Daily Archives: December 19, 2023

In a study published Tuesday, Media Research Center (MRC) Free Speech America found that NewsGuard, the taxpayer censorship giant self-tasked with rating media outlets on reliability, overwhelmingly favored left-leaning outlets over right-leaning ones. This is the third year MRC Free Speech America has exposed NewsGuard for its partisanship, and, according to MRC, NewsGuard has become even worse than years prior.

Using AllSides, an organization that classifies media outlets by their right to left bias, MRC researchers determined that NewsGuard provided a stellar average credibility rating of 91/100 for left and lean left outlets (e.g., The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, Vox), wrote MRC researchers. Meanwhile, right and lean right outlets, such as Fox News, the New York Post, and The Daily Wire, were given an outrageously abysmal average score of 65/100.

NewsGuards rating for right-leaning outlets in particular was worse than the still-low 66/100 average rating it slapped on right-leaning media across the prior two MRC studies released Jan. 6, 2023 and Dec. 13, 2021, MRC noted.

One of the strongest examples of NewsGuards brazen bias is how it excused legacy media outlets false labeling of the New York Posts Hunter Biden laptop story as Russian disinformation back in 2020.

The Washington Post, USA Today, and Politico all outlets that discredited the story were given flawless 100/100 scores. The seriousness of what these legacy media organizations did cannot be understated. As MRC noted, polling indicates that suppression of the laptop story played a deciding role in the 2020 election.

According to MRC, NewsGuards decision to ignore the discrediting of the laptop story isnt surprising, given that NewsGuard itself contributed to its suppression. Indeed, NewsGuard co-CEO Steven Brill joined CNBC just before the 2020 election to castigate the Hunter Biden laptop story as a probable Russian hoax, MRC wrote in its report.

While outlets that engaged in journalistic malpractice and election interference are given gold stars, NewsGuard severely punishes conservative outlets like The Federalist. NewsGaurd gives The Federalist a failing 12.5/100 score. After roughly two years, wrote MRC, NewsGuard is still criticizing The Federalists questioning of the efficacy of masks for COVID-19. At the same time, liberal CNBC, which has a 95 NewsGuard rating, cited a study showing that cloth masks were only 37 percent effective at filtering out virus particles, wrote MRC.

In another example of NewsGuards double standard, the organization gave Not the Bee a 62.5/100 score in part because it supposedly does not disclose that the site advances a conservative perspective that is apparent in its content, MRC reported. This is grossly hypocritical in light of NewsGuards perfect scores for blatantly liberal outlets like the explicitly left-wing New York Times, MRC pointed out.

The New York Times maintains its 100-year-old pledge to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved. This is the same New York Times that tried to spin the political mayhem surrounding Bidens bribery scandal to make the president seem like a martyr and a helpless victim of paternal instincts to shield him from the fallout, wrote MRC researchers.

NewsGuard also gave pro-life news outlets Life News and Live Action 17.5/100 scores while giving Planned Parenthood a generally credible score of 75/100. As MRC noted, Planned Parenthood is notorious for repeatedly portraying itself as a medical care enterprise that just happens to also perform abortions.

NewsGuard doesnt exist to inform regular Americans about media credibility; it exists to annihilate conservative outlets by scaring off advertisers to prevent them from generating revenue.

NewsGuard wields its ratings as a cudgel, attempting to scare away advertisers from doing business with media and organizations that have been accused of promoting so-called misinformation or wrongthink on a whole host of issues like abortion, climate change, COVID-19 and elections, explained MRC. In so doing, NewsGuard effectively strips media outlets with which it disagrees of their ad money, slowly bleeding out their coffers.

As MRC demonstrates, NewsGuard is a political arm of the left, yet it receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from Bidens Department of Defense. This is the same Biden administration that tried to erect a radical Disinformation Governance Board tied to leftist billionaire George Soros to collaborate with Big Tech companies to target Americans speech on social media platforms, wrote MRC.

