Tag Archives: government

Blinders

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FBI Director Christopher Wray was wearing them, when he wasn’t overtly insulting the intelligence of committee members, when he testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee last Wednesday. Committee members asked Wray a number of questions that he refused to answer, even as he couched his refusal in a number of rationalizations.

Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R, OH) asked whether the FBI had asked financial institutions for customer transaction records in the DC area for the period surrounding the 6 Jan riots. Wray: I don’t know the answer.

Darrell Issa (R, CA) asked Wray whether FBI agents infiltrated those riots. Wray refused to answer altogether, referring Issa to “existing court filings.”

Matt Gaetz (R, FL) asked Wray how many times the FBI misused FISA authorities to spy on American citizens. Wray refused to say, or even to explain why the illegal searches happened.

Pramila Jayapal (D, WA) asked Wray whether the FBI was purchasing Americans’ personal data from the Internet or social media collectors. Wray refused to “confirm or deny.” When she asked how the FBI used such data, Wray said,

Respectfully, this is a topic that gets very involved to explain, so what I would prefer to do is have our subject matters come back up and brief you[.]

He thereby confirmed that his FBI does obtain such information, whether through buying it, or through other means. And his answer was insulting to the committee members, particularly to Jayapal, implying that the Congressmen were too grindingly stupid to understand the matter or by insulting their intelligence with his claim that he doesn’t understand the matter himself.

And so on through hours of testimonial evasion, pretended ignorance, and insults.

This FBI has long since outlived its usefulness, and it needs to be disbanded.

Another Excuse…

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…for Leftist-dominated governments to grab power. Farmers Insurance, and other insurance companies, are moving to restrict policy sales in California and Florida due to rising payout costs from a recent spate of natural disaster claims. Public Citizen said that such moves are

prime example of the insurance industry’s hypocrisy on climate change.

Progressive-Democratic Party politicians insist that insurance companies aren’t doing enough to combat global warming and want to impose requirements on them to do more. Connecticut’s Leftist politicians are proposing a 5% surcharge on “any premium payments from any fossil fuel company” to any insurer licensed in the state.

Insurers, in a free market economy, are in the business of insuring risk—transferring the risk of a business venture, or ownership of a home, from the venturer/homeowner to the insurer in exchange for a fee based on the risk’s likelihood of occurring and its cost should it occur.

Insurers, in the Progressive-Democrat economy, are tools of the State, usable by the State to achieve the Progressive-Democrats’ personal goals.

“America Has Too Many Rules”

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And too many laws. Jimmy Sexton, CEO of Esquire Group, is right about the rules.

More than 88,000 federal regulations were promulgated between 1995 and 2016, the most recent data I can find. The Federal Register, a compendium of each year’s new federal regulations, proposed rules and notices, totals nearly two million pages dating back to its inception in 1936. And the Code of Federal Regulations ran to 185,000 pages in 2020. In addition, state and local governments have their own laws and rules.

As he noted,

Laws should be easy to comply with and simple to enforce.

The easy compliance and enforcement isn’t only a matter of each one being short and sweet; the ease flows especially from keeping the overall number small and knowable in their aggregate.

And I’m right about too many laws, especially at the Federal level. Just on the criminal side alone, there are almost 5,200 criminal laws and roughly 300,000 regulations that can subject people to possible criminal penalties. among our statutes, even though the only crimes our Constitution actually names are treason and bribery—and the nebulous high Crimes and Misdemeanors, named in the context of impeaching the President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States. Even the first enumeration of national-level crimes, the Crimes Act of 1790, passed in the 1st Congress, identified only 21 additional crimes wanting Federal-level enforcement and punishment:

  1. treason
  2. misprision of treason (deliberate concealment)
  3. willful murder occurring on federal property
  4. rescue/attempted rescue of a body following an execution
  5. misprision of felony
  6. “man-slaughter”
  7. piracy
  8. “accessory before the fact”
  9. “accessory after the fact”
  10. confederate to piracy
  11. maiming
  12. forgery/counterfeiting/falsifying federal securities or coin
  13. altering/corruption of federal records
  14. larceny
  15. receiving stolen goods
  16. perjury
  17. subornation of perjury (contracting with another to commit perjury)
  18. bribery
  19. obstruction a federal officer
  20. rescue of an inmate
  21. violation of safe conduct/passport.

