FUNDAMENTAL TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICA
Saturday, January 21st, 2023
If questioning the results of a presidential election were a crime, as many have asserted in the wake of the controversial 2020 election and its aftermath, nearly the entire Democratic Party and media establishment would have been incarcerated for their rhetoric following the 2016 election. In fact, the last time they accepted the legitimacy of a presidential election they lost was in 1988.
After the 2000 election, which hinged on the results of a recount in Florida, Democrats smeared President George W. Bush as “selected, not elected.” When Bush won re-election against then-Sen. John Kerry in 2004, many on the left claimed that voting machines in Ohio had been rigged to deliver fraudulent votes to Bush. HBO even produced and aired “Hacking Democracy,” a documentary that added fuel to the conspiracy theory fire of conversations about the 2004 results. But nothing holds a candle to what happened in 2016 after Donald Trump’s surprising defeat of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Rather than accept that Trump won and Clinton lost, the political and media establishments desperately sought to explain away Trump’s victory. What they settled on was a destructive conspiracy theory that crippled the government, empowered America’s adversaries, and illegally targeted innocent private citizens whose only crime was not supporting Hillary Clinton.
With baseless claims of hacked voting totals, illegal voter suppression, and extensive media manipulation, the Russian collusion hoax had it all. But more than anything, the belief that Trump stole the 2016 election had the support of the most powerful institutions, individuals, and even government agencies in the country.
“You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you,” Clinton told her followers in 2019.
Recently our team was invited to meet with 2020 election fraud investigators in downtown Austin. Our team, with some of the top criminal profiling talent in the country, was happy to attend. At the last minute, our new pals cancelled their meeting.
Since we changed our schedules and lost those days, we decided to hold our own confab.
Our team members were the lead builders of one of the world’s most sophisticated criminal profiling systems in use by law enforcement today. We broke the eBay auction fraud rings and deployed a never-before-used technology to end auction fraud as an emerging crime category. We identified numerous Medicaid fraud rings and were hired by most of the top 10 property and casualty insurance firms to solve auto crash rings that eluded the FBI and every fraud technology.
What we do not talk about much is our team’s record predicting crime. There were several occasions when we predicted terrorist activity and warned government agencies. There is a particularly famous one, involving a military base, where they did not listen. That’s one for another day.
When you are at the table with some of the top criminal profilers in the world, talking about industrial scale election fraud, you do more listening than talking. And the listening was interesting. The profilers have zero interest in U.S. elections. Two of them did not vote and had unflattering opinions about both presidential candidates. Their comments were most insightful because they saw the current questions about election fraud so differently than the American media.
To them, 2020 election fraud was an industrial level crime. It was of such magnitude that it moved from the category of an election crime to a sovereign crime.
MacIver News Service
By M.D. Kittle
MADISON, Wis. – Deborah Jordahl and her family felt like they woke up in another country in the predawn hours of Oct. 3, 2013.
That’s when law enforcement officials, directed by the prosecutors of Wisconsin’s infamous John Doe investigation, showed up with warrants and raided the homes of several Wisconsin conservatives – including the one in Jordahl’s middle-class Middleton neighborhood.
Deborah JordahlIt certainly didn’t feel like America.
“It was surreal,” Jordahl recently told MacIver News Service on the Jay Weber Show, on NewsTalk 1130 WISN in Milwaukee.
“I woke up to some sounds in the yard. It was still dark out. The door bell rang. My husband and I were met by an armed deputy sheriff who told us she had a warrant to search the house. Wouldn’t say why,” recalled Jordahl, one of scores of right-of-center activists and other conservatives swept up in the campaign finance probe.
“They would not let me wake my children by myself. They followed me into their rooms. My children, at the time, were 15 and 17, and they woke up to an armed deputy standing over their bed,” Jordahl continued.
She found out months later that her son – 17 at the time of the raid – feared that his father had died, “because why else would there be people crawling around” the house at that hour of the morning. “I couldn’t really say anything. I had to keep them moving. I was terrified,” Jordahl said.
