aimed at him and not to worry because it would be over by Thanksgiving. These are the same lawyers who revealed a fissure in the strategy of the president’s legal team. On one side are presidential lawyers who want to cooperate fully with Mueller because they are convinced that the president has nothing to fear from the public revelation of truthful … Continue reading →

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Should the government borrow against the future? Should it guarantee higher taxes for your children and grandchildren in return for lower taxes for you? If government’s moral legitimacy depends on the consent of the governed, as Thomas Jefferson argued in the Declaration of Independence, can the federal government morally compel those who haven’t consented to its financial profligacy — because they are not yet born — to pay higher taxes? These questions are at the base of the debate — such as it is — in Congress these days over the so-called Republican tax reform plan. But you will not … Continue reading →

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The Department of Justice will soon commence an investigation to determine whether there should be an investigation (you read that nonsense correctly) of a scandal involving the Clinton Foundation and a company called Uranium One. It appears that FBI decisions made during the time that Hillary Clinton was being investigated for espionage will also be investigated to see whether there should be an investigation to determine whether she was properly investigated. (Again, you read that nonsense correctly.) Only the government can relate nonsense with a straight face. Here is the back story. When President Donald Trump fired FBI Director Jim … Continue reading →

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