Category Archives: Federalist

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday demanding documentation related to the FBIs raid of former President Donald Trumps Mar-a-Lago estate last year.

The raid which took place on Aug. 8, 2022 was reportedly aimed at retrieving any document Trump ever saw, read, or created for the entirety of his four years as commander-in-chief. Due to the unprecedented nature of the Biden DOJ conducting a raid on a former president and a potential 2024 rival, House Judiciary Republicans sent letters to Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and then-White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain demanding records pertaining to the execution of a search warrant and the decision to seek a search warrant for Trumps estate. The affidavit released by the FBI later that month justifying the agencys warrant application to raid Trumps Florida residence was nearly all redacted.

In November, the DOJ appointedU.S. Attorney Jack Smith as a special counsel to investigate whether Trump violated federal laws related to the handling of presidential records.

The Judiciary Committee previously requested information and documents related to the FBIs raid on President Trumps residence and its subsequent investigation, Jordans letter to Garland reads. Because you have not provided this information, and in light of your appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel, we write to request an unredacted copy of the memorandum outlining the scope of Mr. Smiths probes regarding President Trump and any supporting documentation related to his appointment as special counsel.

In addition to the unredacted memo outlining the scope of Special Counsel Smiths investigations, Jordan is also seeking any other document describing, listing, or delineating the authority and jurisdiction of the special counsel. Garlands deadline for forfeiting such records to the House Judiciary Committee is June 20, according to the letter.

Jordans Tuesday letter to the DOJ is his second within the past week requesting additional information related to the FBIs Mar-a-Lago raid. On Thursday, Jordan sent a separate memo to Garland expressing concerns about the FBIs track record of bias and reckless disregard for truth, with the House Judiciary chair specifically referencing the report released by U.S. Attorney John Durham. Released last month, the bombshell report found the FBI possessed no real evidence that then-candidate Trump colluded with Russian government officials when it launched its investigation into the Trump campaign leading up to the 2016 election.

Meanwhile, House Republicans recently announced plans to hold contempt hearings for Wray later this week for allegedly violating a congressional subpoenaover an unclassified document that purportedly implicates President Joe Biden in a $5 million bribery scheme with a foreign national from Bidens time in the Obama administration.

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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Jim Jordan Demands DOJ Forfeit Docs On The FBI's Trump Raid - The Federalist

This week Apple unveiled the next big thing in tech: Vision Pro, a $3,500 headset that heralds the era of spatial computing where digital content blends seamlessly with your physical space.

This isnt quite the same as virtual reality, which blocks out the real world and swaps in a virtual one. Vision Pro is basically a set of digital goggles that work as a mixed-reality platform, allowing users to see and hear the physical world even as they interact and manipulate digital content in front of them.

Apple is putting all its clout into this idea of spatial computing, which the company has been reportedly working on for years. Announcing the new product, chief executive Tim Cook compared it to the way the iPhone introduced the concept of mobile computing. Its the first product you look through, and not at, he said. You can see, hear, and act with digital content just like its in your physical space. Youre no longer limited by a display.

Thats almost true. In fact, youre still looking at a display, its just a display of the real world, a digital projection of reality. The headsets cameras capture the world and display it on two small digital screens directly in front of your eyes. So users arent really lookingthroughthe headset at the world, theyre looking at a digital recreation of the world around them. The world you see through the headset might seem real, but it isnt.

Apple calls it the most advanced personal electronics device ever, which is true in more ways than one, especially the personal aspect. Put bluntly, Vision Pro appears to be nothing so much as an incredibly powerful isolation device a means of immersing yourself in a sea of digital content in a way that physically cuts you off from other people and the real world.

That is to say, Vision Pro is precisely the kind of technology that will exponentially increase the isolation and misery of everyone who uses it. Its been obvious for years now that the proliferation of digital tech is creating a populace thats addicted to smartphones, porn, and social media and doing so in a social environment of ever-increasing isolation, anxiety, depression, deracination, and collapsing community. Whatever benefits there are to digital tech, its not at all clear they outweigh the heavy human costs.

The introduction video for Vision Pro unintentionally highlights these costs. It features various people wearing and using the headset. All of them are indoors, and with the exception of a single, brief, real-world interaction, all of them are all alone.

But even then, the real-world exchange doesnt convey what Apple wished quite the opposite, in fact. In a rather farcical scene, a woman sits on a couch wearing the headset and watching a video, and another woman walks in. The voiceover says, Foundational to Vision Pro is that youre not isolated from other people. When someone else is in the room, you can see them and they can see you. But thats clearly not true, as the goggles obscure most of the womans face, even as the pair talk and laugh.

Its obvious, even from the promotional clip, that that kind of interaction, in which someone wearing the headset talks to someone else physically present in the room with them, is the last thing Apples designers and engineers had in mind when designing this. The entire purpose, it seems, is to throttle such real-world interactions.

