February 18, 2025

In the News

Fox Business Live (Video): JD Vance's message in Munich was 'very positive,' says Bradley Smith

.....Bradley Smith, a former FEC chairman, discusses Vice President JD Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference on 'The Bottom Line.'

Nevada Independent: Wynn must lose

By David Colborne

.....According to the Institute for Free Speech, Nevada’s anti-SLAPP law ensures our speech protections are among the strongest in the country.

FEC

"The Absolute Truth with Emerald Robinson" (Video): Interview with FEC Vice Chair Trey Trainor

.....Ed. note: FEC Vice Chair Trey Trainor speaks to Emerald Robinson about President Trump's removal of former FEC Chair Ellen Weintraub. The interview is published in full above. A tweet with a clip of the interview is available here.

FTC

Reason (Volokh Conspiracy): FTC Bans Political Appointees From Being ABA Members

By Josh Blackman

.....In April 2023, I wrote a column for the ABA Journal titled "The ABA needs ideological diversity to ensure its future." I concluded:

“If the ABA does not arrest its progressive lurch, the organization risks its own obsolescence. Model Rules will not be adopted. Evaluations of judicial nominees will be ignored. The accreditation monopoly will cease. And so on. A decline in membership will be the least of the ABA's problems. The ABA can either adapt to a new political reality or fade away like the guilds of yore.”

Over the following year, I attempted to work within the ABA to reform the organization. I joined a caucus formed to promote viewpoint diversity within the ABA. I even spoke at the Midyear Meeting, where I explained in clear terms how the ABA's fixation on leftist politics and DEI would spell its demise. My remarks were met with shock. I was called a racist and worse. People objected to my presence on the panel. One person in the audience said that she would defend the ABA's DEI efforts till the bitter end, even if she was the last member. She may yet get her wish. For reasons I will discuss more fully another time, I resigned from the Caucus. In short, I thought the ABA was beyond repair, and my time could be spent better doing other things.

Today, Andrew Ferguson, the Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, hammered what may be the first nail in the ABA's coffin.

The Courts

New York Times: Order to Drop Adams Case Prompts Resignations in New York and Washington

By William K. Rashbaum, Benjamin Weiser, Jonah E. Bromwich, and Maggie Haberman

.....Manhattan’s U.S. attorney on Thursday resigned rather than obey an order from a top Justice Department official to drop the corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams.

Then, when Justice Department officials transferred the case to the public integrity section in Washington, which oversees corruption prosecutions, the two men who led that unit also resigned, according to five people with knowledge of the matter.

Several hours later, three other lawyers in the unit also resigned, according to people familiar with the developments.

The serial resignations represent the most high-profile public opposition so far to President Trump’s tightening control over the Justice Department. They were a stunning repudiation of the administration’s attempt to force the dismissal of the charges against Mr. Adams.

The Media

Reason: CBS Is Wrong About Free Speech in Germany and the Rise of Nazism

By Robby Soave

.....The weekend programming over at CBS was unusually focused on speech norms and censorship in Germany. First, Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan casually asserted that free speech is what empowered the Nazis to take over the government and implement the Holocaust; then, 60 Minutes conducted an interview with present-day German authorities in which they detailed their efforts to suppress not just Nazi speech but also misinformation, gossip, and insults toward politicians...

Moreover, CBS had its facts wrong. Brennan's claim that "free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide" in Nazi Germany is a profound misreading of history…

This idea that Germany, during the period between World War I and World War II, was some free speech paradise—and that the Nazis used this to their advantage—is utterly false. In fact, historians of the interwar period have a name for this false claim: the Weimar Fallacy.

On the contrary, fears about rising Nazi influence caused Weimar Germany to take increasingly authoritarian steps to outlaw and censor Nazi speech during the 1920s. Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, wrote an excellent article about this in 2022. Far from permitting Nazis to practice free speech, the German government "shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers—in a two-year period, they shut down 99 in Prussia alone," wrote Lukianoff. "They accelerated that crackdown on speech as the Nazis ascended to power. Hitler himself was banned from speaking in several German states from 1925 until 1927."