News Guard also received funding from Big Pharma. The financing came in the form of a funders consortium that included the consulting outfit Publicis Groupe, reported MRC. The Publicis Groupe happens to represent Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant that has been at the center of the debate on the efficacy of vaccines against COVID-19. NewsGuard has a documented history of guarding the Big Pharma and government narrative on COVID-19 writ large, which in retrospect appears to be a major conflict of interest.

MRC is calling on Congress to cease illegally funding an organization that is actively destroying free speech in the U.S. in its pursuit to shut down conservative outlets.

Our federal government never should have spent time and taxpayer money on censoring conservatives, members of the Free Speech Alliance wrote in the open letter to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). That which government is constitutionally prohibited from doing, it cannot contract with others to do.

The governments support of NewsGuard is nothing short of unconstitutional. It is fundamental to living in a free and fair society that agencies of the federal government may not endorse the products and services of private companies they favor, MRC wrote. Nor may they weaponize national power against companies that officials have decided they dislike, absent duly enacted statutes and regulations and appropriate due process.

The political hacks from NewsGuard claim theyll help you decide what news outlets you can trust, said Rob Bluey, the communications director for The Heritage Foundation, which was given a 69.5/100 rating by NewsGuard. In reality, you shouldnt trust anything from this overtly biased organization.

Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.

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Study Finds NewsGuard Overtly Biased Against Conservatives - The Federalist

Amid the controversy following recent congressional testimony on the problem of campus antisemitism by the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio has introduced a bill that would drastically increase the tax rate on the largest university endowments.

This is something Vance has been talking about for some time now, and while its a good idea on the merits, its also a good example of how conservatives should be willing to use whatever political power they have to fight back against the left. Simply put, unless the right starts treating the left and its institutions like the hostile entities they are, our republic will not likely survive.

This is especially true when it comes to higher education, where the wealthiest and most elite schools have long enjoyed preferential treatment even as they poison the body politic by actively promoting not just antisemitism, but racism, gender ideology, and every other brand of cultural Marxism you can imagine.

The recent spectacle in Congress is a case in point. During their testimonies last week, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn refused to say the blatant antisemitism on their campuses since the Oct. 7 attack on Israeli civilians by Hamas terrorists including explicit calls for genocide of the Jews violates their schools policies on harassment.

Their equivocation, insisting that whether such antisemitism constitutes harassment depends on the context, elicited understandable outrage from donors. After a major Penn donor pulled a $100 million gift to the school that was made in 2017, Penn President Liz Magill was forced to resign a rare instance of a leftist elite facing real-world consequences for defending her appalling ideology in public.

Vance, for his part, rightly sees these schools as threats to American values and our way of life that in no way deserve special treatment. Currently, the tax rate on endowments at places like Harvard and Penn is just 1.4 percent, making them effectively slush funds for the ultra-rich. His two-page bill would increase the rate to 35 percent on all endowments worth $10 billion or more.

The point here isnt to raise additional tax revenue (although the money raised could be used to pay down the deficit or help working, middle-class families or just be given back to the American people as dividends). The point is to acknowledge, through federal tax policy, that in their current form, these universities dont serve the national interest. If they cant be reformed, at least they can be punished.

Thats the right approach, not just to higher education but to every facet of what has become an all-consuming cultural and political war in this country. Conservatives can no longer afford to shy away from using the institutions they control to defend Western civilization and the Christian values that undergird it.

State legislatures that responded to the overturning ofRoe v. Wadeby passing strong restrictions on abortion, like Texas and Florida, have the right idea. Same with states that have imposed restrictions on transgender interventions and surgeries for minors (they need to take the next step, though, and impose those same restrictions on adults).

A crude but no less effective version of this posture toward the left is what one man did on Thursday in Des Moines, Iowa. Michael Cassidy, a Christian and former military officer,tore down and beheaded an altar to Satan in the state capitol. Why was a Satan altar even there? Because the left has managed to insinuate itself everywhere even into the Iowa Legislature, despite a Republican supermajority. Under the banner of diversity and tolerance, were told we must accept altars to Satan in our legislative halls.