The rest of criminal behaviors and their definitions are, by design, left to the police powers of each of the several States.

The only Federal criminal laws we need, then, are few: against treason and bribery, and against each of those additional 21, each of which needs to be particularly describing these crimes’ defining criteria, and especially for those 21, particularly describing the criteria that separate them from State crimes and make them Federal crimes.

And yet we have an enormous and bureaucratic Department of Justice and a broad range of Federal police forces: the FBI, the Marshals Service, the Secret Service, each Federal cabinet has its own police force, even the Congress has the Capital Police.

Plausible Deniability?

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Whistleblowers are telling Congress that Delaware US Attorney David Weiss was actively blocked from pursuing his investigation of Hunter Biden’s tax evasion and influence peddling machinations, including being denied permission to pursue the IRS’ tax concerns and being denied permission to bring serious (or any) charges against Hunter Biden in other jurisdictions than Delaware. These claims directly contradict Attorney General Merrick Garland’s prior sworn Congressional testimony that Weiss would have a free and unrestricted hand in his investigations.

Matthew Whitaker, Acting Attorney General under former-President Donald Trump, suggests that Garland might actually have had no knowledge of the obstruction coming from his office:

I also know how the Department of Justice works and Merrick Garland is being kept in the dark by a lot of this.
He’s not communicating with these US attorneys in Los Angeles and the District of Columbia who are doing his dirty work.

And

The Deputy Attorney General, who has day-to-day oversight of those offices, certainly is trying to keep things out of Garland’s office. And not only would I bring those US attorneys in front of Congress after they bring the six witnesses, I would also bring the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the tax division who would have had to approved or be involved in these cases.

Whitaker is being generous. These deputies trying to set up a case of plausible deniability for Garland. They’re failing at that.

Garland is an active participant in this obstruction by his deputies, if only by his continued allowing the obstruction to occur. Garland also assuredly knows of the obstruction at least since the publicity of the whistleblowers’ claims has become so widespread, and he’s still done nothing about it.

There is no plausible deniability here; Garland has constructive knowledge of the obstruction, and he has had all along: even if he doesn’t watch TV or read print news, these deputies work directly for him, Of course he knows what they’re doing, and he knows it in real time.

Merrick Garland must go. But House time and resources shouldn’t be wasted on impeachment when there aren’t the votes in the Senate for a serious trial, much less legitimate chance for a conviction. Instead, Congress and Congressmen must effectively impeach this person by widely and loudly publishing his many peccadilloes—most blatantly, for instance, investigating mothers protesting at school board meetings as domestic terrorists and allowing his FBI to “investigate” traditional Catholics as “right wingers”—and by deleting from the appropriate appropriations bill all funding for the office of Attorney General as long as he’s the AG.

Channeling Fauci

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Anthony Fauci, late of the Federal government, infamously claimed that an attack on him was an attack on science.

Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science[.]

Now Attorney General Merrick Garland is echoing that self-important, arrogant sentiment and broadening it to include all of the Department of Justice, and not just him personally.

Some have chosen to attack the integrity of the Justice Department… This constitutes an attack on an institution that is essential to American democracy.

Because DoJ and every part of it are above criticism.

In the clip at the second link above, the question put to Garland concerned impeachment considerations regarding FBI Director Chris Wray and other men and women in leadership positions in the FBI and elsewhere in DoJ. Garland cynically talked, instead, about the quality of performance of the line agents in the FBI and elsewhere in DoJ.

That government attitude—that we’re above criticism, and government men don’t have to answer your questions—is what is an attack on American democracy.