If you have ever heard talk or been to a seminar about “sovereignty”, then very likely those conversations were influenced by the foundational research of the author and educator.
His research and educational journey reaching millions of people worldwide began in 1992 and culminated in 2022 with the 3-Volume book release – his final word on the subject.
At the turn of the millennium his books and audio courses facilitated in part – a sovereignty and tax-honesty movement that involved millions of Americans.
This 3 Volume series comprises the life’s work of Johnny Liberty filled with comprehensive insights into the last few hundred years of history, law, economics, money, citizenship and governance.
These books show how it is supposed to be done in a constitutional Republic.
How did We the People get to where we are today?
What can we do to reclaim our inherent sovereignty and natural rights?
Many of the answers may be found within these revolutionary pages. Available as a paperback, E-Book (PDF) or an Amazon Kindle format. Thank you for supporting the author.
Sincerely,
With Freedom For All, ~ Johnny Liberty
Sovereign’s Handbook by Johnny Liberty (30th Anniversary Edition)
A three-volume, 750 page tome with an extensive update of the renowned underground classic ~ the Global Sovereign’s Handbook.
Still after all these years, it is the most comprehensive book on sovereignty, economics, law, power structures and history ever written.
Served as the primary research behind the best-selling Global One Audio Course.
The 3 Volume Sovereign’s Handbook by Johnny Liberty is textbook material for everyone including educators/teachers, homeschoolers, historians, activists, leaders/politicians, attorneys/judges/law schools, police officers, and state Citizens/Nationals.
Sovereign’s Handbook by Johnny Liberty (30th Anniversary Edition) (3-Volume Printed, Bound Book or PDF)
A three-volume, 750+ page tome with an extensive update of the renowned underground classic ~ the Global Sovereign’s Handbook. Still after all these years, this is the most comprehensive book on sovereignty, economics, law, power structures and history ever written. Served as the primary research behind the best-selling Global One Audio Course. Available Now!
Dawning of the Corona Age: Navigating the Pandemic by Johnny Freedom (3rd Edition) (Printed, Bound Book or PDF)
This comprehensive book, goes far beyond the immediate impact of the “pandemic”, but, along with the reader, imagines how our human world may be altered, both positively and negatively, long into an uncertain future. Available Now!
No isolated Certified Reference Materials for “covid-19” virus.
PCR tests that find “positive” results for covid merely the result of amplified instrument background.
FDA admits PCR tests were developed without any isolated covid-19 virus samples. So they simulated the virus.
Virologist Dr. Judy Mikovitz confirms common coronaviruses and monkey viruses fraudulently labeled “covid.”
Dr. Jane Ruby explains the lack of any viral isolate and why the pandemic is based on coordinated science fraud.
CDC FOIA documents reveal proof the CDC has never isolated covid-19.
The spike protein bioweapon is real, and covid “vaccines” are kill shots to achieve depopulation.
CDC Director Walensky admits the covid vaccine doesn’t stop covid infections.
Sen. Rand Paul calls for Americans to resist covid tyranny.
Last year when covid skeptics were saying “there’s no such thing as a covid virus,” I strongly disagreed. As a published food scientist, laboratory owner and inventor of two published patents based on mass spectrometry analysis, I was aware that SARS-CoV-2 had been genomically sequenced. Surely, I mistakenly thought, it had been isolated, purified and determined to be the cause of covid-19 sickness.
How did I come to realize the medical and scientific establishment has fabricated all this? And what’s the explanation for the very real sickness that people are experiencing?
I’ll share that story here, but in short, common cold viruses and monkey virus fragments found in flu shots are being mislabeled “covid,” and there is a weaponized spike protein bioweapon that’s being distributed via vaccine injections. That’s all real. But there’s no such thing as a real, physical, isolated covid-19 virus that has been harvested from sick people and shown to infect other people and make them sick. What we’re really witnessing here, it now seems, is three distinct things:
1) A cocktail of common cold viruses labeled “covid” which are circulating and causing sickness in some people, most likely because of the lack of immune system exposure to wild type viruses during all the global lockdowns.