Cassidy begged to differ. The world may tell Christians to submissively accept the legitimization of Satan, but none of the founders would have considered government sanction of Satanic altars inside Capitol buildings as protected by the First Amendment, hetold The Sentinel.

And hes exactly right. Theres no reason to tolerate altars to Satan in public places, no reason to tolerate massively wealthy universities that spread poisonous ideologies, and no reason to accept the ultimate victory of the left as inevitable. For too long, conservatives have foolishly hoped that appeals to a neutral public square, high-minded tolerance, and live-and-let-live winsomeness would be enough to halt the lefts march through the institutions.

But it was a fantasy, a soothing story conservatives told themselves while their culture crumbled around them. William F. Buckley famously said in the mission statement for National Review that the purpose of the magazine was to stand athwart history, yelling stop. That was in 1955. In the nearly 70 years since, its become clear you can yell all you want, but the left isnt listening. They will not stop unless someone stops them.

Buckleys own career began with the publication in 1951 ofGod and Man at Yale, which excoriated the university for foisting collectivist, secular ideology on its students. Today, Yale and its peer institutions like Harvard and Penn are doing far worse than that, actively preaching racism and antisemitism and a virulent form of liberalism that disfigures reason and enslaves the mind.

Its not enough to stand athwart history, yelling stop. At some point you have to do more than yell. You have to act.

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Republicans Need To Learn How To Go After The Left - The Federalist

On 60 Minutes in October, President Biden was asked if the United States was going to struggle to support two wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Biden responded by saying: No. Were the United States of America for Gods sake, the most powerful nation in the history not in the world, in the history of the world. The history of the world.We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense.

Just a few days later, reality intervened when a shipment of American artillery shells destined for Ukraine was rerouted to Israel. This followed a decision by the Biden administration in early 2023 to ship 300,000 artillery shells from a U.S. stockpile in Israel that traditionally had been used to resupply the Jewish state in times of crisis. More recently, a Ukrainian official told ABC News that since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas War, deliveries of NATO-standard artillery ammunition and other munitions have plummeted by more than 30 percent. On top of all this, a multibillion-dollar backlog of arms orders to Taiwan persists as China continues to take actions that indicate it is preparing to forcibly seize control of the island nation.

Even the most powerful nation in the history of the world cannot run the world without facing tradeoffs. But with the Biden administration dug in and unresponsive to criticism in a manner that evokes the Bush administration and Iraq in 2004, change will need to be forced on it.

The Biden administrations latest demand from Congress is for another $61 billion for Ukraine, which would bring the total amount since 2022 to nearly $200 billion. With the war at a stalemate, the U.S. fiscal outlook increasingly bleak, and leaders in both Washington and Kyiv seemingly impervious to these facts, a different course is clearly necessary. Congress should use the most powerful tool at its disposal the purse to force the administration onto a different path in Ukraine.

Congress should reject the latest funding request for two main reasons: First, the Biden administration does not have a plan for producing a Ukrainian victory nor can they even articulate what a Ukrainian victory looks like. Second, the current U.S. fiscal position does not lend itself to continued blank checks for Ukraine or other foreign policy misadventures.

There is little hope of a meaningful Ukrainian breakthrough against the Russians in the near term. As The Wall Street Journal reported, Ukraine may not even be able to launch another counteroffensive at all until 2025. At the same time, the Zelensky government has maintained its maximal war aims, its rejection of diplomacy, and its way of fighting the war that consumes munitions faster than Western nations can produce them.

Add in rapid rates of expenditure of American-made ammunition in Israels war in Gaza, and the latter problem becomes even more pronounced. Even before the Middle East erupted, the commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe was warning that NATO weapons stockpiles were dangerously low. The reason Washington decided to give cluster munitions to Ukraine was because of what National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan referred to as Ukraines dramatically high expenditure rates of artillery in the conflict. The administrations elusive theory of victory contrasts with the very real escalation risks that remain in Ukraine whether due to an unintentional confrontation between Russian and NATO troops on Ukraines borders or reckless behavior by the Ukrainian government. Another $61 billion would be, at best, throwing good money after bad.

