Since this raid isn't obviously related to Joe Biden's videotaped admission of Ukrainian corruption, I can't say whether it's a legitimate or politically motivated investigation. Except Biden no longer seems likely to be the Democrat nominee, so Trump has little need to take him out.

Court frees man who refused (or was perhaps unable) to decrypt hard drives. Of course, he was jailed for years before his case got to this point, and the courts can still throw you in jail for 18 months before they have to let you go.

The 5th amendment should protect people from being thrown in jail for refusing to help the prosecution.

Allegedly, of course.

Dershowitz goes on to say that's OK, the President can do that. And he's right. The President IS the executive. Now, the President still can't violate the Constitution or the law. So ordering an investigation for political reasons, or as a favor, is still a problem. But either Obama or Trump could order an investigation into an alleged crime personally, and that would probably not be an issue so long as they properly followed all the rules about it, and made sure they were actually investigating a crime and not making one up.

I bet they forgot about that last part. Oops.

Background. This might b e a good time to tell Congress not to renew the FISC authorization.

Wake me when he actually holds a hearing and actually calls witnesses.

Florida bans sales of knives to people under 18? I thought that sort of thing was limited to the UK for now. But it looks like there was a Jihadi murder there, too. A 17 year old (surprisingly not named Mohammed) killed a 13 year old and stabbed two others. It was a known-wolf killing. The FBI apparently did nothing, despite being aware the murderer was trying to join ISIS.

Interesting. When I saw this initially, I wondered why Trump would override the CDC here. Keeping the passengers in quarantine in Japan seems like an easy call. (Yes, get them off the ship so the infected don't keep infecting the rest; but then pay for them to spend a month in a quarantine facility with netflix before you bring anyone home. The Japanese have first-world medical care available, it's not like evacuating them from Africa.)

But now it seems Trump did not override the CDC. It was "State Dept Officials", anonymous paper-pushers.

Sara Carter

By averting climate catastrophe we will save: $2.9 trillion over 10 years, $21 trillion over 30 years and $70.4 trillion over 80 years.

Problem: Stopping a loss is not new funding, and there's not even a loss to stop here.

Read the whole thing to dissect the latest attempt to distract and mislead over at Meaning In History. Bottom line: don't believe the narrative the leakers are trying to sell.

I'm increasingly skeptical of suicides who had information that would lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton... or Barack Obama. Not that he had exactly that that I know of. But he certainly had damaging political information about the Obama administration, and my tolerance for unexplained suicides is very, very low at the moment.

His book, See Something, Say Nothing, might have something interesting in it, but was published in 2016. What was he working on in 2020?

UPDATE: Sheriff withdraws suicide statement.

The sheer mass of malice and malfeasance coming from Obama's DOJ is stunning. Judicial Watch has uncovered evidence of political involvement by the prosecutors in the Rep Duncan Hunter case, and the DOJ's excuses for it are thin to the point of transparency... and potentially perjury.

I've been keeping an eye on the Coronavirus news. I don't really have any expertise to add. My thoughts were, basically, to start worrying when it showed serious signs of breaking out beyond China. Now cases are spiking in South Korea and Italy. This one looks like it will be going global.

China is admitting the virus did not start in a food market. That's not an admission of an escaped bioweapon, but it's several steps closer to that. Combined with reports that the virus started in the prison system, is it possible China was testing their bioweapons on prisoners?

Should this situation result in mass deaths in major world powers, it will substantially complicate the diplomatic situation.

This is going to get worse before it gets better, and we have enough cases in the US to be worth worrying about now. So far they are cases we know about. The thing to watch for will be cases where we do not know how they started, because they had no contact with known cases. That would mean unknown carriers, and it would be very difficult indeed to catch up if there are many of those.

UPDATE: More here.

He likely has a winnable case, as he has avoided being a public figure, was acquitted, and is being used as a political punching bag. I would suggest only one change: he should sue Twitter too. Twitter's editorial policy has made a mockery of their "just a platform" claim that is the basis for the legal immunity under CDA.

Daily Caller

The U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) will refuse to treat patients who display discriminatory behavior such as sexism, homophobia or racism toward staff beginning in April.

Amid warnings that an increased number of health service staff are facing abuse, the NHS will begin enforcing rules that allow hospitals to refuse service to patients seeking non-emergency care if they inflict discriminatory or harassing behaviors, the Telegraph reports.

That national "right" to health care is looking worse and worse, isn't it? It's now subject to social control rules. How long before the UK is leveraging their massive network of government surveillance cameras combined with facial recognition and China's social credit technology to ensure that anyone who doesn't toe the party line just conveniently expires younger than average?

Conservative Review

Virginians might have dodged the bullet of a mass gun control bill, but lest some think sanity has been restored to the Virginia legislature, the same Democrat politicians relentlessly promoting restrictions on self-defense for law-abiding citizens are pushing for release of violent criminals. One major bill is now headed to Governor Ralph Northam’s desk.

On Monday, Virginia’s Senate passed HB35, which offers early release to juveniles serving a life sentence without parole once they have already served 20 years. This is a growing trend in a lot of liberal states, but a number of Republicans have bought into this radical idea of retroactively abolishing life without parole for juvenile murderers. This bill will potentially offer release for over 700 people sentenced to life as juveniles, according to liberal activists supporting the bill.