2) A weaponized spike protein toxic nanoparticle that’s being injected into people as a “clot shot” … and it’s likely shedding, causing harmful side effects in other, unvaccinated people.
3) A wholly fraudulent PCR “casedemic” scheme that’s designed to flag almost anyone as “positive” based almost entirely on how many cycles the PCR sample prep instruments are instructed to carry out, thereby amplifying instrument noise to the point of a “positive” hit. Almost anything can be flagged as “positive,” including genetic material fragments from previous years’ flu shots.
These three things — combined with the media’s mass hysteria programming — have achieved a level of global fear and psychological terrorism that the world has never seen before. But it’s all based on lies, it turns out. And here’s how we know.
No certified reference materials for isolated SARS-CoV-2 “covid-19” virus
As a lab owner, published scientist and mass spec analyst myself, I am extremely familiar with the process of using certified reference materials (CRMs) to validate analysis methods and instrument calibration sequences. (I’ve spent far too many evenings creating serial dilutions of standards using a Gilson pipette, trust me…)
Here’s how the process normally works in a legitimate science lab:
Step 1) Acquire the CRM of the thing you want to test (“analyte”). This means acquiring a purified, isolated standard with a known concentration, usually in a carrier such as water, or as a dry powder. For example, when I’m testing for mercury in food, I have a certified mercury standard with a known concentration of mercury, dissolved in water, nitric acid and hydrochloric acid.
Step 2) Run the CRM as a sample, at different concentrations, to build a “curve” that effectively teaches the instrument what the analyte looks like and how the instrument detector responds to different concentrations of the analyte. The end result is a “quant curve” that will be used in step 3.
NOTE: Instruments will “match” the thing you’re looking for by a variety of methods, filtering out all other things that don’t match. In mass spec work, molecules are identified by their molecular mass, ion fragmentation patterns, and elution time on chromatography columns. For a substance to match, it has to hit all these parameters. In PCR testing, a “match” is a genomic sequence made of base pairs, defined in a digital library that may or may not have ever been run against a real, physical standard in the real world.
Step 3) Run unknown samples through the instrument (of blood serum, urine, saliva, water, food sample extracts, etc.) and see if the unknown sample contains any of the thing you were looking for (the analyte). Because you built a quant curve, you can also then determine the concentration of the analyte in the original sample. This is typically described as mass over volume, such as ng / ml (nanograms per milliliter). A nanogram is a billionth of a gram. When we test foods for glyphosate, we can detect as little as 1 nanogram per milliliter, which tells you something about the extreme sensitivity of high-end instruments.
This is the process to test something and identify how much of something is found in something else. For example, if you were going to determine if someone was sick with “covid,” you would need to determine the concentration of covid-19 viruses in their blood (i.e. the “viral load”). This is science / biology 101.
So what’s the problem, then?
You’d be stunned to realize how deep the science fraud really goes. Consider these critical points:
Point #1: There appear to be no isolated, purified Certified Reference Materials available for SARS-CoV-2 “covid”. I’ve seen companies that claim to be selling “isolates” containing covid viruses, but in their own description, they explain that their vials contain genetic material from “host cells” (human cells) as well as bovine serum cells, which means it’s a cocktail stew of who-knows-what. Yet it’s called an “isolate.”
Case in point: BEI Resources, which offers something they call an “isolate” of covid-19, that you can find at this link. As the description states for this covid-19 “isolate:”
…[T]his product is not suitable as a whole cell antigen preparation because the protein content is largely contributed by the host cell and the fetal bovine serum used during virus propagation.
In other words, most of the genetic material in the “isolate” is actually from human cells. So it’s not an isolate at all. The covid virus isn’t isolated. In fact, this “isolate” contains viral genetic material, human genetic material and bovine genetic material, plus whatever other viruses were present in the blood of the people and the cows. This could be millions of different nanoparticles present, each containing their own sequences of genetic material.
