Wrapping up the “New and Improved” American Inquisition™:

Parts One and Two

Need more proof?

House committee admits over email that it did, in fact, doctor a text message between Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows after The Federalist reported that Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif, and his staff doctored it.

Read that again: the committee is doctoring the messages; this is also known as falsifying evidence. Pretty easy to get a conviction if you get to make up the ‘proof’ as you go along.

As On Wednesday morning, The Federalist reported that Jordan had given Meadows a brief summary of a four-page legal memorandum that attorney Joseph Schmitz had written regarding congressional certification of the 2020 presidential electoral vote count.

In The Federalist received an email statement from a Democrat spokesman for the Jan. 6 committee and he admitted that the committee doctored the text message.

“The Select Committee on Monday created and provided Representative Schiff a graphic to use during the business meeting quoting from a text message from ‘a lawmaker’ to Mr. Meadows,” the spokesman wrote. “The graphic read, ‘On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.’”

“In the graphic, the period at the end of that sentence was added inadvertently,” the spokesman admitted. “The Select Committee is responsible for and regrets the error.”

Neither the Jan. 6 committee spokesman nor Schiff explained how it was possible to “inadvertently” cut a sentence in half and eliminate the last two paragraphs of a detailed legal summary, nor why Jordan, “a lawmaker,” was credited with the text rather than Schmitz, its author.

So, the witch hunt continues -and with a hat tip toward the Inquisition “if there is no evidence of wrongdoing make something up!”

And make sure to ignore any similar shenanigans by the accusing side.

 Apparently, Schiff did not contact Jordan to inquire about the content, authorship, or veracity of the text.

All of the other committee’s arguments are similar in their aim to give themselves absolute and unlimited power in how they investigate private citizens and to insist that the judiciary has no right to limit them. In connection with 1/6, for instance, the committee maintains that it can investigate anyone it wants even if its motives are not to enact new laws and even if the documents it seeks (Budowich’s financial records) are unrelated to any proposed new laws. That is because, it says, “Congressional committees are not required to identify a specific piece of legislation in advance of conducting an investigation of the pertinent facts. It is sufficient that a committee’s investigation concerns a subject on which legislation ‘could be had.‘”

Such a principle, if accepted, would destroy any limits on Congress’s ability to investigate citizens (clearly, it was possible for the McCarthy-era In the past, Congress has conducted investigations to produce new laws even though this was not their primary goal, as the Supreme Court ruled twice when striking them down). Although Judge Boasberg accepted the committee’s argument, he nevertheless was bound by an earlier appellate court’s ruling that the 1/6 Committee was mandated by law.

The committee’s other arguments are even more extreme: namely, that “the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause provides absolute immunity to Members and committees when performing legislative acts” and that “sovereign immunity prohibits litigation against Congress to which it has not consented, and no such consent has been.” 

In that case, the 1/6 Committee would be able to do whatever it wants with citizenry, without any court having authority to even review the legality or constitutionality of what they are doing, much less stop them.

Pay attention: Events that happened during the first War on Terror — and many other events that were perceived as traumatic — are instructive here. So many Americans were so horrified by the carnage of that day that many Americans did not care or want to hear about legal niceties, constitutional limitations, or civil liberties regarding government actions. 

In response to or in response to retaliation for 9/11, anything the government did became inherently justified, and anyone who objected — no matter the principles cited — could be considered on the side of the terrorists. Brainwashing propaganda at its purest definition

There is a similar dynamic at work here as well. Congress is (supposedly, anyway) constrained in its ability to investigate private citizens by the constitution. I consider it to be blatantly abusive to conspire with JPMorgan and its counsel to ensure that a citizen does not have a chance to seek judicial relief regarding the committee’s attempt to obtain mounds of his personal and financial records. Additionally, the committee has been relentlessly pursuing not only Trump officials or people who engaged in criminal activity at the Capitol on January 6, but a wide group of Americans whose only crime appears to be their political beliefs and associations — exactly as the Supreme Court observed when it was striking down the excesses of Congress’s McCarthy-era probes of citizens.

However, with the media cheering everything done in order to stop the Trump movement and those who supported 1/6 in any way, all these constitutional rights and civil liberties concerns are trampled upon in the name of safety. Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney, and the rest of the Congressional 1/6 Committee essentially assert unfettered power to delve into the lives of anyone without limits in their latest arguments.

For those out there that are cheering wildly at the ‘Darth Cheeto’ worshippers getting slapped about and having their rights systematically destroyed, history has a warning for you:

You’re next.