In another scene, we see a man sitting alone in a dark house, watching video clips of his daughters playing and blowing out birthday candles. The voiceover tells us that Vision Pro is Apples first three-dimensional camera and lets you capture and relive your memories in 3D with spatial audio.

That means this father was awkwardly wearing the headset when he recorded the clips hes now watching, alone, in a darkened house. Are we to assume that capturing memories so you can relive them later, in 3D with spatial audio, means wearing creepy, face-obscuring goggles to your kids birthday party?

And why depict this father alone in a dark house? Where is his family? Ben Thompson, a tech commentator otherwise effusive in his praise of the headset,said, Ill be honest: what this looked like to me was a divorced dad, alone at home with his Vision Pro, perhaps because his wife was irritated at the extent to which he got lost in his own virtual experience. Exactly right.

Aside from the isolating effects of such technology is its invasiveness. Sterling Crispin, an engineer who spent years working on foundational elements of Vision Pro,explained on Twitterthat much of his work involved detecting the mental state of users based on data from their body and brain when they were in immersive experiences, what he called basically mind reading.

So, a user is in a mixed reality or virtual reality experience, and AI models are trying to predict if he is feeling curious, mind wandering, scared, paying attention, remembering a past experience, or some other cognitive state. And these may be inferred through measurements like eye tracking, electrical activity in the brain, heartbeats and rhythms, muscle activity, blood density in the brain, blood pressure, skin conductance, and more.

He adds there were a lot of tricks involved to make specific predictions possible, like monitoring eye behavior to anticipate when a user was going to click on something, or quickly flashing visuals or sounds to a user in ways they may not perceive, and then measuring their reaction to it.

What Crispin is describing, albeit not in these terms, is a concerted effort to monitor, manipulate, and potentially control the user, all under the guise of predicting his behavior. Its not hard to imagine a near future in which AI is able to translate monitored brain activity and other biometrics into images. A user could be wearing an Apple headset thats continuously transmitting brainwaves and images and thoughts to the cloud, where corporations could mine them for profit and government censors could monitor them for wrongthink.

This already happens now, so why would it not happen with even more powerful technology? Worse, these recorded thoughts and images could be archived the way phone and email records are now, under federal surveillance laws. Were talking about a permanent digital record of your inmost thoughts, recorded and archived by the worlds most powerful corporations and accessible by government agencies whenever they want.

The blunt reality about Apples new mixed-reality platform, then, is that its designed to increase the soul-crushing isolation and loneliness of modern life, thus amplifying the ability of Big Tech and hence, government to exert control over us. The vision of the future offered by Apple is one of solitary men and women sitting alone in the darkened rooms of empty houses, their faces hidden behind shining black masks, reliving memories that were digitally mediated to begin with.

Its a profoundly anti-human vision, and we should resist it with all our strength.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Apple's New Headset Is Designed To Isolate And Control You - The Federalist

The president of the United States has been accused by a credible FBI informant of allegedly taking $5 million in a bribery scheme with a foreign national while he was the sitting vice president. That seems like a pretty big story, but what do I know?

Apparently, theres a document laying out the accusation in some detail and not one cooked up by an oppo-research firm for the RNC and then disseminated to saps in the media to try to delegitimize a presidential election. No, its in an unclassified FD-1023 form, used by law enforcement to record credible tips. Granted, its not in the possession of Buzzfeed, but rather the vaunted FBI, which refused to hand it to Congress for some reason. And there is little curiosity on the part of establishment media to find out what it says.

I know, I know, its getting tedious asking people to imagine the thermonuclear media blast theyd be swept up in if a Republican president had been accused of bribery by an FBI informant. This is the way of the world. To this point, the debate over the proper pronunciation of Ron DeSantis last name has gotten more coverage than the president possibly pocketing millions of dollars through shell corporations.

Though, I suppose thats not exactly right. Bidens Praetorian Guard have begun to preemptively frame the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, James Comer, as some devious nut for demanding the FBI hand over documents. This is what they did to Devin Nunes, who turned out to be correct in his assessment of the Russia-collusion investigation.

There isnt a real journalist in the universe not a beat reporter or opinion writer or copy editor who wouldnt want to read an informants account of a sitting president taking a bribe. You can debunk it. You can prove it. But you want to see it. But therein lies the problem. There arent many journalists left.

Take Philip Bump, who contends that James Comers bribery allegations are out on a very shaky limb, even though Comer has never once made any bribery allegations. The House investigation is focused on the decision-making process that followed the informants accusation.

Last week, CNN ran a piece that might well have been sent verbatim from the FBI press shop. CNNs sources claimed that the form in question has origins in a tranche of documents that Rudy Giuliani provided to the Justice Department in 2020 and the investigation led nowhere. A big nothingburger.