Congress

Florida Politics: Pat Toomey: Here’s what can be done about debanking, the un-American abuse of power by regulators

By Pat Toomey

.....And this week, both chambers of Congress held hearings investigating the matter.

The issue merits the attention it’s getting. As a former ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, where I served for 12 years, and a former banker myself, I can confirm that debanking is real. But it is not driven by the banks themselves…

The cases of rogue regulators are even worse – these are intentional. Congressional investigators found the hard evidence that Obama administration financial regulators were pressuring the banks they regulated to debank industries that were disfavored by the administration, especially small-dollar online lenders and the firearms industry.

In what became known as Operation Chokepoint, the regulators had no legal authority from Congress and went through no public rulemaking. They simply had animus toward certain legal businesses and used the enormous power they wield over banks to try to kill those businesses, often upending people’s lives in the process.

Operation Chokepoint came to an end with the start of the first Trump administration. But no regulators lost their jobs.

Independent Groups

Central Jersey Newswire: Parsippany’s GOP Mayor Barberio Fundraises for Democrat Super PAC

.....Republican Mayor Jamie Barberio will be raising money on behalf of a surprising source at the end of February: a deep-pocketed Democrat-aligned super PAC.

The States

Daily Montanan: Bill that protects free speech, journalists and guards against frivolous lawsuits heads to Senate

By Darrell Ehrlick 

.....There will likely be few pieces of legislation that lawmakers like this session than House Bill 292, which unanimously passed the Montana House of Representatives on Thursday and would protect citizens and journalists from “SLAPP” lawsuits.

If passed into law by Montana, after going through the Senate and the governor’s desk, it would give new protections to those targeted by “SLAPP” lawsuits, which stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation.”

The bill, cosponsored by Reps. Tom Millett, R-Marion, and James Reavis, D-Billings, demonstrated bipartisan and overwhelming support throughout its journey in the House, where it passed the Judiciary Committee 20-0, and then passed both readings on the full House floor by votes of 100-0, and 99-0.

The bill will now head to the Montana Senate.

WTWO: Illinois bill looks to minimize private donors’ influence on judicial elections

By Moussa Diakite

.....Sen. Rachel Ventura (D-Joliet) filed a bill looking to reduce the influence of private donors in Supreme Court and Appellate Court races. This will allow candidates to use public funds instead of interest group funds. She filed the bill in response to the record-breaking amount of money spent in the 2022 Illinois Supreme Court Elections. 

Portland Press Herald: Maine lawmaker accused of forging signatures on campaign finance forms

By Rachel Ohm

.....A Maine lawmaker has been indicted on charges that he forged signatures and made a false statement on campaign finance forms last year.

An Oxford County grand jury on Wednesday indicted Rep. Randall Hall, R-Wilton, on 12 charges including 10 counts of aggravated forgery, unsworn falsification and criminal violation of the Maine Clean Elections Act.

According to the indictment, Hall forged signatures on 10 qualifying contribution affirmation forms, which are the forms that must be filled out by donors who give qualifying contributions to a candidate for state office so they can get clean elections funding from the state.

He is also accused of making a false statement on a different form on which he asserted that the signatures were in fact those of the people they purported to be.

Both actions are a violation of the Maine Clean Elections Act, the indictment said.

Voice of OC: OC Developer Fined by State Officials for Dark Money Campaign in Santa Ana

By Hosam Elattar

.....Ryan Ogulnick, an Orange County developer, is facing a $87,000 fine from the Fair Political Practices Commission, the state’s campaign finance watchdog, for an alleged political money laundering scheme in Santa Ana. 

“This is an outlier,” said Commissioner Alf Brandt during Thursday’s commission meeting. “This is nuts.”

The commission found he illegally hid the source of over $300,000 that was spent on mailers in Santa Ana’s 2018 city council elections, laying out their allegations in a stipulated settlement with Ogulnick. 

 At least one commissioner is calling on OC District Attorney Todd Spitzer to investigate.