FBI AGENTS HAVE BEEN URGED TO DO WARRANTLESS WIRETAPS IN AMERICA BY THE FBI DIRECTOR

An Email From FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate, Tells Employees To Search For “US Persons” In A Controversial Spy Program’s Database That Have Been Repeatedly Misused.

A top FBI official is encouraging employees to continue to investigate Americans using a warrantless foreign surveillance program in an effort to justify the bureau’s spy powers, according to an internal email.

Known as Section 702, the program is controversial for having been misused by the FBI to target American protesters, journalists, and even a sitting member of Congress. American lawmakers, nevertheless, voted to extend the program in April for an additional two years, while codifying a slew of procedures that the FBI claims is working to stop the abuse.

An April 20 email authored by FBI deputy director Paul Abbate to employees states: “To continue to demonstrate why tools like this are essential to our mission, we need to use them, while also holding ourselves accountable for doing so properly and in compliance with legal requirements.”

Abbate added: “I urge everyone to continue to look for ways to appropriately use US person queries to advance the mission, with the added confidence that this new pre-approval requirement will help ensure that those queries are fully compliant with the law.”

“The deputy director’s email seems to show that the FBI is actively pushing for more surveillance of Americans, not out of necessity but as a default,” says American representative Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California. “This directly contradicts earlier assertions from the FBI during the debate over Section 702’s reauthorization.”

Following publication, FBI spokesperson Susan McKee provided a statement from the bureau that mischaracterized the reporting, inaccurately claiming it “alleged that that the FBI instructed its employees to violate the law or FBI policies.” The statement added that Abbate’s email “emphasized Congress’ recognition of the vital importance of FISA Section 702 to protect the American people and was sent to ensure that FBI personnel were immediately aware of, and in compliance with, the privacy enhancing changes the law has put in place.”

Authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the 702 program permits the government to enlist American companies to eavesdrop on a variety of communications—calls, texts, emails, and possibly other forms of messaging—all without the need for a search warrant. The key requirement for the program is that at least one of the recipients (the individual “targeted”) be a foreigner reasonably believed to be somewhere other than on American soil.

In a statement to Congress last year, FBI director Christopher Wray emphasized that the bureau’s focus was on “dramatically reducing” the number of times its agents scoured the 702 database for information on Americans.

The frequency with which the FBI runs American’s phone numbers or email accounts through the 702 database is hazy. The bureau first began reporting the figure publicly in 2021, releasing the total number of times that these searches took place. That number was 2.9 million. Since then, the FBI has “updated its counting methodology” to count only unique searches. (To wit, running the same phone number through the database multiple times a year now counts as a single search.) As a result, at least in part, the number dropped to 119,383 the following year. In 2023, under more stringent guidelines, it dropped further, to 57,094.

You should be able to see that the American regime simply manipulates their reports to hide their blatent violation of the constitution.

THE CIA NOW WANTS EVEN MORE POWER TO SPY ON AMERICANS IN VIOLATION OF THE CONSTITUTION

You Need To Be Aware Of The Federal Intelligence Agencies Spying On All Of Us Without Search Warrants As Required By The Fourth Amendment To The Constitution.

These agencies say they believe that the Fourth Amendment – which protects the individual right to privacy – only regulates law enforcement and does not apply to domestic spying.

There is no basis in the constitutional text, history or judicial interpretations for such a limiting and toothless view of this constitutional guarantee. The courts have held that the Fourth Amendment restrains government – all government. Last week, the CIA asked Congress to expand its current spying in the United States.

Here is the backstory.

When the CIA was created in 1947, members of Congress who feared the establishment here of the type of domestic surveillance apparatus that the Allies had just defeated in Germany insisted that the new CIA have no role in American law enforcement and no legal ability to spy within America. The legislation creating the CIA contains those unambiguous limitations.

Nevertheless, we know that CIA agents are present in all 50 statehouses in the United States. They didn’t arrive there until after Dec. 4, 1981. That’s the date that President Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12333, which purports to give the CIA authority to spy in America – supposedly looking for narcotics from foreign countries – but keeps from law enforcement whatever it finds.

Stated differently, while Reagan purported to authorize the CIA to defy the limitations imposed upon it by the Constitution and by federal law, he insisted on a “wall” of separation between domestic spying and law enforcement.

So, if the CIA using unconstitutional spying discovered that a janitor in the Russian Embassy in Washington was really a KGB colonel who abused his wife in their suburban Maryland home, under E.O. 12333, it could continue to spy upon him in defiance of the Fourth Amendment and the CIA charter, but it could not reveal to Maryland prosecutors – who can only use evidence lawfully obtained – any evidence of his domestic violence.

All this changed 20 years later when President George W. Bush demolished Reagan’s “wall” between law enforcement and domestic spying and directed the CIA and other domestic spying agencies to share the fruits of their spying with the FBI.

Thus, thanks to Reagan and Bush, and their successors looking the other way, CIA agents have been engaging in fishing expeditions on a grand scale inside America for the past 20 years. Congress knows about this because all intelligence agencies are required by statute to report the extent of their spying secretly to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

This, of course, does not absolve the CIA of its presidentially authorized computer hacking crimes; rather, it gives Congress a false sense of security that it has a handle on what’s going on.

What’s going on is not government lawyers appearing before judges asking for surveillance warrants based upon probable cause of crime, as the Constitution requires. What’s going on is CIA agents going to Big Tech and paying for access to communications used by ordinary Americans. Some Big Tech firms told the CIA to take a hike. Others took the CIA’s cash and opened the spigots of their fiber-optic data to the voracious federal appetite.

If government lawyers went to a judge and demonstrated probable cause of crime – for example, that a janitor in the Russian Embassy was passing defense secrets to Moscow – surely the judge would have signed a surveillance warrant. But to the government, following the Constitution is too limiting.

Thus, by acquiring bulk data – fiber-optic data on hundreds of millions of Americans acquired without search warrants – the government avoids the time and trouble of demonstrating probable cause to a judge. But that time and trouble were intentionally baked into the Fourth Amendment so as to keep the government off our backs.

Not to be outdone by its principal rival, the FBI soon began doing the same thing – gathering bulk data without search warrants.