The second reason Congress should decline the request is that the U.S. fiscal position appears truly dire. Though overpredicted historically, the country may finally be approaching the precipice of fiscal ruin. Shortly after President Bidens 60 Minutes interview, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen declared that the United States can certainly afford to support two wars in Ukraine and Israel. But since Yellens interview, the U.S. Treasury has had several weak bond sales, forcing the United States to pay higher interest on its debt and demonstrating a diminishing confidence in the U.S. fiscal outlook among investors. Interest on the debt is now roughly $1 trillion per year, the national debt itself is at almost $34 trillion, and the budget deficit each year is some $1.5 trillion and expected to jump to almost $3 trillion by 2033.

In light of the above, Congress would be foolish to rack up another $61 billion in debt to support a failing war in Ukraine. The Biden administration continues to publicly advance the delusion that Ukraine can achieve a total and decisive victory against Russia. Congress is under no obligation to join them in that delusion. The Constitution gives Congress the power to take the administrations checkbook away. If Congress declines to use that power and once again co-signs the Biden administrations Ukraine policy, they will likely share its place in history as coauthors of diplomatic and fiscal ruin.

Dan Caldwell is a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War and former congressional staffer. Justin Logan is the director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.

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Biden Overdrew America's Account With Blank Checks To Ukraine - The Federalist

Eyebrows were raised last week when it was discovered that Special Counsel Jack Smith had added attorney Michael Dreeben to his legal team.

An interesting detail: Michael Dreeben somehow snuck into Jack Smiths office. He was Muellers appellate guy, enthused Marcy Wheeler, a proponent of the debunked conspiracy theory that Donald Trump stole the 2016 election by colluding with Russia.

Fellow Russia-collusion hoaxer Rachel Maddow of MSNBC ran an entire segment to announce the exciting news that Dreeben is helming this part of the case, meaning Smiths request to the Supreme Court to look at whether American presidents may be prosecuted for actions taken while they are president. Left-wing legal activist (and, yes, another bitter clinger Russia-collusion hoaxer) Joyce Vance said her friend Dreeben had framed this petition before the Supreme Court.

Mueller, of course, is Robert Mueller, the ostensible head of the Mueller probe that treated the Russia conspiracy scam as credible and leaked information to the propaganda press to ensure it had maximum effect. After 18 months, the investigation concluded with not a single American, much less a single Trump official, being found to have colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. On the way to that conclusion, it wreaked havoc on Republicans across the country, and a strong majority of Democrats still believe the big lie that Russians stole the 2016 election for Donald Trump.

As anyone who saw the visibly struggling Mueller testify in July 2019 knows, he wasnt in a mental position to lead the operation. That was left to key operatives, including more than a dozen Democrats. For example, Mueller selected partisan Andrew Weissmann for a key role. In addition to his ethically flawed prosecutions of Enron executives, he was at Hillary Clintons ill-fated 2016 Victory Night Party. The inspector general report showed him as a full participant in the Russia-collusion hoax. After the Mueller probe, Weissmann went on to raise money for Joe Bidens presidential campaign. Weissmann was also part of the team at left-wing legal group Just Security that unofficially wrote Jack Smiths indictment of Trump over classified documents.

As partisan as Weissmann was, and continues to be in his role at left-wing propaganda outlet MSNBC, he wasnt even the actual leader of the Mueller lawfare strategy. That was the much more subtle, much more careful, and much less sloppy Michael Dreeben.

Dreeben was leading the special counsels defense each step of the way, Politico wrote in 2018 when it put him in the top 10 of its power list. He is widely seen as being in charge of Muellers overall legal strategy. When Mueller picked Dreeben, former Chuck Schumer staffer and anti-Trump resistance hero Preet Bharara praised the pick.