Its this CNN story, and another version in The Washington Post (almost surely from the same sources), that allowed Jamie Raskin, ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, to claim that Rudy Giuliani surfaced these allegations, and that a team had looked at the document and in August determined that there was no grounds to escalate from an initial assessment to a preliminary investigation.

None of that, apparently, is true. As my colleagues Margot Cleveland and Mollie Hemingway report, former Attorney General William Barr told The Federalist that the investigation had never been closed, it had merely been sent to an office in Delaware. And the document did not emanate from Giuliani the same ploy used to undercut the New York Posts reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop story but from a 2017 whistleblower report that showed up in a 2020 search. No one has come forward to accuse Barr of lying, so I assume the above is true.

Who knows what this is all about? Ive learned not to make too many assumptions. For all I know, this all leads to a rickety accusation and a dead end.

There is, however, already tons of circumstantial evidence that Joe Biden participated in his familys shady business, which makes the existence of this document highly newsworthy. We know that the president lied about his knowledge of Hunters relationships with Ukrainian energy concerns and Chinese interests. We have emails implicating the president as a participant in Hunters schemes emails authenticated by forensic specialists. We have witnesses, including a retired Navy veteran, contending that Biden is the big guy Hunter is talking about in those emails. Even the Obama administration was alarmed about the Biden family business.

Almost a year ago, former Trump White House adviser Peter Navarro was indicted and arrested by the FBI for ignoring a congressional subpoena by the Jan. 6 commission. He was handcuffed and reportedly denied permission to make a phone call to a lawyer. Today, its the FBI that is ignoring subpoenas. And there will be no one to arrest FBI Director Chris Wray for contempt.

There will also be no more sanctimonious speeches or grandstanding from Democrats regarding the sacred need for transparency and separation of powers. Democracy is no longer in danger, apparently. Of course, we expect jaw-dropping hypocrisy from politicians. We expect a politicized Justice Department to protect Democrats. Nowadays, we also expect the complete abdication of journalistic responsibility from a partisan big media. And thats a massive problem.

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Nothing To See Here But A Whistleblower Accusing Biden Of Bribes - The Federalist

The Federal District court for the Southern District of Florida in Miami is seen in October 2018. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Florida District Judge Aileen Cannon is scheduled to oversee former President Trump's first court appearance next week, adding an unexpected twist to the historic case involving classified documents.

The big picture: Cannon was nominated to serve on the federal bench by Trump in 2020 and was criticized for ruling in his favor last year, allowing a special master to review evidence seized from Mar-a-Lago in the classified records probe.

Cannon, born in Colombia and raised in Miami, Fla., received her bachelors degree from Duke University and graduated from the University of Michigan Law School.

Of note: Cannon listed herself as a longtime member of the Federalist Society, first joining the conservative legal group in 2005.

Back in September, Cannon accepted Trump's bid for a special master to review evidence seized by the FBI in the search of his Mar-a-Lago residence.

Details: Cannon had also denied the DOJ's request to exclude classified documents from the special master review.

Federal judges are randomly selected to handle criminal cases.

Yes, but: The odds that Cannon would be selected for this case were fairly low.

What we're watching: Trump's first court appearance is slated for Tuesday at the U.S. District Court in Miami.

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What to know about Aileen Cannon, the judge overseeing Trump's ... - Axios

Whole Womans Health Alliance just became Indianas first abortion facility to close following the Supreme Courts Dobbs v. Jackson decision last summer.

Since opening its doors in 2019, Whole Womens Health Alliance (WWHA) in South Bend, Indiana, executed more than 1,100 abortions. The facility still plans to refer callers to other abortion providers and to help pay and coordinate travel for out-of-state abortions but announced on Monday that it will permanently cease personally ending unborn lives immediately due to politically driven and medically unnecessary abortion restrictions.

Whole Womans Health has ended the lives of 1000+ preborn [H]oosiers and victimized thousands of women since opening in 2019, Voices for Life Executive Director Melanie Garcia Lyon said in a statement. This is a victory for human rights in our community.

Lyon, who is also the Sidewalk Advocates for Life leader for the South Bend chapter, told The Federalist that the closure feels really surreal given all of the time her organization spent praying for it to shutter its doors and offering life-affirming resources to pregnant women outside of the facility.

Weve been at the facility since it opened in 2019. I was there the first day it opened in June. And weve had a very consistent presence at the facility whenever its been open weve had volunteers there, she said.

Shortly after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb and the states Republican legislators acted swiftly to protect babies in utero except in cases of rape, incest, fatal fetal anomalies, or when the mothers life was at risk.

The pro-life law, which was supposed to take effect in September 2022, would have effectively shut down all seven of the states functioning abortion facilities. Instead, it was held up in courts by pro-abortion activists and organizations, including WWHA, which sent the state back to its 20-week gestation abortion limit. Despite this delay, abortions in Indiana still dropped significantly.