When Congress learned of this, it enacted legislation that banned the warrantless acquisition of bulk data. Apparently, Congress is naive enough to believe that the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency, their cousin with 60,000 domestic spies, will actually comply with federal law.

Last week, that naivete was manifested front and center when the CIA sent a letter to both congressional intelligence committees addressing its spying on foreign persons and the Americans with whom they communicate, and asking to expand that reach inside America.

The timing of the CIA’s letter coincides with a decision Congress must make in the next 10 days – whether to reenact Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, allow it to expire on April 19 or expand it as the CIA has requested. Section 702 permits warrantless spying on foreigners and the Americans whom intelligence agencies suspect communicate with them. Section 702 is an unconstitutional free pass for domestic spying.

So, notwithstanding the persistent efforts of members of Congress from both parties to limit and in some cases to prohibit the warrantless acquisition of bulk data by the CIA from Americans, the practice continues, the CIA defends it and presidents look the other way.

In 1947, Congress created the CIA monster, which today is so big and so powerful and so indifferent to the Constitution and the federal laws its agents have sworn to uphold that it can boast about its lawlessness, have no fear of defying Congress and always escape the consequences of all this largely unscathed. Even President Harry Truman, who signed the 1947 legislation into law, later acknowledged as much and condemned what the CIA had become.

You should suspect the CIA and its cousins will get away with this because they spy on Congress and possess damning personal data on members who regularly vote to increase their secret budgets.

When will we ever have a government whose officials are courageous enough to uphold the Constitution?

Don’t count on it during your lifetime unless you finally decide to be brave enough to actually support freedom rather than submit to authoritarianism as most Americans do now.

FBI AND CIA FILES ON LATINO CIVIL RIGHTS PIONEERS ARE BEING SOUGHT BY CONGRESSMEN

Two House Members Want The FBI And CIA To Declassify All Documents Related To The Surveillance And Harassment Of Latino Civil Rights Leaders From The 1950s To The 1970s.

It’s widely known that the FBI’s COINTELPRO and CIA’s Operation CHAOS sought to disrupt the civil rights activities of Black Americans, but how those programs affected Latino activists is largely unknown.

American Reps. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) and Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) this week sent a letter to CIA Director William J. Burns and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray asking them to release all documents connected to the surveillance of the Latino civil rights movement.

“The historical record is not clear about whether FBI (or CIA) engaged in surveillance of the First Amendment protected activities of the Latino civil rights movement,” the pair wrote.

It’s also unknown if the FBI or CIA “tried to sabotage or disrupt” the Latino civil rights movement, as the FBI did with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., so newly released documents should clear the record, they said.

On last Tuesday at a hearing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Castro asked Burns and Wray about looking into releasing the documents.

They promised to look into it and work with Castro.

The FBI’s COINTELPRO, short for Counterintelligence Program, was created in the 1950s to disrupt allegedly Communist activities.

However, the FBI routinely monitored the activities of King and Malcolm X, planting informants while trying to disrupt planned demonstrations against racism.

“We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security,” FBI Domestic Intelligence Chief William Sullivan wrote after King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Historians in recent years have uncovered quite a bit about FBI surveillance of Latino leaders through open records requests, Brian Behnken, an Iowa State University history professor,says.

The FBI monitored the works of civil rights leader Héctor P. García, the New York-based, Puerto Rican Young Lords Party, and later the activities of the Chicano Movement.

The Los Angeles Times reported in 1995 that the FBI had monitored Mexican American farmworker leader Cesar Chavez for years.

The Dallas Morning News reported in 2013 that the FBI also was monitoring the activities of the GI Forum, a group founded by García for World War II veterans fighting discrimination.

Works by scholars and activists over the years have also uncovered that the FBI has monitored Chicano Movement leaders Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, Reies López Tijerina, José Angel Gutiérrez, and Dolores Huerta.

Yes, but: Having agencies release the documents could save years of waiting for public records requests and possible lawsuits to get information to the public.

Some Latino leaders and their families may not even know about the FBI files and wouldn’t know they needed to file open records requests.

The intrigue: Castro’s mother, Rosie Castro, was monitored by the FBI for her activities in the Chicano Movement, files show.

An FBI informant noted that Rosie Castro “was observed buying two small posters of Angela Davis for 50 cents each, which were mentioned by Rosie Castro as having been printed in Cuba,” the San Antonio Express-News reports.

Joaquin Castro said his mother will be asking for her FBI files.

Do you still think you live in a “free” country with constitutional protections?

THE BIDEN REGIME SAYS CONSTITUTIONALLY REQUIRED WARRANTS ARE BAD BUT THE FSA IS GOOD

Trump Has Repeatedly Attacked The “Deep State” Concerning Misuse Of The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) To Target His 2016 Presidential Campaign.

So, Trump is actually right about at least one thing.

On Valentine’s Day, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan made it clear that it’s not some nebulous, governmental Illuminati‐style cabal seeking to retain the power to spy at scale on Americans. It’s the Biden administration itself.

Just after 6:30 p.m. last Wednesday—and after House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) once again canceled a vote on an extremely controversial FISA reauthorization bill—The Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein posted a clip from the White House press conference where Sullivan was asked whether Biden would veto any FISA reform bill that requires a warrant to access data collected on Americans. Since the Office of Management and Budget has not issued an official state of administration policy on any FISA bill as yet, Sullivan declined to directly answer the question. Instead, he claimed that any warrant requirement to access FISA data on Americans would not be “in the national interest” of the United States.

The national security adviser to the president of the United States, a man who absolutely has President Biden’s ear and undoubtedly knows his thinking on this issue, is claiming that requiring the FBI, NSA, and CIA to abide by the Fourth Amendment vis-à‐vis access to FISA Section 702 data is “not in the national interest.”

That’s a story that should’ve been, but was not, front page news today in every American media outlet.

It should also tell FISA reformers in the House and Senate something else. They will need a bipartisan veto‐override majority to pass any reform bill over what now seems like an inevitable Biden veto if the final reform bill does mandate warrants to access FISA Section 702 data on Americans.