Law enforcement corralled this family of four into their living room. For the next few hours these John Doe raiders searched every closet, every drawer, in every room of the house. Then they went through the basement, then the garage, and the Jordahls’ vehicles. They hauled out boxes of paper and all kinds of electronic equipment.
Jordahl, a successful political consultant who, alongside her partner R.J. Johnson had advised Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign, was the target named on the search warrant. But that didn’t stop deputies and John Doe agents from rooting through her husband’s, daughter’s and son’s possessions – their computers, their cellphones, hard drives, more.
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Their crime? Supporting conservative causes in Wisconsin.
On May 23, the Wisconsin Department of Justice (WisDOJ) received a call from the state’s ethics board. An employee rummaging around in the basement of the building had found a filing cabinet full of material from the now-defunct “John Doe” investigations into the state’s Republican governor, Scott Walker, and his supporters.
WisDOJ was investigating the illegal 2016 leak to the Guardian of confidential details from the investigations, and in January, it had ordered that all John Doe records be turned over immediately. Yet this unexpected trove appeared four months later. The new evidence included three hard drives, 10 optical disk drives, a thumb drive, and paper files, which contained nearly 500,000 private emails and text messages collected from Republican political aides and staffers between 2009 and 2012. Among the millions of pages were discussions of the most personal nature—Wisconsin GOP staffers talking with family members about illness, helping friends through precarious relationships, and discussing money troubles with their spouses. Not knowing government bureaucrats were monitoring their discussions, some saved sensitive passwords in Gmail accounts; others sent pictures of themselves trying on clothes to friends and asked how they looked. Many of these messages were filed in a folder marked “opposition research.”
On December 6, the WisDOJ released a 91-page report on the leak, and what it shows is that Wisconsin public officials set up what amounts to a political spying operation.
The John Doe investigations have been a fixture of Wisconsin politics and courts for more than half a decade. Originating in 2010 with a request from Milwaukee County executive Scott Walker—who was running for governor—to investigate some missing money in his own office, they metastasized into a series of wide-ranging witch hunts used to harass and intimidate conservatives. In both the 2012 recall election to unseat Walker and the 2014 gubernatorial race, Democrats frequently cited the investigations as evidence of his “corruption.”
John Doe proceedings are initiated by a judge to see if a crime has been committed; investigators and suspects are prohibited from discussing the case. The Wisconsin law, dating to 1889, was intended to protect the identities of those being investigated. Yet the inquiries into Walker and his supporters achieved the exact opposite effect. While confidential details about Republicans leaked freely to the media, those under investigation were barred from defending themselves. The gag order against the investigation’s targets prompted U.S. Circuit Court judge Frank Easterbrook to call the John Doe framework “screamingly unconstitutional.”
In 2012, the Milwaukee County district attorney asked for a second John Doe probe, into Walker’s gubernatorial campaign. This one gained national notoriety in October 2013, when law enforcement officers began making paramilitary-style, pre-dawn raids on the homes of unsuspecting private citizens. With floodlights trained on the targets’ homes, armed officers threatened to beat doors down with battering rams; rifled through rooms; and seized phones, computers, and bank records without allowing the subjects to contact their attorneys. Groggy families awakened to the sound of police boots running through their homes were told that they could not tell anyone what had happened.
Their crime? Supporting conservative causes in Wisconsin.
The legal basis for the second investigation was specious as prosecutors were accusing Walker of illegally coordinating with third-party groups during the recall elections in 2012. But that interpretation of state law relied on an outdated reading of election law—which had been overturned by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. In January 2014, Judge Gregory Peterson effectively shut the second investigation down, noting that the conservative groups were engaged in constitutionally protected speech. In July 2015, the Wisconsin State Supreme Court ended the investigation for good and ordered that all the evidence be destroyed or returned to its owners.