Nearly a year into the legal hubbub, the pro-life law is still under review by state courts, but the tide seems to be turning in favor of those protecting life in the womb.

[RELATED: Indiana Health Dept. Sits On Records Showing Two Babies Born Alive After Abortions, Three Women Dead]

Not only did WWHA shut down and rescind itself from the pro-abortion challenge against the states life-forward legislation, but rogue abortionists are also facing punishment from the state for violating state privacy laws.

In November 2022, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita filed an administrative action against Indiana abortionist Dr. Caitlin Bernard for failing to uphold legal and Hippocratic responsibilities by exploiting a 10-year-old little girls traumatic medical story to the press for her own interests and immediately reporttheabuse and rape of a child to Indiana authorities.

Dr. Bernard violated the law, her patients trust and the standards for the medical profession when she disclosed her patients abuse, medical issues, and medical treatment to a reporter at an abortion rights rally to further her political agenda, Rokita said in a statement.

Bernard was the sole source for The Indianapolis Starsviral articledetailing how a 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio crossed state lines in 2022 to obtain an abortion in Indiana.

The Indiana Medical Licensing Board (MLB) agreed with Rokita last month that Bernard violated state privacy laws when she disclosed the story to the Star but did not act on Rokitas reporting failure allegations.

Like we have said for a year, this case was about patient privacy and the trust between the doctor and patient that was broken. What if it was your child or your parent or your sibling who was going through a sensitive medical crisis, and the doctor, who you thought was on your side, ran to the press for political reasons? Its not right, and the facts we presented today made that clear. We appreciate the Medical Licensing Boards extraordinary time and consideration. My team did a great job getting the [t]ruth out. Caitlin Bernard was found liable for violating state and federal patient privacy law on three separate counts, the AGs office said in a statement after the decision.

Bernard was fined $3,000 for her malfeasance, but the MLB did not immediately say whether it would suspend her license. A source in Rokitas office told The Federalist that the MLB has yet to issue a final order detailing disciplinary proceedings. The MLB still has a majority of its 90 days to issue that final order, and Bernard will have 30 days to respond.

The last time the MLB seriously punished a doctor for abortion violations came in 2016 when it stripped Dr. Ulrich Klopfer, a mass abortionist, of his license for violating several state care and reporting requirements. After Klopfers passing in 2019, authorities uncovered a gruesome collection of more than2,000 fetal remains in his home.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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Abortion Facility Closes In IN As AG Pursues Abortionists' Licenses - The Federalist

Well, they finally did it. The powers that be actually indicted Donald Trump.

After the regime weaponized a bogus dossier, spied on his campaign, hamstrung his policy, impeached him, impeached him again, defamed him as a racist Nazi, made his supporters fear isolation and employment retribution, lied about him in every way imaginable on every news station and in every paper every day, and rigged elections again him, theyre finally taking him down with some paperwork.

These papers are criminal, you see, because they have classification markings, were in Trumps possession, and were part of a documents dispute. Pay no attention to the fact that the DOJ wont even tell the court specifically whats in the documents, meaning they can claim this is a Very Serious Matter Scouts honor! with no evidence available to the contrary. Or that as president, Trump possessed declassification authority that wouldnt have belonged to, say, a secretary of state or vice president.

Speak of the devil, ignore that Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, and Barack Obama all had their own documents disputes some more serious than Trumps without facing any criminal charges. And that the whole Mar-a-Lago fiasco, which involved the FBI sending dozens of plainclothes agents to raid the formers presidents estate and dig through his wifes closet, started when a disgruntled, backbench National Archives bureaucrat tattled because he didnt like the look of Trumps banker box.

As a result, Trump is being charged with 37 counts. But he isnt the only target here. So are you.

Bidens DOJ and FBI and their pals in the media wouldnt have to go no-holds-barred against Trump if you would just stop supporting him. Just like Trump didnt go away when the deep state staged its coup, you didnt repent of your patriotism when the current president stood in front of scary red lights and delivered his diatribe against ultra-MAGA Republicanism. Now the ruling class has no choice but to indict, because understand: Waging lawfare, lawlessness, and intimidation brutally and relentlessly against opponents until they crumple is the regimes whole offensive.

So the assaults keep coming, fast and hard, and America bleeds out from the wounds that have become all too familiar but no less painful: the lies, the retribution, the gaslighting.

Blue cities can openly flout pro-life laws restricting abortion, and pro-abortion nutjobs can launch molotov cocktails into life-saving pregnancy centers. But when the faithful Christians who do the most to care for single moms and pregnant women pray outside deadly abortion mills, they are arrested. Just to ensure onlooking pro-lifers are sufficiently intimidated, the feds also send agents to raid their homes and arrest them in front of their terrified children.

