Judicial Watch Taking the Lead—For America at CPAC!


 

As the presidential election approaches, the Biden administration is expanding its controversial initiative to control information and censor Americans by funding a new project that tracks the spread of “mis-, dis-, and mal-information (MDM)” by internet users. A public university in South Carolina is getting nearly $1 million from the government to map the spread of MDM in real time and create an online dashboard with an MDM tracker. The Department of Justice’s (DOJ) National Institute of Justice (NIJ) is doling out the funds to researchers at Clemson University to meet its reported mission of “improving knowledge and understanding of crime and justice issues through science.” The NIJ claims it provides objective and independent knowledge and tools to inform the decision-making of the criminal and juvenile justice communities to reduce crime and advance justice.

It is difficult to see how this project meets the agency’s mission, however. The government is giving Clemson researchers a bunch of taxpayer dollars to identify information and opinions it does not like by conducting the “first real-time mapping of the spread of MDM campaigns around contentious public events,” according to the grant announcement. The venture has been named “Networks and Pathways of Violent Extremism: Effectiveness of Mis/Disinformation Campaigns” and researchers assure their work will not be biased even though a leftist administration is funding the work, and most academics are themselves on the left politically. The research is essential, the Biden administration laughably asserts, to avert “violent extremism.” This is the explanation offered in the DOJ’s grant document: “Nationally publicized political events often become focal points of MDM, which are exploited by various individuals and groups to launch disinformation campaigns and trigger spontaneous or crowd-sourced diffusion of disinformation and violent extremism.”

Clemson researchers will use the public funds to develop specialized algorithms to identify the creation of MDM campaigns and capture event-level characteristics of real-life events that trigger MDM, the grant announcement explains. The academics will also help determine what characteristics of high-profile events are more likely to trigger online MDM campaigns and what are the common characteristics of organizations and other actors engaged in MDM campaigns. The new dashboard will feature a “tracker” that identifies links between specific linguistic characteristics and MDM outbreaks. It is not unreasonable to predict that language considered by the administration to be politically conservative will get flagged as we have seen in social media censorship campaigns. “Additionally, the MDM tracker will provide insights into the commonalities and differences amongst online behaviors of MDM adopters, non-adopters, and disseminators,” according to the grant announcement.

This latest project with the added category of “mal-information” is part of a broader effort to divert substantial amounts of public funds for a fictitious crisis created by the Biden administration to control information. The movement started with a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) panel known as the Disinformation Governance Board, which was technically dismantled after major backlash. Taxpayer dollars keep flowing to related causes, however. Millions in DHS terrorism prevention grants have gone to combat “misinformation and disinformation” and to create media disinformation networks worldwide. Large sums have also gone to related projects such as fighting science misinformation and misperceptions in black communities and, of course, COVID-19 misinformation, especially involving minorities and vaccines.

Last summer a congressional probe exposed a scandalous government misinformation scheme in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) colluded with a compromised Ukrainian intelligence agency to censor the speech of Americans. The federal agency responsible for protecting the nation against terrorists, violent street gangs and serial killers actually joined forces with the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), which is widely known to be infiltrated by Russian-aligned forces, to take down the authentic social media accounts of Americans. This includes a verified U.S. State Department profile and those belonging to American journalists. Interestingly, accounts targeted for removal by the SBU and FBI criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin and expressed pro-Ukrainian views. With the presidential election approaching and Biden’s popularity at an all-time low, there is no telling what the administration will do to control information.

High-ranking Democratic Party officials professed shock, shock, when Special Counsel Robert Hur on February 8 released a report describing President Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” who mishandled classified documents.

“Gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate,” said Vice President Harris. “Gratuitous and wrong,” said former Justice Department official Neal Katyal. “Flouts [Justice Department] regulations and norms,” said Biden lawyer Bob Bauer. “Flatly inconsistent with long-standing DoJ traditions,” said former Attorney General Eric Holder.

But those of us with long memories recall that the special counsel rules requiring fulsome disclosure in a final report were in fact the creation of Democrats. They’ve been the regulations and norm, the long-standing tradition, at the Justice Department for a quarter century, since 1999.

Among those deep in the legal mix at the creation of the special counsel regulations: Eric Holder, Bob Bauer, and Neal Katyal. Bauer was a senior counsel to Congressional Democrats at the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, Katyal was a Justice Department lawyer who helped draw up the regulations, and Holder was deputy attorney general to AG Janet Reno.

Take a quick trip back to 1999 in the time machine. In the wake of the contentious investigation by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr into Bill Clinton, the Independent Counsel Act is not renewed by Congress. To replace the Independent Counsel, Attorney General Reno creates a new special counsel.

“Much legitimate concern has been expressed about the Final Report requirement of the Independent Counsel Act,” the new regulations noted. Legitimate “privacy interests” of individuals not charged with a crime were a major concern, but it also was “appropriate for any federal official to provide a written record upon completion of an assignment, both for historical purposes and to enhance accountability.”

The new regulations tried to resolve this problem by giving the attorney general the power to determine if a report by the special counsel would be released. The attorney general would decide if the report was “in the public interest,” and if it complied with “legal restrictions.”

It's worth noting that when Attorney General William Barr, in the case of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, exercised these powers of review, Democrats and their media allies were apoplectic. Barr’s Justice Department redacted sensitive material and the attorney general issued a letter summarizing the main findings of the 448-page Mueller Report. Then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared that Barr had “thrown out his credibility and the DoJ’s independence.” House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries told Barr: “keep your mouth shut.”

Barr defended his actions as squarely within the special counsel regulations. The public version of the Mueller Report, he told Congress, was “subject only to limited redactions that were necessary to comply with the law and to protect important governmental interests.”

At Judicial Watch, we’ve fought for decades for more transparency and accountability in government. We battled for full disclosure of Independent Counsel’ Starr’s corruption investigation into Hillary and Bill Clinton. In 2016, we revealed new documents about the Starr investigation.

Like Robert Hur, Ken Starr had turned up significant evidence. Like Hur, Starr had to evaluate whether, based on the evidence at hand and the trial venue, he had a good chance of winning the case before a jury. And like Hur, Starr concluded he could not win a case at trial against a prominent Democrat.

The Judicial Watch documents from the Starr probe showed that senior Starr prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig concluded the Independent Counsel team could not win a corruption case against Hillary Clinton, despite a mountain of circumstantial evidence. Rosenzweig wrote:

“In a high-profile case of this sort, however, I think that some jurors are likely to put [the Office of Independent Counsel] to the full measure of proof beyond a reasonable doubt and, in effect, insist that circumstantial evidence is an inferior form of evidence on which they cannot convict.” The bottom line, Rosenzweig concluded, was that prosecutors only has a “ten percent” chance of convicting Mrs. Clinton in the case. “Not enough in my view.”

Clinton was not indicted.

Special Counsel Hur reached a similar finding.

“Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote. Biden “is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt.” Biden’s memory was “significantly limited.” Hur concluded: it “would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict [Biden]—by then a former president well into his eighties – of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

So, it appears that President Biden will skate on charges of mishandling classified documents, while a certain former president faces similar charges in Florida. Democrats should thank their lucky stars. Instead, they are whining about the full disclosure and transparency dictated by the very regulations they put in place, hoist with their own petard.