Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are glad to see Bernie Sanders considering a challenge of the results in Iowa since no one has seen any vote totals. They’re sorry to see Rand Paul’s libertarian voice leave the campaign trail but they are happy he is now focusing on his effort to win re-election to the Senate. And they rip Donald Trump for his Twitter rant accusing Ted Cruz of fraud in Iowa and demanding a redo or for all Cruz votes to be nullified.
Sen. Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses thanks to an unparalleled turnout machine and an adherence to principle that won over voters in a state reliant on big government programs, according to former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, a fierce Cruz ally.
On Tuesday, Cruz defied the final polls and won the GOP caucuses with 28 percent. Previous front-runner Donald Trump finished second at 24 percent and Sen. Marco Rubio finished a close third at 22 percent. All other candidates failed to reach double digits. Cruz leaves Iowa with eight delegates. Trump and Rubio won seven each. Ben Carson earned three and Rand Paul and Jeb Bush each secured one.
Heading into the caucuses, all of the final polls showed Trump with a lead of five to seven points. Even the entrance polls at the caucuses predicted a narrow Trump win.
Cuccinelli was in Iowa making calls and knocking on doors to get Cruz backers to the polls. He says the pollsters and the pundits got schooled by the people.
“Going into Iowa, every single pundit I saw on CNN and Fox, every single one was wrong. Every single one. Everybody hearing that clearly? Every single one,” said Cuccinelli, who says the political “experts” suffer from group think and reinforce each other’s conventional wisdom.
“They don’t know any more about this than you or I or anybody else do. Most of them have never worked on a campaign. They just get caught up in the same narrative and they spit it back out,” said Cuccinelli.
He’s also stunned by the overthinking among the pundits, particularly the narrative that Marco Rubio is somehow the big winner for coming in third as opposed to Cruz who won.
“What you’re hearing with the Rubio piece after the fact is just more media narrative. They all say it to each other and then they turn to the camera and say it. Ted Cruz won last night,” said Cuccinelli. “When Marco Rubio wins a state somewhere, then we’ll have something to talk about.”
So how did Cruz not only win but win comfortably when record turnout was supposed to spell victory for Trump? Cuccinelli says it all came down to the grassroots.
“I am a grassroots guy and I can tell you, they had a well-oiled machine running there in Iowa. They did a great job,” said Cuccinelli, noting the Cruz campaign spent weeks and months building relationships with voters.
What encourages Cuccinelli even more is that Cruz has the same approach in all of the upcoming states.
“No other campaign on the Republican side can match that kind of institutional infrastructure, and Ted has been building it all the way into the March states. So this is not, like for (Rick) Santorum and (Mike) Huckabee a one-shot wonder where they put all their chips on Iowa and weren’t ready for anything beyond that. Ted is ready,” said Cuccinelli.
Cuccinelli believes Cruz ought to be commended for other aspects of the campaign as well, most notably refusing to embrace ethanol mandates and subsidies.
“Ted Cruz is the first candidate in the history of the world for either party to oppose ethanol subsidies and win the Iowa caucuses,” said Cuccinelli.
Instead of pandering, Cruz called for an end to all government favors in the energy sector.
“His explanation of no mandates, no picking of winners and losers by Washington, really resonated with Iowans. Of course, corn is a big deal to them but they understand that Washington is broken and that if you’re going to give goodies away, like sugar subsidies in Florida for instance, then you’re never going to fox the problem. It’s got to be all or nothing,” said Cuccinelli.
In visiting with Iowa voters over the weekend, Cuccinelli says even the people who didn’t Cruz respected his stand. He used the story of a Jeb Bush supporter as an example.
“She said, without me prompting her, ‘I’ll tell you what I like about Ted Cruz is he does what he says he’s gonna do and he sticks to his principles,'” said Cuccinelli.
Now that Cruz and Rubio are getting the post-Iowa buzz, voters will be looking even more closely at both of them. Other than their high-profile battles over immigration, what are the major differences between two candidates who describe themselves as constitutional conservatives.
Cuccinelli sees a couple major differences, starting with the people who surround the two senators.
“[Rubio] doesn’t have movement conservative staff when you compare it to Senator Cruz, who has wall-to-wall movement conservatives in his office. Personnel is policy,” said Cuccinelli, who also sees differences in how passionately the two candidates pursue the issues they ran on.