If you still believe that you live in a “Constitutional Democracy” – dream on…

THE LEGAL AND POLITICAL ASSAULT ON FREE SPEECH WHICH IS NOW “TERRORISM” IN AMERICA

The Battle By Local Atlanta And National Activists To Stop Construction Of The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center – Labeled “Cop City” – Has Entered A New Phase.

ABC News has reported that “#StopCopCity protesters had collected more than enough signatures to move its referendum campaign forward in an effort to get the city to repeal the lease it has with the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center…” The proposed 85-acre facility, which would be built on existing forest areas in Atlanta, has become a political flashpoint, with police critics and environmental activists finding common cause to fight the project.

A little over two weeks after the ABC News piece aired, the State of Georgia filed a 109-page racketeering indictment against 61 people involved in the protest movement. The indictment is long on political rhetoric (the word “anarchist” appears 57 times in the text) and is a clear assault on the Stop Cop City movement as a whole. But Georgia officials may not be the only ones targeting Stop Cop City activists with potential criminal charges.

In March 2023, the left-leaning publication Unicorn Riot revealed the FBI had taken an interest in the Stop Cop City movement, specifically the Chicago variant of Stop Cop City. The FBI records, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), noted that the Chicago Stop Cop City entity had been put into the FBI’s “AOT-DT” category – “Act of Terrorism-Domestic Terrorism” – as part of an “Anarchist Extremist Matters Assessment” opened in August 2022.

The FBI equating petty vandalism – in which a number of activists apparently engaged – as “terrorist actions” is ludicrous. Further, the FBI’s categorization of the Stop Cop City activists as “violent extremists” predates by over six months the Atlanta Police Department’s charges against a number of local protestors under Georgia’s domestic terrorism law.

The FBI “Assessment” noted that the construction of a Chicago version of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, along with the Obama Presidential Library and the Tiger Woods Golf Course in Jackson Park, were the focus of Chicago political activists. Opponents of the projects in Atlanta and Chicago say that hundreds of acres of public green space will be destroyed to accommodate the aforementioned facilities.

In FBI parlance, an “Assessment” is a form of FBI investigation that can be opened without any criminal predicate. As the Cato Institute has noted previously, the FBI has made extensive use of Assessments to target domestic civil society organizations for varying levels of digital (i.e., social media, etc.) and physical surveillance. Earlier this summer, utilizing FOIA requests, Cato learned that the FBI Assessment targeting the Stop Cop City movement had evolved into a full-blown FBI criminal investigation.

Just before Memorial Day 2023, Cato received a FOIA response from the FBI denying in full any records on Stop Cop City by invoking FOIA exemption b7A, claiming there is “a pending or prospective law enforcement proceeding relevant to these responsive records, and release of the information could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings.” On June 23^rd, DOJ’s Office of Information Policy (OIP) affirmed the FBI’s withholding. On July 23^rd, the FBI likewise invoked FOIA exemption b7A regarding records on Chicago Stop Cop City, and on October 19^th, OIP also affirmed that FBI “pending investigation” withholding as well.

And through the fall of 2023, still more evidence of an FBI investigation involving the larger Stop Cop City movement has emerged.

The Georgia “domestic terrorism” indictment noted above featured a local organization known as Network for Strong Communities. That nonprofit, which has featured prominently in efforts to prevent the proposed Atlanta police training facility from being built, is also now the subject of FBI investigative interest.

On October 16^th, Cato received another FBI “pending investigation” FOIA denial response involving Network for Strong Communities. Whether individuals associated with the organization or the organization itself are the target cannot be determined from the FBI letter.

What it does confirm is that the overall Stop Cop City movement and/or people associated with Stop Cop City are the target of an active FBI investigation in Chicago, Atlanta, and possibly elsewhere, likely under the AOT-DT designation. Whether Georgia police authorities were “inspired” by the FBI to file those domestic terrorism and racketeering charges in Atlanta, or whether the FBI is now playing catch up by opening its own “domestic terrorism” investigation, is unknown.

What is clear is that police and their allies at the federal, state, and local level are determined to continue and deepen the militarization of America’s law enforcement organizations, and that those engaged in lawful protest and political activities are viewed as fair game for being labeled – and even charged as – would-be terrorists. These are hallmarks of an authoritarian police state, not a functioning democratic republic.

If you think you live in a democracy with your rights protected by a constitution, guess again.

THE FBI ENDED UP INVESTIGATED IT SELF BY MISTAKE

In April Of This Year, The FBI Began An Investigation To Determine Who Was Using Illegal Software To Spy From Within The United States On Persons In Mexico.

The software was illegal because its Israeli manufacturer, a company called NSO, had previously crafted other software for the FBI, which President Joseph Biden had put on a Department of Commerce blacklist. Stated differently, because NSO manufactured software that enabled the government to violate the Fourth Amendment, all NSO-manufactured products are prohibited from use in the U.S.

Yet, somehow NSO had bypassed the federal embargo on its products and someone was using at least one of those products unlawfully.

The FBI investigation determined that the user of the illegal software was: THE FBI ITSELF.

During the Trump administration, the FBI paid $5 million to NSO for a license to use its “zero-click” surveillance software called Pegasus. Zero-click is software that can download the contents of a target’s computer or mobile device without the need for tricking the target into clicking on it. The FBI operated the software from a warehouse in New Jersey leased by its customer, the American importer of the software.

Before revealing any of this to the two congressional intelligence committees to which the FBI reports, it experimented with the software. The experiments apparently consisted of testing Pegasus by spying – illegally and unconstitutionally, since no judicially issued search warrant had authorized the use of Pegasus – on unwitting Americans by downloading their personal data from their devices. The FBI later claimed that these experiments were harmless, as it never used the downloaded data.

When congressional investigators learned of these experiments, the Senate Intelligence Committee summoned FBI Director Christopher Wray to testify in secret about the acquisition and use of Pegasus, and he did so in December 2021. He told the senators that the FBI only purchased Pegasus “to be able to figure out how bad guys could use it.” Is that even believable?

In follow-up testimony in March 2022, Wray elaborated that Pegasus was used for governmental needs “as part of our routine responsibilities to evaluate technologies that are out there, not just from a perspective of could they be used someday legally, but also, more important, what are the security concerns raised by those products.” More FBI gibberish.