For those Christians who dont appear outside Planned Parenthood, just faithfully commune for weekly prayer and worship services, the same ruling regime simply shuts down their gatherings, citing public safety and love of neighbor. Oh, you think youre going to celebrate your Saviors resurrection? Weve got your license plate number and know where you live.

Meanwhile, leftists celebrating their favorite racist doctrines get a free pass to chant together in the streets and burn down buildings. Then experts explain why protesting in the faces of police officers is less dangerous than the deadly droplets of congregational singing, and media overlords define loving your neighbor as supporting BLM anarchists but streaming Sunday services.

When you demand that the government perform its most basic constitutional duty of protecting Americas borders, its partisans not only insult your intelligence by insisting the border is secure, but they ship busloads of migrants to your community. When any of the illegal invaders go on murderous rampages, the feds claim they were motivated by white supremacy. And while the Biden administration empowers corrupt cartels that traffic children, rape women, and profit off the most vulnerable, the media claim those advocating for a stronger national defense are the heartless ones.

Its not that the ruling class doesnt care about borders at all. Ukraines border dispute is of utmost importance to them. So they start or fund pointless wars that kill millions while accusing you of being a Putin stooge for opposing. Then they gift weapons to corrupt foreign oligarchs and terrorists while they try to ban you from defending yourself and your family here at home.

With Trump, it comes full circle, but its the same old play. Their hoaxes fail, so the feds interfere in elections and then censor you for noticing. When a presidential election with historic turnout, last-minute changes to the law, and countless irregularities shatters confidence in our whole self-governing enterprise, the federal government convicts fed-up grannies for waving flags in the Capitol and calls concerned voters a threat to democracy. To hide their own crimes, they charge and convict the people you elected for daring to challenge them.

The America you once loved and fought for, whose ideals many were willing to give their lives for, is dead. The people in the halls of power today are responsible for killing it and have faced zero accountability.

Few things can revive a lifeless country, especially when elections border on meaningless and shared values are a relic of the past. But any rebirth thats going to happen will start in your own heart and household.

First and more important than anything else: Repent and believe the Gospel. There is simply no enduring hope outside the good news that Jesus died and rose again to redeem the wretched souls of this sinful world who abandon their base desires in exchange for His righteousness and eternal life.

Then catechize yourself and your children. Teach them lasting truths about life and death, sin and salvation, worth and unworthiness. Instill in them the importance of hard work, the beauty of marriage and the sexes, the value of all human life, the pitfalls of pride, and their need for humility and forgiveness.

Join a church. Gather with believers who share your values and care about your spiritual state. Sing praise, pray, and read your Bible.

Care for the needy. Engage with your neighbors. Go outside and appreciate nature. Take good care of your body. Minimize screen time for yourself and your children. Keep an eye on their homework and library books. Run for school board and other local offices. Keep a garden. Buy a gun and learn how to use it responsibly. And dont cower from a worthwhile fight.

Nobody not Donald Trump, not Ron DeSantis, and not new FBI leadership can save America. Its up to you to save your corner of it.

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On Trump And Everything Else, The Regime Has Gaslighted ... - The Federalist

Ive been covering wildfires in the American west for three years now. On Tuesday, I moved outside of Denver to a property adjacent to Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests west of Boulder.

The first thing I did while unpacking was pack a bug out bag in case of an emergency when a nearby wildfire threatens to light my new place up in flames. Wildfires are no longer some faraway problem that pollutes lungs every once-in-a-while. Theyre a very real risk to living at 9,000 feet, especially when surrounded by federally managed land. To Washington bureaucrats, forest fires are merely a consequential warning of a changing climate.

More than 61 million residents up and down the east coast got a rude education this week to the experience of their neighbors in the American west who choke on wildfire smoke every summer.

Western infernos have become so out of control in recent years that the California insurance industry is going up in flames along with Americans homes and livelihoods. While the beltway press is eager to blame climate change, the primary culprit is negligent land management.

[READ: Bad Governance, Not Climate Change, Jeopardizes California Home Insurance]

Maybe the wildfire smoke that cancelled classes and baseball games in the nations capital will now wake up Washington lawmakers to the annual haze that blocks out the summer sun in the American West. Western states have spent years calling on D.C. bureaucrats who manage a third of the nations land to get their act together and properly maintain federal forests going up in smoke.

More than 100 years of aggressive fire suppression has left federal forests overgrown as massive tinder boxes waiting to turn heavenly mountain towns into scenes from Hell at the first match. But there are a myriad of ways Washington can proactively reverse the consequences of a centurys-worth of disaster forest policy.

For starters Congress can roll back the Roadless Rule prohibiting road construction and timber harvesting across nearly 59 million acres of federal forests. The lack of roads block firefighters access to put out problematic blazes and hampers efforts to manage the land properly. Meanwhile the lack of timber harvesting contributes to the fuel buildup on Forest Service land.