“Of all the other things Marco talked about on entitlements and everything else when he was running for the Senate, it was all so inspirational but he hasn’t tried to do any of it. Ted, running for the Senate, addressed a number of issues. He has followed up with those positions and pursued them aggressively, even when it cost him, even when it made him unpopular with the leadership,” said Cuccinelli.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review enjoy three good martinis. They applaud voters for vaulting conservative Ted Cruz to victory in Iowa and Marco Rubio to a strong third place finish. They enjoy the spectacle of a dead heat between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. And Jim has some strong words for candidates who have no chance yet refuse to end their campaigns.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review enjoy Hillary Clinton’s latest feeble attempts to explain away her email scandal. They also enjoy Bernie Sanders suddenly becoming interested in the email/server scandal. And they slap the Cruz campaign for stupidly sending out a mailer to voters suggesting they had broken some law for not voting as much as they should.
Several Republican presidential candidates were bloodied over their shifting positions on immigration reform in Thursday’s debate, but a key voice in the debate says all of the candidates seem to be edging to a more conservative position on border security and what to do about people in the U.S. Illegally.
In the debate, candidates Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were confronted with montages of their own statements that seemed to contradict what they’re saying now. Rubio was quoted from 2010 saying that an earned pathway to citizenship was code for amnesty yet he backed such a pathway in the 2013 Senate immigration bill.
Cruz was asked to explain statements from 2013, when he tried to amend the immigration bill by banning citizenship for people in the U.S. illegally but allowing them to become legalized. Cruz insists that was a poison pill designed to show how unreasonable Rubio and the other sponsors were and that he has never really backed a path to legalization.
Center for Immigration Studies Executive Director Mark Krikorian says everyone has blemishes on this issue.
“Nobody is pure on this issue. not Trump, not Cruz, not Rubio, not Jeb. They’ve all shifted their positions,” said Krikorian.
But he says they are are all flip-flopping in an encouraging way to him.
“They’ve all shifted their positions in the right direction. They’ve all become more hawkish on immigration as the public concern over the issue has become clearer and harder and harder to deny,” said Krikorian.
But not all flip-flopping is created equal. Krikorian says Jeb Bush is the least credible on the issue but doesn’t see Bush as still having a shot at the nomination. Among the top tier of candidates, he says Rubio has the most to answer for because of his involvement in the Gang of Eight legislation.
“I’m not sure that people are going to forgive and forget that and I’m not sure that they should. In a sense, no matter what he says, it’s important that somebody who does the kind of thing Rubio did be punished politically no matter what he thinks now. In other words, that there be a price exacted so that other people in the future will think twice about doing what Rubio did to help Chuck Schumer and Barack Obama,” said Krikorian.
Krikorian is also thrilled the issue is getting so much attention in this campaign. He says Donald Trump deserves credit for pushing the issue to the forefront but not as much credit as Trump gives himself.
“Even if he weren’t in the race, not just Republicans but independents and even lots of Reagan Democrats, are really concerned about this immigration issue. It would be coming up. There’s no question about it but Trump is right. He has gotten so much traction talking about this that the other candidates have been scrambling more than they would have been scrambling otherwise,” said Krikorian.
While voters must determine the sincerity of the candidates, Krikorian says Americans have made it clear what they want on immigration.
“The only way the public would ever accept amnesty would be if we fixed the problem first,” said Krikorian. “Plug the hole in your boat first before you talk about how you’re going to bail it out.”
But Krikorian says candidates and the media have missed the most critical immigration issue – defining the extent of legal immigration.
“The more important issue is how much legal immigration do you think the United States wants to have. We have tens of millions of Americans who want to work and can’t find work,” said Krikorian.
Just three days before the first votes are cast in the 2016 presidential campaign, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is on defense again after the State Department refused to release 22 emails kept on her unsecured server because they contain highly sensitive information.
State Department sources says the 37 pages of emails contain Special Access Program information, some of the most closely guarded secrets in our government.
“This is very telling,” said former U.S. Attorney Andrew C. McCarthy, who is now with National Review and is the author most recently of “Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.”
McCarthy says this doesn’t radically change the scope of the FBI investigation into Clinton’s server since we already know more than 1,300 emails contained classified information and have been released with the sensitive parts redacted. Still he believes this highlights the seriousness of Clinton’s actions.
“With respect to these 22 (emails), there is actually a blanket prohibition on disclosure and the reason is that they fear there are other copies of these emails out there,” said McCarthy.
“If they release any part of them, whoever may have those emails will have it confirmed to them that you’re dealing with a Special Access Program national security intelligence matter,” said McCarthy.
He says tipping anyone off to such information could have horrific consequences.
“When that kind of stuff gets revealed and people work backwards or go to school on the information that’s out there, that can result not only in the compromise of important sources of intelligence but also potentially in the killing of people who are spies or covert informants,” said McCarthy.
The Clinton campaign calls the State Department decision “overclassification run amok” and insists bureaucratic infighting over what qualifies as classified is all that’s happening in this story.
McCarthy dismisses that assessment and says this is the latest evidence that ought to give voters great pause this year.
“As a candidate, I think it makes even less appropriate for her to be given an even higher position of public trust,” said McCarthy.