Thereafter, dozens of internal FBI memos and court records caused Sen. Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to question the veracity of Wray’s testimony. Wyden’s skepticism provoked the FBI reluctantly to reveal that it had ordered its own version of Pegasus, called Phantom, which NSO tailor-made for hacking American mobile devices.

In July 2021, when Biden personally put a stop to the FBI’s use of all NSO products, the congressional intelligence committees assumed that that was the end of it. Biden and his advisers concluded that NSO products were too tempting for the FBI and its intelligence community cousins, as the use of this software without a search warrant was a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

The Fourth Amendment was written to preserve the natural right to privacy and to cause law enforcement to focus on crimes, not surveillance. The instrument of these purposes is the requirement of a judicially issued search warrant before the government can engage in any surveillance.

A search warrant can only be issued based on probable cause of crime demonstrated under oath to the issuing judge and a showing that the place to be searched or person or thing to be seized is more likely than not to reveal evidence of crime. As well, the warrant must specifically describe the place to be searched and things to be seized. Warrants can only be issued for investigations of actual crimes that have already occurred, not for experiments.

The Fourth Amendment contains some of the most precise language in the Constitution, as it was written intentionally to thwart the rapacious appetite of governments to snoop, which the British did to the colonists using general warrants.

General warrants were not based on probable cause of crime and lacked all specificity. Rather, they were based on government needs – a totalitarian standard because whatever the government wants it will claim it needs – and they authorized the bearer to search wherever he wished and seize whatever he found.

After The New York Times revealed the results of Freedom of Information Act requests for memos and court documents pertaining to NSO, they showed a vast determination by FBI management to offer NSO products to FBI agents and other federal law enforcement and surveillance personnel.

Last week, the FBI found the importer of the illegal NSO software: its own customer who leases the New Jersey warehouse where the illegal Pegasus software is stored. And it revealed that it had used the NSO product before realizing it was illegal. Before realizing it was illegal? Who would believe that?

The FBI was using software illegally imported into America frome someone who had been banned from importing the product.

All of this leaves us with an FBI out of control and run by a director who has been credibly accused of misleading Congress while under oath – a felony – and whose agents have been credibly accused of computer hacking – also a felony. Who knows what other liberty-assaulting widgets the FBI has in its unconstitutional toolbox about which Wyden and his investigators have yet to learn?

The whole purpose of the Fourth Amendment is to protect the right to be left alone and to compel the government to focus on solving crimes, not predicting them.

Today’s FBI has agents who are professional computer hackers. Today’s FBI has morphed from crime fighting to crime anticipating. Today’s FBI is effectively a domestic spying operation nowhere authorized in the Constitution. It should be defunded and disbanded.

FBI ELECTION INTERFERENCE HAS BEEN REVEALED BY A “HIGHLY CREDIBLE” SOURCE

More Important To America’s Future Than Unearthing Biden Family Corruption Is Uncovering Corrupt Bureaucrats Who Violate The Rule Of Law.

Allegations that then-Vice President Joe Biden agreed to accept money from a foreign national to affect policy decisions was reportedly “highly credible” and used by the FBI in multiple criminal investigations dating back to the Obama administration. Friday’s exclusive by Fox News provides further insight into Sen. Chuck Grassley’s focus on the FBI — as opposed to the Biden family — as the primary scandal in play.

“We aren’t interested in whether or not the accusations against [then]-Vice President Biden are accurate,” Grassley said during an interview last week discussing FBI Director Christopher Wray’s refusal to comply with the congressional subpoena issued for the FD-1023 form. That form, dated June 30^th, 2020, included detailed information from a CHS to the FBI regarding an agreement by now-President Biden to deliver preferred foreign policy positions for a $5 million payment.

After Grassley revealed he had already seen the FD-1023, Fox News’ Bill Hemmer queried: “How damning is this document to the sitting U.S. president?”

“I don’t know,” responded Grassley, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He stressed that while “there’s accusations” in the FBI report, the congressional oversight committees’ concern is whether “the FBI does its job.” “That’s what we want to know,” he continued.

Friday’s revelation that the CHS was “highly credible” and had served as a source in multiple prior criminal investigations — including ones run under the Obama-Biden administration — proves Grassley is properly focused on the FBI.

Yes, the CHS’s allegations offer more evidence of a Biden family pay-to-play scandal, and unraveling any criminal conduct by the Biden family remains important. But more significant to the future of our country is uncovering government actors responsible for violating the rule of law: America can survive select injustices, but it cannot withstand a corrupt bureaucracy that obstructs justice and interferes in elections.

Yet that is precisely what occurred, according to the whistleblower. He claimed that “in August 2020, FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment which was used by a FBI Headquarters’ team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease.” The whistleblower further alleged that the FBI HQ team that handled the Auten assessment, after concluding the reporting was disinformation, placed the information in a restricted access sub-file that only the particular agents who uncovered the CHS’s information could access.

Now knowing the CHS behind the FD-1023 was not just “trusted,” as Grassley had previously indicated, but “highly credible,” and relied upon in multiple criminal cases dating back to the last time Biden worked for the executive branch, makes the whistleblower’s accusations even more damning because those additional facts mean the agents had reason to believe the buried accusations were true.

Not only does this evidence suggest FBI headquarters obstructed justice, but the date of the CHS’s report indicates those responsible for misbranding the intel as disinformation sought to interfere in the 2020 election.

As Grassley’s colleague in the House, James Comer, revealed, the CHS report was dated June 30^th, 2020, and while the allegations against candidate Biden came from a “highly credible” CHS, the FBI closed them. According to the whistleblower, FBI headquarters closed out the source even though some of the allegations had already been verified and other details could have been verified.

In contrast, when the bureau received a vague tip from an Australian diplomat of unknown veracity that a low-level Trump volunteer had claimed the Russians possessed dirt on Hillary Clinton, within days FBI headquarters opened an investigation into the Trump campaign.

John Durham’s special counsel report recently lay bare the impropriety of the FBI’s targeting of the Trump campaign based on unverified gossip from an unvetted source. Grassley is now highlighting the converse: the FBI’s improper branding of evidence from a “highly credible” CHS as disinformation to protect the Democrat candidate for president.