Point #2: If you have no isolated, certified reference materials, you can’t develop a legitimate analysis test. And this is exactly what the FDA admits in its own documents, which state that since covid-19 viruses weren’t available for the development of the PCR test, they “simulated” it by using human cells and gene bank coronavirus fragments. From the FDA’s own document:
Since no quantified virus isolates of the 2019-nCoV were available for CDC use at the time the test was developed and this study conducted, assays designed for detection of the 2019-nCoV RNA were tested with characterized stocks of in vitro transcribed full length RNA … spiked into a diluent consisting of a suspension of human A549 cells and viral transport medium (VTM) to mimic clinical specimen.
In other words, they faked the covid virus by using gene bank cells which were deliberately and falsely labeled “covid.” This is how the PCR test was developed. The FDA admits it all. The PCR test is a fraud.
Point #3: If you don’t have a CRM isolate, you can’t calibrate instruments against a known sample. And this means the PCR tests aren’t being calibrated against anything real and physical. Instead, they’re relying on downloaded digital libraries provided by none of than the CDC, the very same Big Pharma front group that’s spearheading this covid scam.
Point #4: PCR instruments are incapable of quantitative analysis.The “positive” hits are nothing but amplified background noise. No PCR instrument can tell you how much of some genetic material was found in an original sample. It can merely detect the presence of material on a yes / no basis. In lab science, this is called a “qualitative” analysis, not a quantitative analysis.
In qualitative analysis, the key factor is the “Limit of Detection” (LOD) of the instrument. How little of the sample will still create a “hit” for the instrument? In all instruments, for the LOD to be scientifically valid, it must be something that rises above background noise, or it’s scientifically meaningless. All instruments produce background noise, which are “peaks” or “hits” that represent detector static, you might say. These exist at a background level even when you’re running nothing in the instrument.
To show you what this looks like, consider the following graphic. It shows some mass spec results across a spectrum of masses. The horizontal axis here is m/z (mass over charge), which is simplified to just “mass” for general discussion. It’s the mass of the molecules or particles being detected.
Notice the red and orange lines across the bottom of each chart. That’s largely “background” noise across all the masses. Then notice the very tall orange peak which rises above the background. This is the mass of the molecule they’re looking for. It might be a pesticide, or a contaminant, or a nutrient, etc.
The COVID-driven centralization of economic power and information control in the hands of a few corporate monopolies poses enduring threats to political freedom.
By Glen Greenwald, Founder of The Intercept
Asserting that Donald Trump is a fascist-like dictator threatening the previously sturdy foundations of U.S. democracy has been a virtual requirement over the last four years to obtain entrance to cable news Green Rooms, sinecures as mainstream newspaper columnists, and popularity in faculty lounges. Yet it has proven to be a preposterous farce.
In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. Actual would-be despots such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán quickly seized on the virus to declare martial law, while even prior U.S. presidents, to say nothing of foreign tyrants, have used the pretext of much less civil unrest than what we saw this summer to deploy the military in the streets to pacify their own citizenry.
But early in the pandemic, Trump was criticized, especially by Democrats, for failing to assert the draconian powers he had, such as commandeering the means of industrial production under the Defense Production Act of 1950, invoked by Truman to force industry to produce materials needed for the Korean War. In March, The Washington Postreported that “Governors, Democrats in Congress and some Senate Republicans have been urging Trump for at least a week to invoke the act, and his potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, came out in favor of it, too,” yet “Trump [gave] a variety of reasons for not doing so.” Rejecting demands to exploit a public health pandemic to assert extraordinary powers is not exactly what one expects from a striving dictator.