That was important because even though the Mueller team knew from the outset that the Russia-collusion theory it perpetuated was false, it pursued a novel legal strategy of trying to build an impeachment case that Trump obstructed justice when he protested the Democrat-designed and Democrat-funded Russia-collusion lie. It is also worth noting that the Mueller probe, for fairly obvious reasons, never investigated how the Russia-collusion theory was designed and funded by Democrats, developed with the help of Russian operatives, and integrated into the federal governments unconstitutional resistance of a duly elected president. Covering up those facts was, in fact, the purpose of the Mueller probe.

Now Dreeben has joined the Biden administrations effort to try to convict Trump on Jan. 6-related charges before the 2024 election. This is not the first Democrat effort Dreeben joined. He was also brought on to help Democrat Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vances successful effort at the Supreme Court in 2020 to get Trumps taxes and related financial records.

New York Magazine reported that Dreeben was part of a key group of former Mueller prosecutors brought in by Vance to figure out ways to politically prosecute Trump. They werent the only lawyers brought into the Democrat operation. Vance secured legal help from a Biden-connected law firm in New York City to design the get Trump operation. The powerhouse law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison lent Michael Pomerantz, Elyssa Abuhoff, and Caroline Williamson to Vance. The law firm had held a $2,800-per-plate fundraiser for Biden during his presidential campaign.

By the spring of 2023, Dreeben was publicly noting his affiliation with Just Security, the legal beachhead of the Trump resistance. The group helped launder Mueller probe legal theories into the general public and helped transition the Russia-collusion impeachment theory to the Ukraine issue once it became apparent that the Russia hoax was only believed by Democrats in echo chambers. Dreeben left the federal government in June 2019 after the Mueller probe ended, and he was viewed by Republican congressional staffers as being involved in Democrats impeachment efforts later that year along with Norm Eisen. Eisen, a frequent author at Just Security, was the House Democrats counsel for the 2019 impeachment.

Dreeben is one of the most experienced advocates before the Supreme Court, having argued 105 cases during his time in the solicitor generals office. That the elite attorney is helping Democrats with their 2024 campaign strategy of lawfare is significant and showcases how much coordination between key Democrat operatives is behind this Soviet-style attempt to imprison President Joe Bidens political opponents.

Democrat prosecutors began indicting Donald Trump and other Republican political opponents earlier this year. Democrat Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Vances successor, indicted Trump in March in a widely panned case involving payments to Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election. After the shocking raid on Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump in Florida in a classified documents case in June 2023. Democrat activist Fani Willis indicted Trump and more than a dozen other Republicans in August for contesting the poorly run 2020 election in Georgia. Smith also indicted Trump in Washington, D.C., in August on charges related to the Jan. 6 protest of the controversial 2020 election.

This is all happening while the Democrat New York Attorney General Letitia James, who ran on an explicit campaign of using lawfare to harm Trump, is attempting to seize the Trump family business as punishment for his political views.

The focus on Smiths second indictment in Washington, D.C., is occurring along with the realization that the other cases might not secure the quick and easy convictions in front of biased juries that are the hallmark of other show trials.

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Meet Michael Dreeben, The Man Behind Major Anti-Trump Ops - The Federalist

Senate Democrats blocked an opportunity to vote this week on legislation allowing schools enrolled in the National School Lunch Program to serve whole milk.

On Thursday, Democrat Chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee Debbie Stabenow refused to allow lawmakers a vote on the Whole Milk For Healthy Kids Act, which passed the House Wednesday. The legislation amends the Richard Russell National School Lunch Act to allow schools with federally subsidized lunch programs to offer whole milk alongside low-fat varieties.

Access to healthy and nutritious whole milk should not be controversial, said Kansas Republican Sen. Roger Marshall. I was heartened to see the overwhelming bipartisan support for our bill last night in the House. With this momentum, we thought we had a real opportunity to come together and get a bipartisan win in the Senate to close out the year.

It remains unclear why the Democrats blocked the measure. When reached for comment Friday, Stabenows office referred The Federalist to the senators brief remarks on the Senate floor Thursday night.