This evidence of continuing political bias at the FBI is Grassley’s primary concern, prompting him to call for a “change in the culture.” That change will be a long time coming, however, given that Wray resisted the subpoena and appears poised to fight Grassley and congressional oversight committees every step of the way.

THE DEEP STATE HAS CAPTURED THE MEDIA

Look For The Deep State To Infiltrate Ever-More Media Outlets In The Future As Their Lies And Captive Media Platforms Lose Audience And, As A Result, The Impact Of The Captive Legacy Media Wanes.

Suspected Pentagon documents leaker Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Dighton, Massachusetts Air National Guardsman, allegedly released classified documents without permission about the sobering American intelligence assessment of Ukraine’s prospects in the Russo-Ukrainian War (i.e., Ukraine can’t win, despite public official pronouncements about their imminent battlefield victories). Those documents he allegedly leaked also revealed that several dozen American soldiers were operating in the war zone (the equivalent of two special ops teams), despite official denials, along with CIA operatives already known to be calling missile and artillery strikes in the war.

Just days after his April 13^th arrest, local Boston television news stations were broadcasting Teixeira’s high school disciplinary record. He was suspended in high school for “threatening” language, don’t-cha know?

It’s like the old joke about the principal telling a kid that “this is going on your permanent record,” except it’s now reality. If only Teixeira could have cut a deal like Bart Simpson, we wouldn’t have to be having this discussion right now.

What does Teixeira’s high school disciplinary record have to do with his revelations about official lies and secrets about the America’s involvement in a war with the world’s other nuclear superpower?

Nothing at all. Zip. Zero. Nada. A whole number between -1 and 1.

There’s no journalistic value in the story that Teixeira was suspended in high school for “threatening” language (he said he was describing a video game at the time). It has no relationship to the story about Ukrainian war lies. Such dirty laundry in decades past used to be relegated to discussions of celebrity divorces in supermarket tabloids.

But it has a lot of value if your goal is to engage in a general character-assassination using compliant media.

So it brings up a couple of questions: Why is the news media reporting this? And how did they get this information?

The second question is the easiest to answer: The American government’s executive branch careerists gave it directly to them. It was part of the official filing by (now former) Attorney Rachael S. Rollins asking the federal district court to keep Teixeira in jail until trial.

And one must wonder how that made it into the official filing. How is this relevant to the legal need to deny Teixeira bail and keep him in jail until trial, if the worry was that he wouldn’t return to court for his trial or would publicly reveal more official state secrets?

Again, it doesn’t. At all.

The purpose of including Teixeira’s high school disciplinary record—one that was confidential and which could only be obtained through court warrants or Intelligence Community (IC) surveillance—in the filing was to engage in a deliberate and planned public character-assassination of Teixeira through compliant media organs.

Rollins—or more likely, her handlers in Washington—wanted to destroy this young man publicly by unnecessarily releasing his private sins to the press in an attempt to distract the media from exposing the official lies that Ukraine can win its war against Russia and that American combat troops are not present on the ground. Plus, as a bonus, it serves the double-purpose of poisoning the available pool of unbiased jurors in advance of trial and making a public example to deter future whistle-blowers.

Say what you will about Rollins, the Feds assigned this role to someone who has hands-on experience in this specific task. Rollins resigned Friday, May 19^th from her role as District Attorney for Massachusetts because an Inspector-General Report by the American Department of Justice revealed she’d done the same thing to a candidate for Suffolk County District Attorney (an elected state position). According to the Inspector General report on Rollins, “Rollins assisted a candidate in a partisan political election and sought to influence the election by, among other things, disclosing non-public, sensitive DOJ information to the press.”

In other words, she conspired to engage in a media smear of a public person using confidential, non-public information.

Sound familiar?

But there’s an important difference between both the Teixeira case (and the Trump-Russia collusion hoax) and the local candidate Rollins was accused of smearing. Disclosing private information to defame a candidate in a local election is a no-no, unless he is an enemy of the Deep State. But if the Deep State wants to character-assassinate someone, whether holder of the highest office in the land or all the way down to some lowly Air National Guard private, then that’s just spiffy.

Rollins suffered no negative consequences from smearing Teixeira. Only when smearing someone who wasn’t an enemy of the Deep State did she face an inquiry.

Now back to the original question about CBS-Boston and other media reporting that Teixeira was suspended during high school. Why are they reporting something that has no news value? Because word was put out to destroy his character in order to distract from his revelations about the Russo-Ukrainian War, and they used compliant media networks to do just that.

Some time after the defection of Soviet spy Anatoliy Golitsyn in 1962, the former KGB officer suggested to his CIA handler that National Review founder and syndicated columnist William F. Buckley help edit the book he was working on, and that it be serialized in Reader’s Digest. It was a logical request. Conservative icon Buckley was known to be a CIA veteran (and had formed National Review around his Langley friends), and with circulation in the millions Reader’s Digest was probably the highest circulation periodical with CIA assets on staff. The late 1960s and early 1970s were the height of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, where agents infiltrated and controlled hundreds of media corporations and journalists, respectively, toward the CIA’s stated goals of fighting the Cold War against the Soviet empire. Operation Mockingbird is a campaign still officially denied by the CIA, so its activities can be said to have never been completely shut down, even if they were suspended for a few years.

The reforms of the 1970s imposed some nominal restraints via executive order upon the rogue CIA (along with the FBI) in the reforms of the post-Vietnam era. After the contentious Church and Pike Committee hearings, CIA officials publicly promised they weren’t infiltrating media and poaching journalists as spies and influence-peddlers. But even by the mid-1980s, CIA chiefs were publicly stating they might have to do so again in the future.

The restraints came off the IC (“Intelligence Community”) in the wake of the 9/11 attacks with Congress passing the USA PATRIOT Act. It’s hard to say when the IC began to focus more upon the domestic media than foreign media, but it’s safe to say it was having a measurable impact upon domestic media by the early 2010s. It was at that point even media traditionally antagonistic to government power had been transformed from watchdogs into Deep State lapdogs.

The “Deep State” can be loosely defined as executive branch careerist bureaucrats and their nominally private sector but government-funded “NGO” contractors who don’t have to face elections or the voters, and who make policy outside of directives from elected officials in the legislative branch and the president.