A similar dynamic prevailed during the sustained protests and riots that erupted after the killing of George Floyd. While conservatives such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK), in his controversial New York Times op-ed, urged the mass deployment of the military to quell the protesters, and while Trump threatened to deploy them if governors failed to pacify the riots, Trump failed to order anything more than a few isolated, symbolic gestures such as having troops use tear gas to clear out protesters from Lafayette Park for his now-notorious walk to a church, provoking harsh criticism from the right, including Fox News, for failing to use more aggressive force to restore order.
The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. Positing Trump as a grand aberration from U.S. politics and as the prime author of America’s woes — rather than what he was: a perfectly predictable extension of U.S politics and a symptom of preexisting pathologies — enabled those who have so much blood and economic destruction on their hands not only to evade responsibility for what they did, but to rehabilitate themselves as the guardians of freedom and prosperity and, ultimately, catapult themselves back into power. As of January 20, that is exactly where they will reside.
The Trump administration was by no means free of authoritarianism: his Justice Department prosecuted journalists’ sources; his White House often refused basic transparency; War on Terror and immigration detentions continued without due process. But that is largely because, as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war. With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not ones invented by him. To the extent Trump was an authoritarian, he was one in the way that all U.S. presidents have been since the War on Terror began and, more accurately, since the start of the Cold War and advent of the permanent national security state.
The single most revealing episode exposing this narrative fraud was when journalists and political careerists, including former Obama aides, erupted in outrage on social media upon seeing a photo of immigrant children in cages at the border — only to discover that the photo was not from a Trump concentration camp but an Obama-era detention facility (they were unaccompanied children, not ones separated from their families, but “kids in cages” are “kids in cages” from a moral perspective). And tellingly, the single most actually authoritarian Trump-era event is one that has been largely ignored by the U.S. media: namely, the decision to prosecute Julian Assange under espionage laws (but that, too, is an extension of the unprecedented war on journalism unleashed by the Obama DOJ).
The last gasp for those clinging to the Trump-as-dictator fantasy (which was really hope masquerading as concern, since putting yourself on the front lines, bravely fighting domestic fascism, is more exciting and self-glorifying, not to mention more profitable, than the dreary, mediocre work of railing against an ordinary and largely weak one-term president) was the hysterical warning that Trump was mounting a coup in order to stay in office. Trump’s terrifying “coup” consisted of a series of failed court challenges based on claims of widespread voter fraud — virtually inevitable with new COVID-based voting rules never previously used — and lame attempts to persuade state officials to overturn certified vote totals. There was never a moment when it appeared even remotely plausible that it would succeed, let alone that he could secure the backing of the institutions he would need to do so, particularly senior military leaders.
Whether Trump secretly harbored despotic ambitions is both unknowable and irrelevant. If he did, he never exhibited the slightest ability to carry them out or orchestrate a sustained commitment to executing a democracy-subverting plot. And the most powerful U.S. institutions — the intelligence community and military brass, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the corporate media — opposed and subverted him from the start. In sum, U.S. democracy, in whatever form it existed when Trump ascended to the presidency, will endure more or less unchanged once he leaves office on January 20, 2021.
The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
The U.S. Founders most certainly did not envision or desire absolute economic egalitarianism, but many, probably most, feared — long before lobbyists and candidate dependence on corporate SuperPACs — that economic inequality could become so severe, wealth concentrated in the hands of so few, that it would contaminate the political realm, where those vast wealth disparities would be replicated, rendering political rights and legal equality illusory.
But the premises of pre-Trump debates over how grave a problem this is have been rendered utterly obsolete by the new realities of the COVID era. A combination of sustained lockdowns, massive state-mandated transfers of wealth to corporate elites in the name of legislative “COVID relief,” and a radically increased dependence on online activities has rendered corporate behemoths close to unchallengeable in terms of both economic and political power.