The Obama White House also waded into the Clinton investigation on Friday, with Press Secretary Josh Earnest downplaying the likelihood that Clinton will face any legal trouble for her actions over the server.
“That’s not something I’m worried about,” said Earnest. “Some officials have said she is not the target of the investigation and it does not seem to be the direction in which it is trending.”
McCarthy finds that statement puzzling.
“The political parts of the government, including the White House and the White House staff, shouldn’t know what’s going on in the Justice Department’s investigation,” said McCarthy.
McCarthy also says Earnest is using slippery language by saying Clinton is not the “target” of the investigation. He says in the legal community the term “target” or “subject” is reserved only for situations when a grand jury has begun to investigate a specific person. Since there is no grand jury, McCarthy says Earnest’s statement is meaningless.
He says the FBI should not be rushed by the political calendar but he also says this probe really shouldn’t take that long.
“A classified information case is easier to investigate than other kinds of cases in the sense that the arguments either where they belong or they’re not. They were either transmitted to people who shouldn’t have had them transmitted to them or they weren’t,” said McCarthy.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review applaud Ted Cruz for refusing to embrace ethanol subsidies and mandates in Iowa. They slam Cruz for his terrible joke about leaving the stage and they discuss the GOP bloodbath over immigration flip-flopping. And they wonder why Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum allowed themselves to be used by the Trump campaign.
Senator Mike Lee, R-Utah, is leading the charge to pass legislation to make it harder for the government to see your emails.
Lee is championing S. 356, also known as the Electronic Communications Privacy Amendments Act, which would require officials to get a warrant or court order to gain access to emails just as they currently do to search our mail or enter our homes. He says there are no restrictions on the government searching our emails.
“Nothing. All the government has to do is have is the thought, ‘I want to go after so-and-so’s email. They don’t have to go get a court order. They don’t have to get a warrant. They just have to decide they want it. As long as the email is at least 180 days old they can get it,” said Lee.
“That’s wrong. That violates the spirit, certainly, and also probably the letter of the fourth amendment. Yet this has been in law, in statute, since 1986,” said Lee.
Therein lies the problem. The law has not been updated in 30 years. Lee says lawmakers had no way of knowing how pervasive email would become or even conceiving of cloud-based technology. But he says that’s no excuse for not updating the law.
He says what the House and Senate legislation calls for is very simple.
“You would have to get a court order. You would have to have access to some type of official process in order to gain access to somebody’s emails. It’s not enough that it would simply need to be 180 days old,” said Lee.
The legislation is getting blowback from some government agencies, mainly the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC. Lee says their argument is pretty straightforward and so is his response.
“The objection is this could make it more difficult for government to gain access to documents that it wants. And my response to that is yeah, that’s the whole point,” said Lee.
“That’s also the whole point of the fourth amendment. For that matter, that’s the whole point of having a constitution at all. You want to make things more difficult for the government to do. That’s what we call rights. That’s the whole reason why we have a constitution in the first place,” said Lee.
Lee says it’s time for the government to honor all aspects of the Constitution, in this case protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
“The fourth amendment’s not just a good idea. It’s also the law. It’s there for a reason and it’s there because governments tend to abuse too much power when they have access to it,” said Lee.
Lee says the SEC has been leading the opposition to the bill while intelligence agencies have not been as active as they have in other privacy debates.
“They’ve been less vocal on this issue, in part because they’ve got other tools that they can use to gain access to what they need. The Securities and Exchange Commission has been the most vocal of the agencies on this one. But again, I just don’t think that their argument carries the day,” said Lee.
The House version of the bill, HR 699, has more co-sponsors than any other piece of legislation. The Senate bill is also popular and petitions from the public have more than 110,000 people demanding passage. However, the two lawmakers that matter most have no inclination to take action.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Virginia, have not even marked up the bills much less tried to move them out of committee.
“This does not appear to have been a priority for them so far. I’m trying to change that,” said Lee, who says Grassley and Goodlatte harbor the same reservations as officials at the SEC.
“They have some concerns because some of the things that some government agencies, especially and including the SEC have expressed. I understand that concern. I get it, but in my mind that doesn’t obviate the need for the legislation, far from it.. It actually highlights the need from it,” said Lee.
Lee says it is vital for Congress to act rapidly on the legislation for multiple reasons. First, he says Americans deserve these fourth amendment protections as soon as possible. Second, he insists there is enthusiasm in both parties in both chambers to get this done and President Obama is likely to sign it. Finally, he does not want to have to start over on this in the next Congress when there is no guarantee on what the balance of power will be.
