There are apparently deep divisions within the administration about the Justice Department’s handling of the William Jefferson search warrant. Today, a well-connected former administration official told NRO that when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made the final decision to seek a warrant and search Jefferson’s office, he pointedly did not include Solicitor General Paul Clement and attorneys from the department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the decision-making process. Those lawyers, the former official says, would be precisely the people who might have raised objections to the proposal to seek a warrant and search Jefferson’s office. This afternoon, a Justice Department spokesman had no comment, saying department officials “have declined to discuss the internal deliberations involved in this particular case.”
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Jussie Smollett Changes His Story Again
By Kyle Smith
The actor Jussie Smollett continues to talk about the alleged January 29 attack on him during a frigid night in Chicago, giving Good Morning America his fullest description yet of his claims. It differs substantially from what he told police initially after the alleged assault.
Smollett told GMA that the ...
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McConnell: Trump Will Sign Spending Bill and Declare National Emergency to Fund Wall
By Jack Crowe
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Thursday that President Trump will sign the homeland-security-spending bill pending before Congress while simultaneously declaring a national emergency in order to fund his long-promised border wall.
The spending bill, which provides just $1.35 billion for the construction ...
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We’ll Regret This
Mitch McConnell says the president will sign the budget deal and he will also declare a national emergency to build the wall, as I expected.
We’ll see the legal justifications he uses, but as a political and constitutional matter this is a long-term disaster. Oh, it might be good for Trump according to the ...
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How the Democrats Went Nuts in Three Months
The Democrats swept to power in Congress by campaigning in a way that has been successful for Democrats for generations. “Republicans will take away your health care,” they said, after having focus-grouped it. Now we are preparing for a 2020 campaign in which Donald Trump and Republicans can as easily ...
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Trump’s Emergency Declaration Is Contemptuous of the Rule of Law
By David French
One thing that is abundantly clear from reading the full text of President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on the southern border — he’s barely even deigning to explain why there is a particular crisis today, or why that crisis is so grave that it requires the military to combat it. At its heart ...
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The Failure of the Deal
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “news”letter, the G-File. Subscribe here to get the G-File delivered to your inbox on Fridays.
Dear Reader (But especially Sammie),
I had my say on the emergency declaration yesterday, and I’m sure I’ll have to say it all again not very far ...
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Capitalism’s Cold War
The story of capitalism since the 1980s has been that of a kind of cold war between capital and politics.
In the decade prior, American government was at the nadir of its prestige and credibility. The so-called War on Poverty, launched with great fanfare and idealism in the late 1960s, quickly collided with ...
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Trump Declares National Emergency to Fund Border Wall
By Jack Crowe
President Trump declared a national emergency on Friday in order to unilaterally appropriate $3.6 billion for the construction of his long-promised border wall.
The announcement, made during a televised White House Rose Garden ceremony, came after Congress passed a bipartisan homeland-security-funding bill ...
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