The lockdowns from the pandemic have ushered in a collapse of small businesses across the U.S. that has only further fortified the power of corporate giants. “Billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes,” reportedThe Guardian in September. A study from July told part of the story:
The combined wealth of the world’s super-rich reached a new peak during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published by the consulting firm PwC and the Swiss bank UBC on Wednesday. The more than 2,000 billionaires around the world managed to amass fortunes totalling around $10.2 trillion (€8.69 trillion) by July, surpassing the previous record of $8.9 trillion reached in 2017.
Meanwhile, though exact numbers are unknown, “roughly one in five small businesses have closed,” APnotes, adding: “restaurants, bars, beauty shops and other retailers that involve face-to-face contact have been hardest hit at a time when Americans are trying to keep distance from one another.”
President Trump’s legal team speaks on the Election 2020 concerns in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania Court grants hearing in election integrity case challenging the constitutionality of Act 77 (mail-in ballots).
On Wednesday during a hearing in front of the Pennsylvania State Legislature, Rudy Giuliani and his team presented evidence as they attempted to prove fraud in the 2020 election.
At one point during the hearing, Giuliani and his team provided data relating to the ballot counting in Pennsylvania. The team was discussing massive spikes in ballots for former Vice President Joe Biden who received nearly 600,000 votes compared to President Trump’s 3,200 in just a very short amount of time.
“How much of the vote that accounted for for Biden and how much for Trump?” Giuliani asked the man presenting the data.
“Close to 600,000. I think our figures were about 570,000 that all those that were represented over time,” he replied.
“For Biden?” Giuliani asked.
“Correct.”
“And how much for Trump?” Giuliani followed up.
“I think it was a little over 3,200,” he replied.
The data was so shocking that the crowd of people in the hearing gasped at the shocking revelation.
Johnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: This is the third and final interview between Brian Rose and David Icke. After the first and second interviews which he exposed the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity for the Global Power Structure, or cult as he calls it, to impose their decades long New World Order (NWO) agenda to destroy the sovereignty of nations.
Their ultimate goal is to undermine freedom, destroy independent small businesses, reduce the human race to a starving population fighting each other for survival and impose a an absolute totalitarian control system which includes mandatory vaccines laced with microchips/nanobots. All this is run robotically with the rollout of 5G networks.
Immediately after the second interview, David Icke was banned from Facebook and YouTube for violating “community” standards (and daring to air a controversial perspective the Global Power Structure doesn’t want you to hear about).
You can believe Icke’s perspective or not, but it’s your sovereign right (i.e., human right) to be able to hear his perspective and decide for yourself. For anyone knowledgable in his field of research, you would know Icke is speaking truth if the technocrats have to go to the extreme measures of squashing/censoring the message to stop his message from getting out to the uninformed. Friends of Liberty, do listen and decide for yourself, but under no circumstances bury your head in the sand. This is the turning point of human civilization and our individual awareness and collective decisions will determine the fate of all humanity.
By David Rose & David Icke
The Broadcast They Don’t Want You To See… The Ideas They Don’t Want You To Hear…
On May 3, 2020 at 5pm UK time, David Icke is LIVE on the DIGITAL FREEDOM PLATFORM for the largest LIVESTREAM of a conversation in human history. This single broadcast could change the course of humanity.
If we get the information now, we can act on it, we can change course.
If We Are Silenced, It Could Be The End of Humanity As We Know It.
WE NEED YOU!
Based on the popularity of our previous Icke I and II interviews, we expect to have a MILLION PEOPLE ACCESSING THIS LIVE.
As a member of the London Real Army you can make a difference by sharing this link and sharing this video.
Be Brave. Stand Up. Fight For Your Freedom.
What Will You Tell Your Grandchildren You Did During The Removal Of Civil Rights During The Great Pandemic?
Did You Stay At Home And Did What You Were Told? Or Did You Fight For Your Freedom Of Speech?
Join Us And Let’s Change The World.
WE WILL NOT BE CENSORED.
WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED.
WE WILL NOT BE STOPPED.
Johnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: This is a fine documentary with the utmost detail about how COVID-19 was created in a Wuhan bioweapons laboratory and debunks the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) version of reality which insists that it originated in the Huanan Seafood Market. Click here on on the above graphic to watch the film.
By Joshua Phillips, Investigative Reporter
As the world is gripped by the ongoing pandemic, many questions remain about the origin of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus—commonly known as the novel coronavirus.
Join Epoch Times senior investigative reporter Joshua Philipp as he explores the known facts surrounding the CCP virus and the global pandemic it caused.
In his investigation, Philipp explores the scientific data, and interviews top scientists and national security experts. And while the mystery surrounding the virus’s origin remains, much is learned about the CCP’s cover-up that led to the pandemic and the threat it poses to the world.
From the start of the virus outbreak in China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has not been forthcoming with information about the virus. In the early days of the outbreak, medical professionals who sounded the alarm were reprimanded by police for spreading “rumors.”
Initially, the CCP said the virus originated at the Huanan Seafood Market, even though it knew patient zero had no connection with the market. Fearing that it might be held accountable for the worldwide pandemic, the CCP shifted its narrative to suggest that the virus originated in the United States and was brought to China by the U.S. military.
As a leading voice in covering China for the past 20 years, we understand very well the CCP’s deceptive nature and its history of cover-ups. With this outbreak, we saw a case of history repeating itself—in 2003, we exposed the CCP’s cover-up of the SARS epidemic in China, far ahead of other media.
In this documentary, we present viewers with the known scientific data and facts surrounding the origin of the virus along with experts’ opinions. We don’t draw conclusions, but we point out that serious questions remain about the origins of the virus as well as the CCP’s handling of the outbreak.
Some of our viewers felt the documentary was taking a position on the origin of the virus, which was not our intent. The documentary has been slightly updated as of April 14 to better reflect our position, which is not to provide a definitive answer, but rather to present the known facts.
Snowden fears that world leaders will hold onto new emergency powers well after the pandemic ends.
In addition to quarantines and lockdowns, some governments like those in China, Taiwan, and South Korea have been using a surveillance strategy called “contact tracing” to reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus.
While each country’s contact tracing program has slight variations, all of them are essentially cell phone apps that keep a running record of the user’s heath and the health records of all the people they come into contact with.
If a cell phone comes in close contact with someone who might have the virus, the user receives a text message informing them and then instructing them to self-quarantine for 14 days.
However, the quarantine is not necessarily voluntary, depending on where you live. In some countries, phones have been used as a sort of house arrest ankle-bracelet that will notify authorities if the person being monitored leaves the house for any reason.
These apps are being touted as the way to end the shut down in both Italy and the UK and it appears that officials are going to be taking things in that direction.
At face value, it may appear that this could be a useful strategy in preventing the spread of disease, but privacy advocates and tech experts are concerned that this information could be misused and that the unprecedented surveillance capabilities could be kept and held by corrupt governments long after the pandemic is over.
In a recent interview with Vice, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden expressed his concerns about the coming surveillance program, calling it the “architecture of oppression.”
“Do you truly believe that when the first wave, this second wave, the 16th wave of the coronavirus is a long-forgotten memory, that these capabilities will not be kept? That these datasets will not be kept? No matter how it is being used, what’ is being built is the architecture of oppression,” Snowden said.
Snowden recognized that the virus was a serious threat and said that the intelligence community was well aware that it was only a matter of time before a massive pandemic crippled the country, even back when he was working in the NSA.
“There is nothing more foreseeable as a public health crisis in a world where we are just living on top of each other in crowded and polluted cities, than a pandemic. And every academic, every researcher who’s looked at this knew this was coming. And in fact, even intelligence agencies, I can tell you firsthand, because they used to read the reports had been planning for pandemics,” he said.
Snowden questioned the positive numbers that have come out of China in recent weeks and pointed out that the Chinese government has been credited with reducing the spread of the illness because they took such draconian measures during the lockdown.
