From Our “You Can’t Fool All of the People All of the Time” Desk

A new Harvard CAPS/Harris poll found that President Biden’s unconscionable false demonization of half of America as dangerous, semi-fascist “extremists” worked – but only on audiences predisposed to actually believe anything Joe Biden says. Fortunately, that’s still a minority, although it’s way too many for comfort.

https://pjmedia.com/uncategorized/kevindowneyjr/2022/09/21/more-americans-worried-about-socialist-left-than-big-scary-maga-and-thats-just-the-beginning-n1630953

The poll asked, “Are you more concerned about the Socialist left in America and the power they are gaining or more afraid of MAGA Republicans and the power they are getting?” By a margin of 55-45%, Americans said they’re more worried about the socialist left.

When asked, “Do you think there are tens of millions of dangerous MAGA Republicans backing violence and trying to overthrow the constitution, or is that a gross exaggeration and distortion?” 54% said it’s a gross exaggeration and distortion, while 46% were seriously deluded enough to believe it.

On the question, “Do you think that President Biden is fairly raising issues around MAGA Republicans, or is the President trying to avoid talking about inflation, immigration, crime, and other issues?”, 59% said he’s avoiding the real issues (including 68% of Independents), while 41% swallow Biden’s bilge.

Some other findings that might make the Dems rethink their pedal-to-the-metal propaganda assault: 56% of Americans think Biden should not have given that divisive speech in Philadelphia; 54% think the FBI is illegally leaking info about Trump and 72% think the leakers should be prosecuted; 54% have doubts about Biden’s mental fitness, and 63% think he’s too old for the job; 57% believe Hunter Biden was peddling influence via access to his father; and 59% believe Hunter’s “laptop from Hell” is genuine.

Amazingly, 41% actually still believe it’s “Russian disinformation,” despite even liberal media outlets finally admitting that was a phony cover story. I suspect that those people must give all their money away to Democrat candidates and Nigerian Internet scammers.

It never ends: New York AG Letitia James files anti-Trump civil suit

New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Wednesday that she's bringing a $250 million civil suit against President Trump, three of his adult children, and Trump Organization executives Allan Weisselberg and Jeff McConney for inflating Trump’s net worth and the values of his properties. We learn several things from this:

1. Letitia James is up for re-election on November 8.

2. Letitia James is trying to fulfill her original campaign promise to “get Trump.”

(Yes, she actually ran on this very issue in 2018–- but try as she might, she didn’t have evidence for a criminal case. If she had, she would've brought one.)

3. Letitia James shows us that the weaponization of the federal bureaucracy extends into some of the states as well, certainly her own.

(During her campaign, she said she “would join with other attorneys general across this nation in removing this President from Office.”)

4. Letitia James is up for re-election on November 8. Did I say that already?

5. It’s a good thing --- if you’re Letitia James talking about President Trump –- to say a duly-elected President is illegitimate.

(In a campaign ad from 2018, she said, “I’m running for attorney general because I will never be afraid to challenge this illegitimate President, when our fundamental rights are at stake.”)

6. Last but not least, did I mention that Letitia James is up for re-election on November 8?

See how much we learned? During her campaign in 2018, she smiled into the camera and said, “Oh, we’re going to definitely sue him. We’re gonna be a real pain in the a--. He’s going to know my name personally.” (In other words: Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime. We’ll figure out the charges later.)

A footnote in this new court filing says she’s passing along her findings to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, who could possibly open a criminal investigation into bank fraud. Never mind that the Manhattan DA’s office has been investigating Trump and his family for years and finally declined to press criminal charges.

Trump invoked his Fifth Amendment rights when James subpoenaed him last month. In a criminal trial, that is not evidence or even implication of guilt and, under our Constitution, CANNOT lawfully be taken as such. We noted at the time Trump took the Fifth that he was already the target of massive “incoming” lawfare --- the Mar-A-Lago raid, for crying out loud --- and couldn’t possibly have been expected to prepare for every question they might ask. He and his attorneys knew prosecutors were just waiting for him to get some small detail wrong. Can you say “perjury trap”? (And perjury IS criminal.)

At the time, we were glad he'd declined the invitation. But as commentators on the left are gleefully reporting, the jury in a CIVIL trial DOES get to interpret this negatively if they so choose. I hope jurors understand that if the plaintiff pleads the Fifth hundreds of times, it's only because they're being asked hundreds of questions. If you plead the Fifth for one question, you have to do it for them all.

Last month on Truth Social, Trump said, "I once asked, if you're innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment? Now I know the answer to that question. When your family, your company and all the people in your orbit have become the targets of an unfounded, politically motivated Witch Hunt, supported by lawyers, prosecutors and the Fake News Media, you have no choice."

James, in her press conference Wednesday, said she’s going after Trump for such nefarious activities as exaggerating the size of his apartment square footage. He did this to “deceive banks and deceive the people of the great state of New York.” She even came up with this really, really clever turn of phrase that no one’s ever thought of before: “the art of the steal.” Isn’t that creative?

Legal expert Harmeet Dhillon said on Tucker's show that James seems “obsessed” with Trump and denies the legitimacy of his election. (Note: it’s fine when Democrats are “election deniers.”) Dhillon noted that James is trailing in the polls and suggested this is really about boosting her ratings. James absolutely could not find any crime on which to indict Trump, so she’s filed a 220-page complaint and gone the civil-suit route instead.

As Dhillon pointed out, fraud has a statute of limitations of six years, and what James is looking at goes back even to before Trump was in office. It’s “stale, old stuff,” she said, “that nobody bothered about until this time.”

