Aug. 19, 2022
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
Sen. Ron Johnson: ‘This is looking more and more like a dispute over the President's declassification authority.’
By Robert Romano
“To me, this is looking more and more like a dispute over the President's declassification authority.”
That was Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) on Fox Business with Dagen McDowell on Aug. 15, responding to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Aug. 8 raid of former President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach, Fla. residence, Mar-a-Lago, saying that the documents that were seized by the FBI may have contained documents that had already been declassified by Trump.
Johnson explained, “I know President Trump was trying to declassify or had declassified information the tail end of his administration. We have not seen one page of that,” referring to a Jan. 19, 2021 “Memorandum on Declassification of Certain Materials Related to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation” that Trump had signed.
The memorandum described the documents as “a binder of materials related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Portions of the documents in the binder have remained classified and have not been released to the Congress or the public.
In it, Trump ordered the documents declassified: “I hereby declassify the remaining materials in the binder. This is my final determination under the declassification review and I have directed the Attorney General to implement the redactions proposed in the FBI’s January 17 submission and return to the White House an appropriately redacted copy.” But the redacted versions of the documents were never returned by the Justice Department to the White House.
Johnson and Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) have been trying to get at these documents for more than a year, in a Feb. 15, 2022 letter and an Oct. 2021 letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, demanding that they be disclosed.
Grassley and Johnson wrote in the Feb. 2022 letter, “We remain concerned that over one year from the date then-President Trump directed the Justice Department to declassify certain Crossfire Hurricane records the Justice Department has not only failed to declassify a single page, the Department has failed to identify for Congress records that it knows with certainty to be covered by the declassification directive.”
Johnson said regardless of the status of the documents, that the matter could have and should have been settled in civil courts, not criminal: “My guess is some of that information probably went down to Mar-a-Lago — was declassified — but now I guess there’s a dispute. This dispute ought to be settled in court, not with search warrants of a former president.”
Johnson added, “My understanding is that the President’s the ultimate authority in terms of what is going to be declassified.”
He’s right. Specifically, the President’s classification and declassification powers are implicit in the Constitution’s Article II, Section 1 vesting clause: “The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States.”
In 1988, in Department of Navy v. Egan, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed the President’s of classification of sensitive national security documents derive from his Article II constitutional powers, not from any Congressional statute: “The President, after all, is the ‘Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.’ U.S. Const., Art. II, 2. His authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security and to determine whether an individual is sufficiently trustworthy to occupy a position in the Executive Branch that will give that person access to such information flows primarily from this constitutional investment of power in the President and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant.”
Now the magistrate judge overseeing the case in federal court, William Reinhart, has ordered parts of the affidavit used in the Justice Department’s warrant application to at least be partially published, ruling that the government had failed to show cause in keeping the justification for raiding the former president’s home secret. The Justice Department has to now propose redactions for sensitive information.
Similar to a president declassifying documents, Reinhart can decide to accept the Justice Department’s redactions, modify them, or reject them completely and publish the entire affidavit. And once that determination has been made, that’s it, the document becomes public.
As of this writing, it is unclear whether the Justice Department ever disclosed to Reinhart that Trump had already declassified the documents in question. If it did, then it should be in the affidavit. If it did not, those omissions could have been used to convince Reinhart that a crime had been committed when that was an impossibility given Trump’s actions to declassify the documents while he was still the President. Either way, we know Sen. Johnson will be eagerly awaiting Reinhart’s reply. Stay tuned.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2022/08/sen-ron-johnson-this-is-looking-more-and-more-like-a-dispute-over-the-presidents-declassification-authority/
Cartoon: Hunting Rinos
By A.F. Branco
Click here for a higher resolution version.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2022/08/cartoon-hunting-rinos/
Allum Bokhari: Michael Hayden, Advisor to ‘Misinformation’ Watchdog NewsGuard, Says GOP More Dangerous than Al Qaeda, ISIS
By Allum Bokhari
Retired Gen. Michael Hayden, who directed the CIA and the NSA during his career but has since become a partisan clown,CNN talking head, and member of the advisory board for establishment media watchdog NewsGuard, recently agreed that even compared to other movements around the world, Republicans are the most “nihilistic, dangerous, and contemptible.”
This allegation means that in Hayden’s worldview, Republicans outrank Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Chinese Communist Party among others in terms of their danger to the world.
Hayden made his comment in response to Financial Times associate editor Michael Luce, who said “I’ve covered extremism and violent ideologies around the world over my career. Have never come across a political force more nihilistic, dangerous & contemptible than today’s Republicans. Nothing close.”
“I agree,” responded Hayden. “And I was the CIA director.”
Hayden’s comments reinforce the picture of a national security deep state that has become overwhelmingly partisan, viewing half of the country as a threat.
It will also add to evidence that NewsGuard, the establishment media watchdog that purports to fairly rate the trustworthiness of news sources but consistently trashes conservative media, is also a partisan outfit intended to quash and delegitimize dissent.
Hayden, who is a member of NewsGuard’s advisory board, is a spreader of false news narratives himself, having failed to retract his claim that the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story is “Russian disinformation.”
In a comment to Breitbart News, NewsGuard general manager Matt Skibinski emphasized that Hayden plays no rule in determining its ranking of news sources.
“As we disclose on our website, we have advisors across the political spectrum,” said Skibinski. “NewsGuard’s advisors, which include a former Secretary General of NATO and the first Direct of Homeland Security, under President George W. Bush, “provide advice and subject-matter expertise to NewsGuard. They play no role in the determinations of ratings or the Nutrition Label write ups of websites unless otherwise noted and have no role in the governance or management of the organization.”
Hayden is also a principal for strategic advisory services at the Chertoff Group, a consulting firm headed by another stalwart of the national security state, former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff.
Chertoff was the man the Biden administration tapped to “review and assess” the future of the DHS “disinformation governance board,” a project of Biden’s DHS that quickly became farcical after its appointed head, Nina Jankowicz, was exposed as a far-left loon who made pro-censorship sing-song TikTok videos.
In a comment to Breitbart News, a spokeswoman for the Chertoff Group distanced the company from Hayden’s remarks.
“General Hayden’s tweets are his own and do not reflect the firm,” said the Chertoff Group.