He encourages concerned Americans to demand action from their senators and members of Congress.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review welcome new, unimpressive poll numbers for Hillary Clinton. They staggered as to why evangelicals are flocking to Donald Trump despite his life and political positions being a giant middle finger to traditional values. They marvel at Trump’s ability to plan an event that may well eclipse the debate he’s skipping and the RNC’s inability to stop other networks from airing it. And they mark 30 years since the horrific Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
The lead attorney for one of the undercover pro-life reporters indicted this week in the aftermath of last year’s exposing of Planned Parenthood says prosecutors are pursuing bogus charges, Planned Parenthood officials are the obvious criminals and we’re reaching a “scary” point where politics determine the outcome of the justice system
On Monday, a Harris County, Texas, grand jury elected not to indict Planned Parenthood for allegedly selling organs and other body parts of aborted babies. Instead, the members returned a felony indictment of tampering with a government record against Center for Medical Press President David Daleiden and his colleague, Sandra S. Merritt. If convicted, they could each spend as much as 20 years in prison.
“These two individuals will be exonerated. There’s no question about that,” said Liberty Counsel Chairman Mathew Staver, who is lead counsel for Merritt. “They’ll have their day in court. We look forward to that.”
Daleiden was charged with an addition misdemeanor of trying to purchase organs from aborted babies.
According to the indictment, the felony tampering charge accuses Daleiden and Merritt of fabricating California driver’s licenses to gain entry to the Houston Planned Parenthood facility.
Staver says the statute is being badly misapplied in this case.
“They were using journalistic tactics like lots of journalists do. It’s not just David and Sandra. This is something that has been done by journalists for a long time,” said Staver.
In addition, he says there is an explicit exception to the law.
“If you take a driver’s license and you tamper with it and make it look like it’s valid for you because you have had your driver’s license revoked for a DUI or whatever, and you then present that as your driver’s license to the police officer knowing that you really have no driver’s license, that is what’s covered by this situation,” said Staver.
As a result, Staver is supremely confident both defendants will be cleared.
“This indictment really goes beyond what the statute words say, and certainly the intent of the statute. That’s why I think this will be thrown out at the end of the day,” said Staver.
Staver says the misdemeanor charge against Daleiden may be even more bogus.
“That’s even more outrageous because he’s purchasing what from whom and the seller doesn’t get anything to that effect? If someone’s going to purchase something, you have to have a seller selling something, and it’s illegal to sell body parts,” said Staver.
He says Daleiden has even stronger ground in that he had no intent to actually buy any body parts from aborted babies. He says no one would videotape their activities and then disseminate it far and wide if they believed it was criminal.
Staver believes the absence of charges against Planned Parenthood is the greatest travesty of all in this case.
“It’s obvious what they’re doing. They’re on video. It’s multiple times, multiple people, high-ranking Planned Parenthood individuals. They’re talking callously about aborting baby body parts. They’re talking about preserving certain fetal organs intact because they can get higher prices for them. Then they’re talking about selling these body parts, so it’s pretty obvious,” said Staver.
“Planned Parenthood is the one that has committed criminal acts here. They’re the ones that should be indicted and having to reveal to the rest of the public the inner workings of Planned Parenthood, this brutal, barbarous kind of activity that Planned Parenthood is doing and being funded by state and federal tax dollars in the process,” said Staver.
So how did this happen? Staver sees two potential issues, beginning with the grand jury process itself.
“[A grand jury] is basically giving one side of a story without the other side represented. Certainly we need to respect the grand jury’s process but I do know there are situations where grand juries don’t get all the information and they are going on information that is being presented to them, which is a very narrow slice of the pie. That’s why prosecutors need to be so ethically above board,” said Staver.
That last point leads to Staver’s second major concern. While Harris County District Attorney Davon Anderson is a Republican who calls herself pro-life, one of her assistant prosecutors most certainly is not.
LifeNews revealed that Lauren Reeder, a prosecutor in Anderson’s office, is listed as an unpaid director for the Houston Planned Parenthood clinic in question on the facility’s most recent 990 tax form from 2014.
“The district attorney or the assistant district attorney has a lot of power in either giving evidence to give one side or withholding evidence to not give the other side,” said Staver.
In the big picture, Staver fears we are entering a “very scary” phase in which politics and ideology seem to matter more than the law in resolving hot-button cases.
“When you get into two different particular areas, abortion and the issue of homosexuality and same-sex marriage, it seems all the common sense, all the logic, all the rules of procedure, frankly the rule of law just gets tossed to the side and you have these outrageous, shocking situations,” said Staver.
“What’s driving it? It’s not the rule of law. It’s ideology and it’s politics and it should have nothing to do with judicial proceedings. When you ultimately mix ideology and politics with the judiciary, you’re really messing up the system that the founders envisioned. All of us should be concerned about that because all of lose our liberty,” said Staver, noting that those who cheer today’s decisions could find the winds blowing against them soon.