Joe Reddan has spent nearly four decades as a forester including a prolonged stint at the U.S Forest Service. Reddan now runs his own forestry consulting firm and said federal land managers need to ramp up timber sales and accelerate forest thinning to prevent summer wildfires from becoming the mega-infernos that send pollution as far as Europe.

Trees come out of the woods in one of two ways, Reddan told me. One on a log truck and the other up in smoke.

Current land managers remain over reliant on prescribed burns to clear out excess debris that eventually fuel large fires. Reddan described prescribed burns, where an area is deliberately set ablaze to preventatively incinerate smaller wood fuels, as stone-age technology thats very indiscriminate and causes large scale mortality.

A prescribed burn in the Santa Fe National Forest that spun out of control last year ignited into the largest wildfire in New Mexico history.

[READ: Federal Incompetence Is Responsible For New Mexicos Largest Wildfire]

I dont know of anybody whos ever lost a house to an escaped timber sale, Reddan said, adding the forests need to be properly managed back to good health before prescribed burns should be used.

Washington lawmakers can increase timber sales by rolling back the Roadless Rule hampering development in rural areas. A resurgence in primary processing plants or, sawmills, offers not only medicine to land health but promises local employment in small western mountain towns deprived of economic opportunities at the behest of radical environmentalists.

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Washington Chokes On A Lesson In Empathy - The Federalist

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Demos are among numerous left-wing voter advocacy groups partnering in the Biden administrations bid to interfere in U.S. elections, according to a new report.

On Wednesday, The Daily Signals Fred Lucas reported that the Indian Health Service (IHS) which assists American Indians as part of the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed the ACLU, Demos, the National Congress of American Indians, and the Native American Rights Fund are among the groups helping it to register and turn out voters under Executive Order 14019.

Signed by Biden in March 2021, the order instructs hundreds of federal agencies tointerferein the electoral process by using taxpayer money to boost voter registration and get-out-the-vote activities. This includes soliciting and facilitating approved, nonpartisan third-party organizations and State officials to provide voter registration services on agency premises. As The Federalist has previouslyreported, voter registration efforts are almost always a partisan venture and often involve left-wing groups that abuse their nonprofit status to target likely-Democrat voters.

Under Executive Order 14019, the heads of each agency werealso requiredto draft a strategic plan explaining how his or her department intends to fulfill Bidens directive. Despite attempts by good government groups to acquire these plans, the Biden administration has routinelystonewalledsuch efforts by slow-walking its response to federal court orders andheavily redactingany related documents it has released.

According to Lucas, The Daily Signal filed an open records request with IHS last year over the agencys strategic plan and any information regarding its criteria for selecting nonprofit organizations to work with it to achieve the goals of the order. In its response to the outlet last week, IHS claimed After a thorough search of our electronic data files, we did not locate records responsive to your request.

Its worth mentioning that IHS was one of the agencies flagged in a progress report released by more than 50 left-wing organizations (including the ACLU and Demos) that evaluated how well certain departments were complying with Bidens order. According to the evaluation, IHS is classified as one of three agencies that are falling behind in their efforts to register and turn out voters.

Unfortunately, there is no evidence to date that IHS has done any work to follow through on this commitment, which would be transformative for increasing voter access in Indigenous communities, the report reads.

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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Biden Is Working With Left-Wing Groups To Interfere In Elections - The Federalist

Nowadays, labor-law cases are a rare sight at the Supreme Court. The Court usually takes them only when they intersect with other fields, such as arbitration or the First Amendment. And at first glance, the Courts latest effort seemed a bit of a dud. In Glacier Northwest, Inc. v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the Court applied well-worn doctrine to find that federal law does not preempt certain state-law tort claims. That was the right result and, in truth, not all that interesting. More interesting, however, was the principal concurrence. Written by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, the concurrence suggested that labor-preemption doctrine cedes too much authority to administrative agencies. And if that view catches on, the Court could soon find itself wading back into the labor-law fieldthis time, in a more consequential case.

To understand the debate, we need some background. The main federal labor statute, the National Labor Relations Act, says nothing about preemption. Yet courts have given the Act broad preemptive effect anyway. Theyve reasoned that when Congress passed the Act, it was trying to nationalize labor policy. It wanted one set of rules to govern all labor disputes. So it created a single administrative body, the National Labor Relations Board, to make those rules up. And to make sure the Boards rules were followed, it implicitly preempted most state law in the labor field.

Or at least, thats what courts have inferred from the statute. And theyve carried that inference quite far. In the leading case, San Diego Building Trades Council v. Garmon, the Supreme Court held that the Act blocks state courts from regulating any conduct arguably protected by federal labor law. And generally, whether something is arguably protected is a decision for the Board. State courts cant make that decision for themselves; they have to wait for the Board to weigh in.