During the Cold War, the government used to curate a list of the “Captive Nations” who were under the thrall of the Soviet empire based upon subservience to the Soviet imperial interests. Today, much of the American corporate media is obviously captive to the American empire’s intelligence behemoth in its recent expansion of Operation Mockingbird. Some have come to call it the “captive media,” in homage to the Cold War-era “Captive Nations” terminology.

The last hurrah of journalistic independence and antagonism to power for The Washington Post was the Edward Snowden affair in 2013. After Snowden’s revelations, the Post never seriously challenged the Deep State again, including its Big Pharma subsidiary, nor have they engaged in any significant actions against the government’s other alliances with giant corporations. The New York Times had been captured by the Deep State as early as 2002 when Judith Miller was acting as stenographer for lies about Iraqi WMDs. The Times and Post both became de facto state assets, along with the five giant media conglomerates (ABC-Disney, NBC-Comcast, CBS-Viacom, CNN-TimeWarner and Fox-Newscorp), and all today routinely condemn enemies of the national security state and Big Pharma rather than expose the excesses of those powerful special interest groups within the executive branch of government. Likewise, many social media and tech corporations have been revealed by the Twitter Files to be adjuncts of what journalist Matt Taibbi accurately labels the “Censorship Industrial Complex.”

One key “tell,” to use a poker term, to identify a likely captive media organ is to observe media character-assassination of a person threatening the primacy of the military-industrial complex. This label of captive media is all the more likely to be accurate when the character assassination doesn’t even address the newsworthy revelations or political positions of that person, and when all the other captive media organs are chiming in chorus with the same condemnation.

The Teixeira case is instructive on the Deep State’s penetration of the American media. The modus operandi of the Deep State is to distract from their own corruption by smearing anyone who exposes them or opposes them, and to publicly ruin someone in a key government position who expresses intolerable levels of heterodoxy from the official narrative. The latter was the reason for smearing presidential candidate Donald Trump with the gamut of their arsenal: he was an apex-level racist, a Russian asset, probably an anti-Semite, a threat to democracy, etc.

All this is not to say that Donald Trump was a good president. He wasn’t, and his politics were seriously deficient from a reasonable perspective on many fronts. But he wasn’t enough on “Team Deep State” to avoid the careerists in the executive branch conspiring with the Hillary Clinton campaign to bring him down with multiple lies, as the Durham Report makes eminently clear.

None of the Russia-collusion hoax lies against Trump were true, but truth—like the words coming out of Trump’s own mouth—was immaterial to the issue. One of our favorite podcasts used to be Unfilter, and one of the libertarian hosts revealingly noted back before the podcast went dark, “Trump is not a liar. He’s a bullshitter.” This distinction is highly significant. A liar expects you to believe his lies, but to a bullshitter both the truth and your level of belief in his lies are irrelevant. A bullshitter doesn’t care if you believe him; the only important thing is how you react to his lies. Trump was—and remains—an expert-level bullshitter. He can trigger the corporate media into giving him free press coverage constantly; the CNN Town Hall spectacle with Trump serves as the most recent hilarious example. Everything he says is to get a reaction, not to reveal some truth.

That’s the Deep State’s working model right now. They don’t care if you believe them. All that matters is your emotional reaction: to hate Donald Trump, to hate Jack Teixeira, and to hate anyone else they believe is a threat to their power and their agenda. They’re confident they can dig up dirt on every person with their surveillance panopticon, and can find enough sin on anyone to ruin any heterodox person publicly. They’ve taken the Orwellian “two minutes of hate” and perfected it, treating Nineteen Eighty-Four as a roadmap rather than a warning.

That’s why the working thesis on media corporations is that any company which focuses upon personal attacks rather than the relevant issues to journalism and public policy, especially if the personal attacks coincide with the official Deep State narrative (and they usually do), they’re likely among the captive media.

This also works to some degree for individuals, even if they’re not explicit agents of the Deep State. Anyone who hates a political figure—whether Donald Trump, Ron Paul, or Joe Biden—based upon personal characteristics rather than public positions and routinely resorts to baseless smears of being a racist, an anti-Semite or a foreign agent is probably compromised (or at the very least, a toxic person) whose opinions are worth ignoring entirely.

It should go without saying Americans can’t trust the captive media, of whom it could be accurately said that truth and factual accuracy are irrelevant. The long-running Russia-collusion hoax is but the latest example exposed. There’s a long list of official lies: cloth masks stop transmission of COVID-19, the vaccine stops transmission of the virus, gas attacks in Syria, Ghaddafi’s imminent genocide in Libya, all the way back Judith Miller. And those are just a handful of hundreds of examples.

The good news is that The New York Times and Washington Post‘s circulation reach new lows every month, as do the ratings of CNN, Fox and MSNBC. CNN’s ratings hilariously fell below NewsMax last week.

Lies don’t sell well.

So look for the Deep State to infiltrate ever-more media outlets in the future as their lies and captive media platforms lose audience and, as a result, the impact of the captive legacy media wanes. Those of us opposing the surveillance panopticon and the perpetual warfare state will need to use both the patterns described above and leaked truths to reveal the captive media, as they are taken over.

The Jack Teixeira and Twitter Files revelations are but the latest in a line of exposures of official lies beginning with Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Reality Winner. There will be others.

It’s also encouraging to hear the House of Representatives is holding at least some tentative hearings on the weaponization of the executive branch in the election cycle. Liberty-loving individuals need to encourage more of those hearings, and a much deeper-dive into revealing their secrets, followed by legislation that would (if not outright abolish) at least re-impose some limits upon the “Intelligence Community.”

LEARN ABOUT THE BIGGEST FBI SPY SCANDAL OF THE YEAR

A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Opinion Revealed That The FBI Violated The Constitutional Rights Of 278,000 Americans In 2020 And 2021 With Warrantless Searches Of Their Email Etc.

For each American that the FISA court permitted the FBI to target, the FBI illicitly surveiled almost a thousand additional Americans. This is only the latest federal surveillance scandal stretching back to the years after 9/11.