Stabenow cited incumbent dietary guidelines that broadly recommend a low-fat diet.

Dairy is a very important part of a balanced meal, but one thing is clear, Stabenow said, and that is that school meal standards, currently based on dietary science, should continue to be based on dietary guidelines, not based on which individual food products that we support.

At this point in time, I do not believe its in the best interest to be able to move forward on this bill, Stabenow finished.

Last year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) finally proposed an update to the agencys definition of health to promote foods higher in saturated fat content, such as salmon, over ultra-processed cereals. The USDA, Stabenow mentioned, is in the process right now [of] updating school meal[] standards.

Americans, however, are slowly waking up to the devastation of the low-fat diet institutionalized by policymakers and major public health groups such as the American Heart Association (AHA), which endorsed the diet regimen more than 60 years ago. And theyre waking up with a hangover. About 6 in 10 American adults are suffering from at least one chronic disease, and 4 in 10 suffer from at least two, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Childhood obesity, meanwhile, has reached epidemic levels, with nearly 1 in 5 children being categorically obese.

While it might be a stretch to say the dietary guidelines caused the unprecedented outbreak of obesity and disease, the low-fat recommendations certainly havent prevented present health crises.

Nina Teicholz spent nearly a decade researching the science behind health authorities embrace of a low-fat diet and published her findings in her 2014 book, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet.

Almost nothing that we commonly believe today about fats generally and saturated fat in particular appears, upon close examination, to be accurate, she wrote. Teicholz reviewed the history of dietary guidelines endorsing a low-fat diet and found personal biases and industry influence often contaminated the substantiating research.

Ultimately, for every million more dollars spent by the AHA and [National Institutes of Health] trying to prove the diet-heart hypothesis, the harder it became for those groups to reverse course or entertain other ideas, Teicholz wrote. Although studies on the diet-heart hypothesis had a surprisingly high failure rate, these results had to be rationalized, minimized, and distorted, since the hypothesis itself had become a matter of institutionalized credibility.

Healthy fats such as those found in beef and milk are essential for properly absorbing fat-soluble vitamins such as A, D, K, and E. The vitamins found in fortified cereal, Teicholz noted, can only be well absorbed if consumed with milk that has not been stripped of its fat content.

The U.S. Dietary Guidelines, however, as cited by Sen. Stabenow, still recommend Americans adhere to a low-fat diet.

Maybe Republicans should have slipped the milk measure into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) just as they did with the reauthorization of warrantless surveillance. After all, adolescent malnutrition is a national security issue, and the epidemic of childhood obesity is leaving the armed forces strapped for manpower.

The legislation blocked by the Senate Agriculture chair this week is separate from the Protecting School Milk Choices Act of 2023 proposed by House Republicans earlier this year to mandate sugary chocolate milk in schools. House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik introduced the bill to counter proposed restrictions on flavored milk in middle and elementary schools put forward by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

This approach would reduce exposure to added sugars and would promote the more nutrient-dense choice of unflavored milk for young children when their tastes are being formed, the agency proposal read.

More than 15 million American children received breakfast in school through the 2021-2022 academic year, according to the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC). The federalmilk mandaterequires schools to provide cows milk for every student on assistance.

Eleven House Republicans, however, including the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania, co-sponsored legislation to require chocolate milk be made available. The average cup contains up to 3 teaspoons of added sugar.

[READ: Republicans In The Swamp Should Take On The Real Culture Wars, Not Bidens War On Chocolate Milk]

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Senate Dems Block Bill To Allow Whole Milk In School Lunch Programs - The Federalist

The same intelligence experts who penned the infamous Hunter Biden laptopletter in October 2020 are now calling on lawmakers to reauthorize the warrantless surveillance state through the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

On Monday, 46 former national security officials signed a letter urging Capitol Hill to rubber stamp the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The same law was abused by deep-state FBI agents to surveil members of Trumps campaign. The more than three dozen former national security officials who signed the letter invoked the fentanyl crisis and overseas turmoil to make their case for unconstitutional surveillance.