It was only after this court order that dozens of conservative activists learned that three years’ worth of their private email and text messages had been seized. With the release of the WisDOJ report, the public found out that this mountain of intimate, private correspondence had been sitting for years in an unsecured filing cabinet in the basement of what used to be the offices of the Government Accountability Board (GAB), which enforced the state’s ethics and elections laws until 2015, when it was replaced by two separate watchdogs. Much of this material had been reviewed and filed by GAB staff when they began the secret investigation that WisDOJ calls “John Doe III.”
The existence of this third investigation came as a complete surprise to the state’s attorney general when he learned of it last year. WisDOJ agents surmised it was instigated by staff at the GAB when they had caught wind of “illegal” campaigning by legislative staff during the 2012 recall elections that swept Wisconsin in the wake of Scott Walker’s controversial union reforms.
It was many of these staffers whose private emails and chats showed up in the basement. Investigators identified 35 campaign workers whose personal accounts had been obtained by search warrant, and in its report, WisDOJ said it was “deeply concerned by what appears to have been the weaponizing of GAB by partisans in furtherance of political goals.” The list of people subjected to the search includes not just people who worked on the 2012 recall campaigns, but also Republican Party of Wisconsin staffers and Scott Walker aides. One former Senate aide says he had spent two weeks in Wisconsin’s North Woods in 2012 volunteering for a Republican candidate, and for this innocuous act, three years of his emails were seized.
Republican state senator Leah Vukmir, who will be running for the U.S. Senate in 2018, was also subject to the spying. WisDOJ found files with more than 150 emails between Vukmir and her daughter—many of which contained “private medical information and other highly personal information.” In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on December 10, an outraged Vukmir announced she was looking into her legal options for the violation of her privacy. “This was criminal behavior, and the individuals involved ought to see jail time,” she wrote. Vukmir says that despite the court order, she was never notified that her emails had been seized.
As Vukmir’s daughter’s case demonstrates, it wasn’t simply the targets of the investigation whose personal information ended up before the leering eyes of the GAB staff. All those who emailed one of the subjects on the list were unwittingly spilling their personal secrets to government bureaucrats, whether they had any connection to the ill-fated investigation or not.
WisDOJ investigators never conclusively identified where the leak to the Guardian came from, but the report noted that the only place where all the relevant documents were ever held all together was a portable hard drive belonging to a GAB investigator named Shane Falk. According to the same report, the file cabinet holding all the seized personal emails and documents was adorned by Post-it notes suggesting that Falk was also its owner.
A Democratic appointee to the GAB, Falk made the news in 2015 when his zeal to take down Scott Walker was revealed in leaked emails. In an email to prosecutors in November 2013, Falk wrote that the alleged coordination between Walker’s campaign and conservative groups was a “bastardization of politics” and that the state was being run “by corporations and billionaires.” According to emails released by WisDOJ, Falk frequently harangued other John Doe prosecutors for not going after Walker vigorously enough and questioned their knowledge of campaign finance law. Ironically, it was Falk’s legal reasoning that was repeatedly rejected in court after court.
In interviews since the WisDOJ report was released, Falk has said he doesn’t know anything about the leak and that he doesn’t know how the personal emails obtained by GAB came to be marked “opposition research.” In its report, WisDOJ called the leak a crime, but concluded that it couldn’t identify who had made it—so instead of criminal charges, Wisconsin attorney general Brad Schimel forwarded contempt of court charges against Falk and eight other GAB investigators for their reckless handling of records.
Those records include numerous details of state Republicans’ private lives, collected with little probable cause in the course of a bogus investigation. To date, WisDOJ agents have not been able to locate Falk’s external hard drive, which mysteriously went missing after he resigned from the board.
Christian Schneider is a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Turnout data for the 2014 election, posted Dec. 10 on the state’s Board of Elections website, tell a different story. Black turnout and registration for the November 2014 election increased by every relevant measure compared with November 2010, the last non-presidential general election.
Two sets of plaintiffs, led by the NAACP and the League of Women Voters, sued in federal court on Aug. 12, 2013. They were followed a few weeks later by the Justice Department. Attorney General Eric Holder asserted that the state’s new laws would restrict “access and ease of voter participation” and “would shrink, rather than expand, access to the franchise.”