The FISA law was enacted in 1978 to curb the rampant illegal political spying exposed during the Richard Nixon administration. After the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration decided that the president was entitled to order the National Security Agency to vacuum up Americans’ emails and other data without a warrant. After The New York Times exposed the surveillance scheme in late 2005, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced that “the president has the inherent authority under the Constitution, as commander in chief, to engage in this kind of activity.” Gonzales apparently forgot the congressional impeachment proceedings against President Nixon. The Bush White House also asserted that the September 2001 “Authorization to Use Military Force” resolution Congress passed entitled Bush to tap Americans’ phones. But if the authorization actually allowed the president to do whatever he thinks necessary on the homefront, Americans had been living under martial law.

Federal judges disagreed with Bush’s prerogative to obliterate American privacy. The result was a 2008 FISA reform that authorized the feds to continue commandeering vast amounts of data. But under Section 702 of that law, the FBI was permitted to conduct warrantless searches of that stash for Americans’ data only to seek foreign intelligence information or evidence of crime.

President Barack Obama responded to the new law by sharply expanding the NSA’s seizures of Americans’ personal data. The Washington Post characterized Obama’s first term as “a period of exponential growth for the NSA’s domestic collection.” Obama’s Justice Department thwarted court challenges to the surveillance, thereby permitting the White House to claim that it was respecting Americans’ rights and privacy.

Edward Snowden blew the roof off the surveillance state with his disclosures starting in June 2013. But there was no reason to presume that federal crime sprees were not occurring before Snowden blew the whistle. Professor David Rothkopf explained in 2013 how FISA’s Section 702 worked:

“What if government officials came to your home and said that they would collect all of your papers and hold onto them for safe-keeping, just in case they needed them in the future. But don’t worry…they wouldn’t open the boxes until they had a secret government court order…sometime, unbeknownst to you.”

The 2008 FISA amendments and Section 702 snared vast numbers of hapless Americans in federal surveillance nets. The Washington Post analyzed a cache of 160,000 secret email conversations/threads (provided by Snowden) that the NSA intercepted and found that nine out of ten account holders were not the “intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.” Almost half of the individuals whose personal data was inadvertently commandeered were American citizens. The files “tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes,” the Post noted. If an American citizen wrote an email in a foreign language, NSA analysts assumed they were foreigners who could be surveilled without a warrant.

Snowden also leaked secret court rulings that proved that the FISA Court had “created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans,” The New York Times reported in 2013. FISA judges rubberstamped massive seizures of Americans’ personal data that flagrantly contradicted Supreme Court rulings on the Fourth Amendment. The Times noted that the FISA court had “become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues,” and almost always giving federal agencies all the power they sought.

Unfortunately, Snowden’s courageous disclosures did not stop the outrages. The heavily-redacted 2022 opinion finally released Friday revealed that the FBI wrongly searched almost 300,000 Americans’ online lives. And this was on top of the roughly 3.4 million warrantless searches of Americans in 2021 via Section 702 that the FBI conducted that the Justice Department claimed was justified.

The latest disclosure from the FISA court signals that the FBI presumed that any American suspected of supporting the January 6, 2021 protests forfeited his constitutional rights. Roughly 2,000 pro-Trump protestors (including an unknown number of undercover agents and informants) entered the Capitol that day. But an FBI analyst exploited FISA to unjustifiably conduct searches on 23,132 Americans citizens “to find evidence of possible foreign influence, although the analyst conducting the queries had no indications of foreign influence,” according to FISA Chief Judge Rudolph Contreras. The court ruling did not disclose the standards (if any) the FBI used for its warrantless January 6^th searches. Did Twitter retweets suffice?

The FBI exploited FISA to target 19,000 donors to the campaign of a candidate who challenged an incumbent member of Congress. An FBI analyst justified the warrantless searches by claiming “the campaign was a target of foreign influence,” but even the Justice Department concluded that almost all of those searches violated FISA rules. Apparently, merely reciting the phrase “foreign influence” suffices to nullify Americans’ rights nowadays. (In March, Rep. Darin LaHood (R-IL) revealed that he had been wrongly targeted by the FBI in numerous FISA 702 searches.)

The FBI conducted secret searches of the emails and other data of 133 people arrested during the protests after the killing of George Floyd in 2020.

The FBI conducted 656 warrantless searches to see if they could find any derogatory information on people they planned to use as informants. The FBI also routinely conducted warrantless searches on “individuals listed in police homicide reports, including victims, next-of-kin, witnesses, and suspects.” Even the Justice Department complained those searches were improper.

Judge Contreras lamented: “Compliance problems with the querying of Section 702 information have proven to be persistent and widespread.” The FBI responded to the damning report with piffle:

“We are committed to continuing this work and providing greater transparency into the process to earn the trust of the American people and advance our mission of safeguarding both the nation’s security, and privacy and civil liberties, at the same time.”

In 2002, the FISA court revealed that FBI agents had false or misleading claims in 75 cases and a top FBI counterterrorism official was prohibited from ever appearing before the court again.

In 2005, FISA chief judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly proposed requiring FBI agents to swear to the accuracy of the information they presented; that never happened because it could have “slowed such investigations drastically,” the Washington Post reported. So FBI agents continued to have a license to exploit FISA secrecy to lie to the judges.

In 2017, a FISA court decision included a 10-page litany of FBI violations, which “ranged from illegally sharing raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties to accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications without proper oversight.”

In 2018, a FISA ruling condemned the FBI for ignoring limits on “unreasonable searches.” As The New York Times noted, “F.B.I. agents had carried out several large-scale searches for Americans who generically fit into broad categories…so long as agents had a reason to believe that someone within that category might have relevant information. But [under FISA] there has to be an individualized reason to search for any particular American’s information.” The FBI treated the FISA repository like the British agents treated general warrants in the 1760s, helping spark the American Revolution.