And this is key: “What we’re really talking about is valuation of assets that were heavily negotiated with banks.” James’ complaint displays “a shocking naivete about the realties of business, about the realities of how properties are financed...” This is “small-potatoes stuff.” The banks never even complained; there was no victim. If anyone else had done it, it would not be singled out. This is “entirely political,” she said, and “not how an attorney general in the United States should be using their awesome power.”

This report from THE DAILY CALLER includes the statement from Trump attorney Alina Habba. “Today’s filing is neither focused on the facts nor the law,” she said. “Rather, it is solely focused on advancing the Attorney General’s political agenda.”

https://dailycaller.com/2022/09/21/new-york-ag-sues-trump/

Kurt Schlichter has some fun with this development in a series of tweets predicting how this “dog’s breakfast of a complaint” will go. He reminds us that you can’t have a civil suit without allegations of harm: “You cannot sue if you did not suffer a loss.” He says “there are reasons to dismiss that just leap off the page.”

They chose a civil suit, he said, because they don’t need proof beyond reasonable doubt, only the standard of “preponderance of the evidence.” Also, “they chose civil ‘fraud’ to impress dumb people.” They filed the suit “in time to influence the election” but not early enough “that this garbage case could be tossed out before the election.” Though it certainly should be.

https://twitchy.com/brettt-3136/2022/09/21/townhalls-kurt-schlichter-lays-out-how-new-yorks-lawsuit-against-donald-trump-will-go/

RELATED: I don’t always agree with what former Attorney General Bill Barr has to say, but when he’s right, he’s right.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/political-hit-job-bill-barr-blasts-letitia-james

Barr recognizes a “political hit job” when he sees one, and when a politician’s children are dragged into it, that’s a tip-off, he says. Trump’s kids wouldn’t know the details of his personal financial statement.

He thinks this attack on Trump could backfire in a big way, with Trump seen as a sympathetic figure. He said this was “another example of of people piling on because of Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Letitia James has got it so bad, she really should stay quarantined indefinitely.

“Everything You Know Is Wrong” Dept.

A new peer-reviewed analysis found major flaws in a Bangladesh study that’s been cited as the principal proof that wearing face masks help slow the spread of COVID. Another study in the peer-reviewed Nature journal “Communications Biology” found that hydroxychloroquine "blocks SARS-CoV-2 entry into the endocytic pathway," the primary method of entry for the Omicron variant. In summation, they're claiming that HCL helps and masks don't.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/misinformation-peer-reviewed-research-questions-mask-study-finds

So please mark these two things on your score cards for “Things that were dangerous misinformation that had to be censored” a year ago, but are now probably true.

Suspended FBI agent is our Huck's Hero; here's why

As of now, at least 20 disgusted FBI whistleblowers have –- finally –- come forward to congressional investigators. One of them has also told DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz about the falsification of data to make it look as though we have a big problem with white supremacist right-wingers threatening to commit domestic terrorism. That is an atrocious lie.

Miranda Devine at the NEW YORK POST has identified this whistleblower and spoken to him. She calls him an “FBI hero” and tells in a new opinion column how he’s now “paying the price” for exposing how conservative Americans are being unjustly persecuted.

His name, appropriately, is Steve Friend. He’s 37, the father of two young children, a 12-year veteran of the FBI and a SWAT team member. As Devine reports, he was “suspended on Monday, stripped of his gun and badge, and escorted out of the FBI field office in Daytona Beach, Florida, after complaining to his supervisors about the violations.” They’d already suspended his top-secret security clearance last week.

Here’s the best part: he actually refused to participate in SWAT team raids that he considered to be violations of FBI policy and a use of excessive force against January 6 subjects who had been accused of misdemeanors. They wrote him up as absent without leave. He says he’s been threatened. I hope he’s got good legal representation, as there are laws in place to protect whistleblowers. It sounds as if he does; on Wednesday, he filed a formal whistleblower complaint with IG Horowitz.

Friend says he’d been working on child sexual exploitation and human trafficking cases before word came down that domestic terrorism and the January 6 cases were to be the priority, so he was reassigned to them. He believes this harmed the investigations he’d been working on.

He says he did not vote for President Trump in 2020, so maybe they’ll go easy on him. Just kidding –- that won’t be good enough if he doesn’t share their killer-instinct for going after Trump and his supporters. He dared to say to his superiors that the Mar-A-Lago raid, and the investigative process leading up to it, violated FBI policy as well as the subject’s Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial and Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment.

He even said THIS: that the FBI was dragging agents into J6 investigations that violated citizens’ Sixth Amendment rights due to “overzealous charging by the DOJ and biased jury pools in Washington DC.” Wow, he IS a hero, our Huck’s Hero for today!

https://nypost.com/2022/09/21/fbi-hero-paying-the-price-for-exposing-unjust-persecution-of-conservative-americans/

Devine’s piece is a must-read. She also appeared Wednesday night on Tucker Carlson’s show to talk about how Agent Friend felt when he was taken off cases he knew were really important and given others that he considered bogus, cases being investigated just to, in Devine’s words, “back up the rhetoric that we’re hearing from the White House.”

It might be that the conscientious rank-and-file agents at the FBI will save our law enforcement bureaucracy and give us something exceptional to start fresh with. Perhaps it was the Mar-A-Lago raid that provided the final straw, or the way January 6 targets have been treated, but whatever it was, unrest is growing among field agents about the weaponization of the FBI for political purposes.