In Glacier, the question was how far that principle goes. The case involved a company that produced ready-made concrete. The company delivered the concrete in specialized trucks; after the concrete was mixed, the trucks spun it in drums to keep it wet until it could be poured. The truck drivers were members of a local chapter of the Teamsters. The unions collective-bargaining agreement had expired, and the parties had failed to negotiate a new one. So the union called a strike. But more than simply strike, the union timed its action to inflict maximum damage. It waited until the concrete had been prepared, loaded into the trucks, and dispatched. Then, while the trucks were en route, it told the drivers to walk off the job. The drivers then returned their trucks with full loads. Worse, some of them failed to tell the company their trucks were still full. So the company had to scramble to prevent the concrete from hardening in the truck bins. Using on-hand supervisors, it emptied the bins and saved the trucks. The concrete, however, was ruined.

The company sued the union for intentional property destruction in state court. But a trial court dismissed the complaint. The court held that because the alleged destruction happened during an arguably protected strike, the companys claim was preempted. The Washington Supreme Court agreed. The U.S. Supreme Court then took the case to decide whether intentional property destruction was arguably protected.

The Court had no trouble answering that question in the negative. Eight Justices agreed that federal labor law does not protect intentional property destruction. Lower courts, the Board, and even the Supreme Court itself had always treated intentional destruction as unprotectedeven when it happens during an otherwise protected strike. The state courts were therefore wrong to find the claims preempted and wrong to dismiss the case.

That result was unsurprising and (mostly) uncontroversial. More surprising, and potentially more consequential, was a concurrence by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch. The two Justices agreed with the result. But they wrote separately to question the Courts approach to labor-law preemption in general. Garmon, they wrote, is an outlier of preemption jurisprudence. It does not merely resolve conflicts between state and federal law. It affirmatively casts a shadow, or penumbra, over arguably protected conduct. This penumbra deprives states of jurisdiction even when their laws are logically consistent with federal law. Worse, states cant decide for themselves whether conduct falls into the penumbra. They instead have to wait for the Board to decidea decision the Board might never make. And until the Board acts, the injured party is stuck a legal no mans land: she has no state claim, no federal remedy, and no realistic prospect of getting either.

Thomas and Gorsuch didnt just hint that they think this approach is wrong; they openly urged the Court to reconsider Garmon. And when the Court does that, they said, it should replace Garmons test with one that asks whether state and federal law are in logical contradiction. That is, federal law should preempt state law only when its logically impossible to comply with both. Otherwise, state courts should be free to step in.

If the Court took that approach, the jurisdictional balance would tilt. States would have much more leeway to regulate labor relations. For example, they could require employers to let union organizers onto their property. Or they could forbid union organizers from soliciting employees at home. And they could enforce those rules in court. Courts could play a much more direct role in interpreting, developing, and applying labor law. Passive deference could give way to active engagement.

That result would track the Courts recent ideological trend. The Court has expressed increasing skepticism about deferring to agencies. Look no further than its recent decision to accept cert in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, where it will reconsider Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. National Resources Defense Council. Chevron is a well-known monument to the administrative state. It requires courts to defer to certain reasonable agency interpretations. It has shifted much lawmaking authority to agencies. As a result, it is commonly held up as a major source of administrative mission creep.

But as Thomas and Gorsuch point out, Garmon has the same effect. Like Chevron, Garmon requires judges to defer to the legal judgments of agency officials. The main difference is that Garmon is less well known. It applies to a narrower band of cases, so it has drawn less attention from the bar and the academy. Yet at least one body seems to be paying attentionthe Court. So if Chevron goes down, Garmon may follow in short order.

To be sure, Glacier established no new doctrine. If the main opinion is discussed in future cases at all, it will likely be at the end of a long string cite. But the concurrence might still stand for something bigger. There is a rising tide of skepticism toward the administrative state. And if the concurrence suggests anything, its that the tide could carry labor law along with it.

Note from the Editor: The Federalist Society takes no positions on particular legal and public policy matters. Any expressions of opinion are those of the author. To join the debate, please email us atinfo@fedsoc.org.

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Is Glacier Northwest the Tip of the Iceberg? - The Federalist Society

Special Counsel Jack Smith officially indicted former President Donald Trump on Thursday for his retention of presidential documents following his departure from the White House.

The Attorney General Merrick Garland appointee was hard-pressed to cook up charges but somehow still confirmed Americans widely held suspicions that this is just a continuation of the deep states ploy to get Trump, which started with the Russia collusion hoax in 2016.

Todays act of open legal warfare by the highly politicized and partisan Department of Injustice, has taken things to a new level, and set a dangerous precedent, the Trump campaign said in a statement on Thursday night. By politically weaponizing the DOJ, the Biden administration and their henchmen in the Swamp are now conducting an all-out prosecution of the leader of the current administrations political opposition. This is un-American and wrong.