This people got into prison by killing at least one person. I doubt their ability to successfully navigate life out of prison will have been improved by 20 years inside, surrounded by criminals, with no job skills and a felony murder conviction.

There are crimes for which I would support this sort of reform. Murder is not one of them. For exceptional cases, there's the executive clemency (pardon) system. But... that won't get criminals out of prison and onto the voter rolls in time to save the Dems in 2020. So, mass releases are the way to go.

Or, you know, mass escape plots.

Bolton's book release during impeachment trial just a publicity stunt.

This lawsuit seeking records on Seth Rich may expose a lot of deep state malfeasance. If the DNC emails released by Wikileaks were leaked (for which Seth Rich is pretty much the only publicly known possibility) rather than hacked by the Russians, the entire Russia hoax falls apart.

Sundance thinks this is a response to Barr showing weakness. Possible. I was disappointed in Barr's comments to Trumps' tweeting, but I was willing to chalk it up to personality differences. However, Barr's lack of solid results on this front (especially now that we are formally into Trump's re-election year) is concerning.

Remember: if the Deep State gets Trump out of office, they win and all of this goes away forever. Barr has said some good things but he is an inside player who has run coverups before (Ruby Ridge).

The downside here: it's still only an acting appointment. I have no doubt the "Acting" part will be used as an excuse to play keepaway with the import secrets.

The same penumbras and emanations that protect a woman's "right" to have an abortion apparently do not protect a man's right to have his reproductive organs unmolested by government mandated vasectomies. At least, they don't in the mind of an Alabama Democrat female legislator.

Trump recently pardoned a few people; less than just about every other President in recent history. The media promptly freaked out about that, and are now claiming that Trump offered to pardon Assange (the man behind Wikileaks, who published the DNC leaked emails, and the Podesta emails) in return for saying where Assange got the DNC emails from. The implication is that Assange would be pardoned in return for a lie, and the pardon is thus a corrupt bargin and obstruction of justice.

There are problems with this narrative.

First, Trump did not pardon Assange and did not ask that a pardon offer be conveyed.

Second, Assange has always maintained he did not receive the DNC emails from a hacker, and has strongly suggested he got them from a leaker (Seth Rich) who was subsequently murdered under unusual circumstances. The FBI has something to hide about Seth Rich's murder, and the timing of the recent indictment strongly suggests they want Assange in custody and under control so he cannot speak out.

Third, the charges against Assange have pretty obviously been false from the beginning. In Europe he was accused of ... accidentally not wearing a condom during consensual sex and thus this is rape. Except those got dropped. The people involved seem likely to be plants, and not the kind you need to water every day. The other US charges are related to the Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning affair, and originate from the Deep State SpyGate team. They are also slim, revolving around helping with "hacking" that never happened.

So why the big stink about the pardon thing, when the Assange part wasn't in the news until the media injected it?

Because the Judicial Watch FOIA suggests more about Seth Rich will be coming out, and the idea of Trump getting Assange to testify somehow is obviously scaring the wits out of the Deep State. If Assange testifies that it wasn't Russia, and it was Seth Rich... all of Russiagate blows up.

Remember when I told you she's running?

Ace of Spades

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Bloomberg have both told people privately in recent weeks that if they thought they could win, they would consider entering the primary -- but that they were skeptical there would be an opening, according to Democrats who have spoken with them.

She's running.

Hillary Clinton says "Never say never" about signing on as a Vice Presidential candidate to one of the Democrats running.

They would be foolish to extend an offer to Hillary. But the question and answer shows where her mind is. Even though she probably recognizes she can't win the primary in any normal fashion, she still wants in. And being someone's VP is better than nothing, right?

Fox News

Claims that a Maltese academic offered “dirt” on Hillary Clinton to a former Trump campaign adviser are “absolutely … not true,” the professor is heard saying on a newly released audio recording, according to a British newspaper.

Professor Joseph Mifsud made the remarks in October 2017 to a reporter from The Telegraph of London, the newspaper claimed Thursday in a story promoting its “Crossfire” podcast.

The paper’s website includes an audio clip of 1 minute and 33 seconds of the reporter, Robert Mendick, purportedly talking with Mifsud, whose whereabouts have been unknown in recent years...

Fox News could not independently verify whether the voice was that of Mifsud, but his lawyer, Stefan Roh, expressed skepticism, given that much of the recording was centered on Mifsud insisting he did not work for "any service, secret service or intelligence or none of this kind.”

So, let's review.

If it IS Mifsud, he said he doesn't work for any intelligence agencies, and did not say anything to Papadopoulos about dirt on Hillary. This would seem at first glance to be bad news for the SpyGate folks since it goes against the Russian narrative -- but the FBI is not claiming their investigation began with Mifsud and Papadopoulos. They claim it began after that.

If it ISN'T Mifsud... as Mifsud's lawyer says... who is it and what motive do they have for the claims?

Cui Bono? Who benefits?

The US intelligence agencies who desperately want to cover up their own involvement in this farce. Producing a fake Mifsud recording and leaking it to the media seems an easy way to create confusion and doubt over their involvement with the man who seems to remain in hiding or perhaps dead.

Why are Democrats so violent?

No consequences.