As you well know, our nation is under significant threat today with wars in Europe and the Middle East, a potential conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific, and the deadly flow of fentanyl across our southern border, they wrote. In these circumstances, we cannot hamstring the U.S. Intelligence Community either by failing to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act or by limiting it in ways that would make it difficult for the government to protect Americans.

Four of the letters signatories also signed the letter in the fall of 2020 that sought to discredit Hunter Bidens laptop as an instrument of Russian interference. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Deputy Director for the National Security Agency (NSA) Richard Ledgett, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Acting Director Michael Morell, and former CIA Chief of Staff Jeremy Bash each put their names on both the humiliating 2020 laptop letter and Mondays call to reauthorize baseless surveillance.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are preparing to reauthorize Section 702 of FISA, which expires on Dec. 31, without significant reform through the NDAA, an annual defense bill. Section 702 ostensibly allows federal intelligence officials to monitor non-U.S. persons, located abroad, who are expected to possess, receive, or communicate foreign intelligence information. FISA has been abused, however, to conduct domestic surveillance of the regimes political opponents.

Now the same former federal intelligence officials who propped up President Joe Biden in 2020 by peddling a Russian conspiracy theory have demanded that Congress keep the levers of their insurance policy for 2024 intact.

Theres no substitute for it, they wrote Monday.

In an interview with New York Magazine, Clapper defended signing the discredited Biden laptop letter last fall. The letters allegations of Russian interference were quickly debunked with rare on-the-record statements from the FBI, the Department of Justice, theDepartment of National Intelligence, and theState Department, all before Election Day.

Clapper was not pleased to be asked about the letter two years after its release, the magazine reported.

What are you trying to get me to say, that I screwed up and I shouldnt have signed the letter? Im not going to say that, Clapper told the paper. As far as I was concerned, we were waving the yellow flag. At the time, it was fishy to me. It had the characteristics of a Russian disinformation campaign.

Morell, the former acting CIA director who signed both letters, was a campaign surrogate for President Biden in the 2020 election and admitted he drafted and circulated the letter to give Joe Biden a talking point to use during a 2020 presidential debate against then-President Donald Trump.

[READ: CIA Solicited Signatures For Hunter Biden Laptop Letter, Congressional Testimony Shows]

On Monday last week, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan sent a letter to former CIA Director William Burns demanding to know who, if any, of the 51 former intelligence officials who signed the Biden laptop letter were paid by the agency.

We understand that former intelligence officials often return to the intelligence community under private contract for their previous agencies, Jordan wrote. It is vital to the Committees oversight to understand whether any of the signatories of the public statement were actively employed by CIA as contractors or consultants at the time they signed the public statement.

Last week, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, blasted the congressional effort to pass a proposed FISA reform measure as a thinly veiled way of saying FISA 702 is just fine as it is.'

The FBI has used Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to conduct warrantless backdoor searches of the private electronic communications of American citizens, Lee wrote in a Blaze op-ed on Monday. It has done so, moreover, not just sporadically and by accident but quite deliberately and on hundreds of thousands of occasions.

The Brennan Center for Justice agrees, calling the proposed measure by House Republicans the biggest expansion in government surveillance since the Patriot Act. The liberal think tank faults provisions that would expand corporate compliance with government surveillance programs without adequate safeguards to prevent abuse.

Despite its name, the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act is not a reform bill. It is an anti-reform bill in disguise, reads a Brennan Center policy paper. Not only does it fail to rein in warrantless surveillance of Americans of Section 702; it would actually expand surveillance in critical respects, effectively rewarding the FBI for years of misconduct and thus encouraging even more flagrant abuse in the future.

[READ: Think The FBI Deserves The Benefit Of The Doubt? This Laundry List Of Corruption Should Make You Think Again]

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'Experts' Who Discredited Biden Laptop Call To Extend Warrantless Spying - The Federalist

Ranked-choice voting (RCV) advocates are circulating incredibly misleading messaging about what the deceptive system actually is ahead of a Wisconsin Senate hearing on legislation attempting to bring RCV to the state.