As Federalist Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland repeatedly noted prior to the charges, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) appeared to share no legitimateconcernsabout the documents Trump kept in his Mar-a-Lago home. If they did, NARA failed to afford Trump the same help it gave the Obama administration in securing documents that needed to be preserved.

Yet, the Department of Justice still used the EspionageAct, which does not explicitly prohibit the retention of classified documents, to sic the FBI on Trumps home in a dramatic raid last August.

President Joe Bidens DOJ says this is about preserving the rule of law. Yet, if Democrats truly valued the rule of law, illegal border crossers, Russia hoaxers, Jeffrey Epsteins clients, pro-abortion vandals, rioters, and the people who run corrupt government agencies like the Department of Justice, the FBI, the NSA, and the Manhattan DAs office would be the ones standing in court, not Trump.

If muddled questions of personal or campaign payments were truly criminal matters, campaign finance offenders like failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama would have faced some punishment. Instead, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, encouraged by corporate media and Democrats who fear a second Trump term, revived a case that several DOJ officials previously declined to pursue.

If rallying rioters on Twitter was really an indictable offense, Vice President Kamala Harris should have faced punishment for raising bail money for vandals and rioters during the 2020 summer of rage. Instead, Smith is expected to come up with a crime to punish Trump for his constitutionally protected speech on January 6, 2021.

If taking documents home from the White House is a crime, then the DOJ would have launched a criminal probe into Biden and his classified documents the moment they were discovered. Instead, the DOJ concocted a reason to launch an unprecedented raid on Trumps Mar-a-Lago home, followed by an unprecedented legal case.

To put it simply, the cases against Trump are rigged to look successful for the left. In reality, they are actually quite weak. But that doesnt mean they wont bite. Thats because the real reason for the indictment frenzy isnt about holding politicians accountable. Its not even just about Trump. Its about his voters and what they believe.

Under the auspices of taking out their number one enemy, the deep state has set its sights on dissenters like you and its not backing down.

Every time Democrats and their cronies hand down an impeachment or indictment of Trump, they are really indicting you. It sounds provocative, but its true.

Preventing Trump from taking the White House was always the lefts top priority. As evidenced by the Democrats prosecutions over the last year, this goal has not changed. Unfortunately, the lefts persecution wont stop with Trump.

How do we know? Because Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who just announced his Republican presidential campaign last month, faces coordinated smears from corporate media, attacks from the White House podium, and potentially even criminal charges from partisan officials.

DeSantis presidential run may have only been possible because of the populist brand Trump harnessed in 2016 but hes made it clear that hes not Trump. So why would get Trump Democrats and their allies in the corporate media complex feel so threatened by him that they have already begun to act?

Even if Democrats successfully oust Trump from the 2024 election, they know his platform will live on through MAGA Republican voters, many of whom will likely pivot to DeSantis. The left will, of course, find this unacceptable because they hate not just Trump and DeSantis, but everything they and their voters stand for.

The lefts short-term goal may be hampering the rights chances in the next presidential election but the long-term goal was always to outlaw the ideological platform that made this new GOP competitive in the first place.

The Biden administrations recent weaponization of the bureaucracy against conservative Christians is simply evidence of that.

Over just the last couple of years, the Biden administration launched attacks on concerned parents, raided a pastors home, refused to protect Republican-nominated Supreme Court justices from coordinated influence campaigns designed to undermine the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling, and attempted to punish Republican states for protecting children including the unborn.

The DOJ and the FBI are, in all senses of the word, a threat to the republic. Even before the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago a majority of Americans knew the U.S. has atwo-tiered system of justice. Now, after a year of more smears and one felony indictment, more than half of the nation says they want the lefts enforcement arm to face punishment for weaponizing its power against the American people to achieve political goals.

Under this regime, youre not allowed to believe babies in the womb deserve a chance at life. Youre not allowed to believe that the rainbow is about Gods promise, marriage is between a man and a woman, and June is reserved for the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Youre not allowed to believe that parents get the final say in what their child hears, sees, reads, and studies. Youre not allowed to believe that there are only two sexes and they arent interchangeable.

As of now, Trump is at the helm of the movement that rejects the lefts institutional takeover at its very core. Hes made a fine obstacle for the left for the last seven years, but its important to recognize that hes only an obstacle.

When Trump descended on a golden escalator in June 2015, Democrats and the corporate media werent interested in exploring why so many people liked and supported him. The contempt they felt for half of the nation after Trumps 2016 victory lives on today. Only this time, they will do everything it takes to hamper conservative voters effectiveness.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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The Indictment Isn't Just About Trump, It's About Wrongthink - The Federalist