In April 2021, the FISA court reported that the FBI conducted warrantless searches of the data trove for “domestic terrorism,” “public corruption and bribery,” “health care fraud,” and other targets—including people who notified the FBI of crimes and even repairmen entering FBI offices. If you sought to report a crime to the FBI, an FBI agent may have illegally surveilled your email. Even if you merely volunteered for the FBI “Citizens Academy” program, the FBI may have illegally tracked all your online activity. As was revealed after that report came out, “The FISA court has gone from pretending FBI violations don’t occur to pretending violations don’t matter. Only task left is to cease pretending Americans have any constitutional right to privacy.” FISA court Chief Judge James Boasberg lamented “apparent widespread violations” of the legal restrictions for FBI searches but shrugged them off and permitted the scouring of Americans’ personal data to continue.

The FISA court treats the FBI like liberal judges treat serial shoplifters. Going back more than 20 years, FISA court rulings have complained of FBI agents lying to the court and abusing the law. As long as the FBI periodically promises to repent, the FISA court entitles them to continue decimating the Fourth Amendment.

Federal intelligence agencies refuse to even estimate how many Americans’ private data has been rounded up in government databases. There is no reason to presume that the feds have disclosed all their FISA wrongdoing. Prior to Edward Snowden’s leaks, the feds probably admitted less than 1% of federal surveillance abuses.

Section 702 will expire this year unless Congress reauthorizes that provision of the law. But the FBI’s perpetual crime wave has created a hornet’s nest on Capitol Hill. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) asked: “How much longer must we watch the FBI brazenly spy on Americans before we strip it of its unchecked authority?” Rep. Mike Garcia (R-CA) declared, “We need a pound of flesh. We need to know someone has been fired.” Even Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, opposes reauthorizing Section 702 without fundamental reforms.

But will Congress finally stop the federal spying spree on Americans? Only a fool would expect members of Congress to give a damn about the constitutional rights and liberties of Americans. Without radical reform, FISA should be renamed the “Trust Me, Chumps!” Surveillance Act.

Get real and realize that you live in a police state, not a free country.

DOES THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT ACTUALLY BELIEVE IN THE CONSTITUTION AT ALL?

Last Week, FBI Officials Boasted That In 2022 Their Agents Had Spied On Only 120,000 Americans Without Search Warrants! Under The Constitution, That Number Should Be ZERO.

This revelation is supposed to give members of Congress comfort that the folks we have hired to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution are in fact doing so. In reality, the FBI and their cousins at the National Security Agency continue to assault and violate a core freedom protected by the Constitution — the right to be left alone.

The reason for the FBI revelation last week is the pending expiration of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the bipartisan animosity toward its extension.

Section 702 is unconstitutional on its face as it directly contradicts the core language of the Fourth Amendment. On its face, it permits the feds to conduct warrantless surveillance on foreign persons who are either physically or digitally present in the United States and all with whom they communicate — American or foreign — who are located here.

Thus, for example, if you call or text or email an art dealer in Florence, Italy, from your home in New Jersey or your cousin in Geneva, Switzerland, calls or texts or emails you at your home in California, the FBI can monitor all those communications without a search warrant. And then the feds can monitor the future calls you make and texts and emails you send. And then they can monitor all the communications of the persons you reached and all the persons they reach. As this expands on and on to the sixth degree, the numbers grow exponentially to hundreds of millions.

The reason for the search warrant requirement is to prevent a repeat of what British agents did to the American colonists before the Revolutionary War. Then, secret British courts in London issued general warrants to British agents in America, which authorized the bearer to search wherever he wished and seize whatever he found.

When the British used their general warrants to search colonial homes ostensibly looking for tax stamps in compliance with the Stamp Act, they were really attempting to predict who among the colonists entertained revolutionary ideas that might lead to a revolt against the king.

The existence and the enforcement of the Stamp Act proved so unpopular that Parliament rescinded it after just one year. But the former bond between colonials and their king had been irreparably breached and a sea change in colonial thinking pervaded the land. The core of that sea change was not taxation without representation; it was “freedom.”

To the colonial mindset, freedom had one universal meaning. It meant freedom from the government — from king and Parliament.

The sea change in colonial thinking resulted in an ideological welcome mat for the Declaration of Independence. When Thomas Jefferson was holed up in a Philadelphia rooming house for five days in June 1776 writing and revising the Declaration, he thought he was crafting the ideological fountainhead of a minority of landowners who despised the king’s autocracy. Yet, within a year, farmers and laborers joined the popular and bloody revolt that ended in 1783 with freedom from England.

What about freedom from the new government here?

When the Constitution was ratified six years later, it had no amendments and made no mention of personal liberty. Five of the ratifying states had insisted upon the promise of the addition of a Bill of Rights as a pre-condition to ratification.

And so, the first task of the new Congress was to comply with that promise and craft a Bill of Rights, lest these five states secede from the new union. What became the Fourth Amendment protected the quintessentially American right to be left alone.

It states that “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” shall be secure and may be violated by the government only pursuant to a search warrant issued by a neutral judge and based on probable cause of crime — and the warrant must specifically describe the place to be searched or the persons or things to be seized.

There is no exception in the amendment for foreign people, bad people, dangerous people, violent people, people the government hates or fears. By the plain meaning of its English words, the amendment protects ALL people. There is no limitation in the amendment to government personnel engaged in law enforcement. The amendment restrains ALL government. The very purpose of the amendment is to present an obstacle to all government because the amendment protects the natural human right to personal privacy.

James Madison and his colleagues who drafted the amendment made a value judgment consistent with their Judeo-Christian-informed morality — namely, that natural rights trump governmental needs.

The violation of privacy is a form of government aggression. Madison knew the tendencies of government toward aggression. The Fourth Amendment was to be the bulwark against it. The people could protect themselves against private aggressors, but they’d need a clause in the supreme law of the land and independent judges to restrain government aggressors.

After 50 years of studying,writing about, judging, interpreting and just plain explaining the Constitution, we are convinced that those in government don’t believe its words or accept its values. They don’t feel bound by it.

They have crafted mechanisms of all sorts — like Section 702 — to evade and avoid it. They will claim that it impairs their duties. Yes, it does — intentionally so, and in the name of personal liberty. Today, liberty is impaired for foreign persons, an immutable characteristic. Tomorrow it could be impaired for any other immutable trait. Of what value is a Constitution with congressionally crafted, politically based exceptions? None.

Channeling Justice George Sutherland, if the provisions of the Constitution are not upheld when they pinch as well as when they comfort, they may as well be abandoned.