If you search “spy court” online, the first item that pops onto your screen is a CNN article under the headline “Spy Court Fast Facts.” The first sentence of the story is, “Here’s what you need to know about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.” The next item in the search results is Wikipedia’s entry on the court. Others on the first page of search results include an article on the ACLU website with the headline, “Secret Spy Court Rules ACLU Case Can Move Forward.” It’s also about the FISA Court.
You get the picture. Search algorithms demonstrate the obvious and previously uncontested fact that the FISA Court’s raison d’etre is deciding whether federal agencies may undertake spying operations in America. It’s a little absurd to belabor this, but it is necessary because Democrats continue to deny that there’s any evidence that the intelligence community spied on Team Trump during the Russia investigation and to raise hell over Attorney General William Barr’s assertion that it did so. Of course it did.
The Dems’ fuss is in keeping with the Left’s denial of the obvious on other points, and its willingness to say black is white, up is down. I’ve written before that their plan is to have the best of both worlds by not actually impeaching President Trump but by besmirching him and thus persuading voters that he could have been rightly impeached if the Democrats had wished to do so.
This process most recently included an absurd vote on the House Judiciary Committee, under Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., to hold Barr in contempt of Congress for failing to turn over subpoenaed evidence from special counsel Robert Mueller. We analyze this Capitol Hill circus act in our editorial. It’s intended to create the bogus impression that there is a cover-up. This is an example of turning reality on its head. Barr did not cover up the Mueller report but sent it, with tiny, legally obligatory redactions, to Congress. In doing so, he went above and beyond the transparency required by law — this will be tested in court following Trump’s decision to invoke executive privilege — but with the Democrats, no good turn is left unstoned. We’ll follow this dirty election campaigning both here in the Washington Examiner magazine and on our website, washingtonexaminer.com, as the weeks and months go by.
[Editorial: Nadler’s show trial, not Barr, deserves to be held in contempt]
This week’s magazine, last week’s, and next week’s are dedicated to military appreciation, for which the month of May is set aside. Our cover story profiles and interviews Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, a former Navy SEAL, who has become a star on the Right almost as fast as AOC became a star on the Left. And he’s a lot more impressive than she is. We also publish a superb excerpt from Sen. Tom Cotton’s, R-Ark., new book Sacred Duty, about his time in the Old Guard at Arlington National Cemetery.
Elsewhere in the magazine, we write on the death of the political cartoon as a genre. And in the Life & Arts section, Eric Felten orders a martini as smoothly as 007.