All three suits alleged that the reforms will inflict “burdens” on North Carolina voters—and in particular, on minority voters. These allegations were backed by reams of expert reports submitted by social scientists predicting that these burdens would depress voter registration and turnout.
One expert in the Justice Department lawsuit claimed that more than 200,000 black voters, along with 700,000 white voters, would be “burdened” in an off-year election. Another expert concluded that particular provisions “will lower turnout overall” and “will have a disparate impact on African-American voters.”
Those predictions were not borne out. The 2014 elections were the first test of the impact of North Carolina’s new laws, including a “soft rollout” of its voter-ID requirement—under which poll workers asked voters if they had ID and if not, to acknowledge the new requirement in writing. Board of Elections data showed that the percentage of age-eligible, non-Hispanic black residents who turned out to vote in North Carolina rose to 41.1% in November 2014 from 38.5% in November 2010. (more…)
– Front Page Magazine – www.frontpagemag.com –
The Vanishing White Democrat
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On November 19, 2014
Daily Mailer,FrontPage |
It wasn’t all that long ago that the Democrats were predicting the end of the Republican Party.
With the rise of Obama, James Carville began peddling a new book “40 More Years” promising that the Dems would rule for generations.
Just this year Carville predicted that the Republican Party would become extinct if it lost to Hillary Clinton. But it was the Democratic Party that was going extinct in Carville’s own backyard.
Republicans began winning Senate seats in Louisiana for the first time in a century in just the last ten years. If Landrieu loses, then both of the Louisiana’s Senate seats will be unprecedentedly held by Republicans.
And Louisiana isn’t an outlier. Bill Clinton couldn’t stop Arkansas from going full Republican with two Republican senators and a full suite of Republican representatives for the first time in history. That’s all the more amazing in a state that only had two Republican senators before that for over a century.
The Democratic Party is going extinct in places like Louisiana, Arkansas and West Virginia. It’s vanishing because the working class White Democrat is becoming extinct.
Even Carville hedged his bets while predicting the end of the Republican Party by joining FOX News.
A generation ago, white Democrats outnumbered white Republicans. Today it’s the other way around. Under Obama, barely a quarter of white people still identify as Democrats.
Republicans didn’t just win a few elections. They swept across entire legislatures in western and southern states. They took state senates and governorships in places like New York and Illinois. It’s not that Republicans had a particularly compelling message, some did and some didn’t, but that Democrats had assumed that enough white voters would continue showing up to prop up their rainbow coalition.
They were wrong. (more…)
The Democrats who were caught standing on the beach last week when the GOP’s 40-foot wave washed over them are now explaining why it wasn’t their fault.
No. 1: It’s not us; it’s what’s his name, the unpopular president. (And that awful Valerie Jarrett. )
No. 2: It was a midterm election with a bad map; we’ll be back in 2016. Hillary to the rescue.
Official Obama Explanation : My ideas and policies are fine; I just have a messaging problem.
USS Democrat Captain Nancy Pelosi : “There was an ebbing, an ebb tide, for us.”
This all reminds me of the classic film satire, “I’m All Right, Jack,” about the dying days of the British trade-union movement. When an idealistic young factory worker shows the efficiency gains possible from actually using a forklift, the union steward calls a strike. Three guesses which Democrats in the U.S. version would play the roles of Peter Sellers, Terry-Thomas and Margaret Rutherford.
A few Democratic voices, mostly party professionals whose job is winning elections, have said the donkey herd that just ran off the cliff needs to rethink its sense of direction. No one is listening to them. Most Democrats, especially the left that took control of the party in 2008, deny any problem. And well they might. There is no Plan B.
The Democrats’ standard political model is generally attributed to FDR confidante Harry Hopkins : “We will spend and spend, and tax and tax, and elect and elect.” Hopkins denied ever using these words, but the formula lived on.
Tax, spend and elect just slammed into the mountain. (more…)