Under RCV, often dubbed rigged-choice voting by its critics, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes in the first round of voting, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and his votes are reallocated to the voters second-choice candidate.

Obtained by The Federalist, a memo produced by Democracy Found, a Wisconsin-based RCV advocacy group, attempts to mislead voters and legislators about how a top-five ranked-choice voting system would actually work. Similar to Alaskas top-four RCV elections, a top-five RCV system would create a jungle-style race in which candidates from different parties would run in the same primary. The top five vote-getters would then advance to the general election, in which RCV would be used to determine the winner.

Bills (AB 563andSB 528) proposing such a system for Wisconsinscongressional primaries and general elections are currently being considered by the states legislature, with a Senate committee hearing on SB 528 set to occur on Tuesday.

In its memo titled, Factual Correction: Final Five Voting (FFV) and Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) are Not the Same, Democracy Found deceptively attempts to argue that a top-five primary and RCV are completely separate systems, despite admitting the two are inextricably linked. After describing how a top-five primary works, the group dovetails into discussing the instant-runoff general election that would follow, which Democracy Found admits would require voters to use a grid-style, ranked ballot [to] pick their favorite candidate [and if] they want to their 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and last place candidates as well.

In other words, the top-five system advocated for the group would implement an RCV system for Wisconsins general elections.

Democracy Found tries to sweep this fact under the rug by claiming RCV is often used as a synonym for an Instant Runoff because an Instant Runoff election is enabled by a ranked-choice ballot and is an umbrella term that can mean different things. The group also baselessly asserts that RCV make[s] elections more fair and more democratic.

Instant Runoff is more precise, and Instant Runoff General Election, not RCV, correctly describes what we propose in WI as the Part 2 of FFV, the memo reads.

Democracy Founds dishonest messaging falls in lockstep with that advised by pro-RCV advocates. A polling memo previously obtained by The Federalist revealed that RCV proponents are searching for ways to deceive voters into adopting the system for their elections throughout the country. Among the talking points found to be the most effective at bringing voters on board with the system are those centered around the concept of fairness. Meanwhile, arguments that the system would result inCalifornia-style primaries similar to the top-five system pushed by Democracy Found appear to work best in generating opposition to RCV.

RCV advocates have clearly realized that promoting RCV on the merits is not working, which is why proponents are resorting to pie-in-the-sky arguments about fairness and somehow claiming that final-five voting isnt RCV, even though RCV is an integral component of final-five voting, Honest Elections Executive Director Jason Snead said in a statement. At the end of the day, RCV is unpopular because it makes voting harder and the public dont understand or want it.

Amid RCV proponents push for the system in Wisconsin, a coalition of election integrity organizations recently issued a letter warning the states GOP legislative leadership about how a top-five RCV system would produce confusing, complex, and costly electoral contests and mark a devastating blow to the integrity of Wisconsin elections. The groups also highlighted how RCV disenfranchises voters and often produces results that contradict the desires of voters.

During Alaskas 2022 special election for its at-large congressional district, for example, nearly 15,000 votes were deemed exhausted and discarded. Of these nearly 15,000 ballots, more than 11,000 were from voters who voted for only one Republican candidate and no one else, according to ananalysisfrom the Foundation for Government Accountability. In that same election, Democrat Mary Peltolawonthe seat even though nearly 60 percent of voters [cast] their ballots for a Republican.

The system also played amajor rolein helping GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski fend off a challenge from a more conservative candidate that same year.

In light of the push for RCV in Wisconsin, a coalition of GOP state lawmakers have since proposed a constitutional amendment to prohibit the use of RCV in the state. Under theWisconsin Constitution, if the legislature approves a constitutional amendment proposal in two consecutive sessions, it will then go to the voters for final passage.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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Ranked-Choice Voting Proponents Are Lying To WI Voters To Hide The System's Flaws - The Federalist