Perhaps their extreme strategy is not working as well as they say it is, but since the government maintained tight control of any information coming out of the country, it is impossible to say for sure.
“If you’re looking at countries like China, where cases seem to have leveled off, how much can we trust that those numbers are actually true? I don’t think we can. Particularly, we see the Chinese government recently working to expel Western journalists at precisely this moment where we need credible independent warnings in this region,” Snowden said.
In a statement published on Friday, Apple and Google announced that they were teaming up in a rare partnership to develop compatible contact tracing apps, which they claim will work on an “opt-in” basis.
However, according toBloomberg, the companies are planning to eventually build the contact tracing into the device’s updates.
Apple and Google insist that you will still be able to opt-out of the program if you don’t want to participate, but it is possible that rankings on these apps could be used to gain entry into grocery stores or larger businesses and events once the economy opens up again.
“As authoritarianism spreads, as emergency laws proliferate, as we sacrifice our rights, we also sacrifice our capability to arrest the slide into a less liberal and less free world,” Snowden warned.
Johnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: As Edward Snowden was correct to reveal to the international press (at the sacrifice of his own well-being and freedom) that the NSA had abused their power and broke the law in gathering metadata on every American citizen, giving more power to the government is not a wise move regardless of the reason. Once they have that power, they’ll always have it (and will eventually abuse it). For example, the USA Patriot Act continues to be in force today without a tangible terrorist threat. Your civil liberties and sovereign rights continue to be compromised daily.
By Dylan Byers
Federal health officials say they could use anonymous, aggregated user data collected by the tech companies to map the spread of the virus.
The White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are asking Facebook, Google and other tech giants to give them greater access to Americans’ smartphone location data in order to help them combat the spread of the coronavirus, according to four people at companies involved in the discussions who are not authorized to speak about them publicly.
Federal health officials say they could use anonymous, aggregated user data collected by the tech companies to map the spread of the virus — a practice known as “syndromic surveillance” — and prevent further infections. They could also use the data to see whether people were practicing “social distancing.”
Some sources stressed that the effort would be anonymized and that government would not have access to specific individuals’ locations. They noted that users would be required to opt-in to the effort.
The federal effort, first reported by The Washington Post, will force the tech giants to weigh their commitments to user privacy against their desire to help combat a disease that has cost thousands of human lives and upended the global economy.
The government officials have held at least two calls in recent days with representatives from the companies, the sources said. Those officials are “very serious” about making this happen, a person at one of the tech companies said.
Similar and more aggressive surveillance practices have already been put to use in China, South Korea and Israel. The moves have set off alarm bells among privacy advocates who fear what the government may do with users’ data.
Facebook already provides health researchers and nongovernmental organizations in some countries with anonymized data to help disease prevention efforts. Laura McGorman, policy lead of Facebook’s “Data for Good” program, said a similar effort could be used “to understand and help combat the spread of the virus.”
But other sources warned that providing the government with greater access to anonymized location data now could lead to the erosion of individual privacy down the line, especially if the government starts to ask for non-anonymized data.
Representatives from Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Cisco all took part in the call with White House and federal health officials. Spokespeople for the companies declined to comment on the discussions.
Right church, wrong pew, as we Catholic types are wont to say.
As I tried to explain in Thursday’s column, Rand Paul is wrong to insist that the Sixth Amendment’s confrontation clause demands that the so-called whistleblower be unmasked and publicly questioned. That does not mean, though, that Senator Paul’s general idea (that the “whistleblower” should testify) is wrong; nor does it mean that the Constitution’s guarantee of trial rights is irrelevant.
The right to present a defense, also vouchsafed by the Sixth Amendment, is the guarantee on which Paul and the rest of the president’s supporters should focus.
This comes with the same caveats elaborated on Thursday. The Constitution vests the House and Senate with plenary authority over their respective impeachment proceedings (the House to decide whether to file articles of impeachment, the Senate to try the case). No court has the power to make either legislative chamber afford a particular quantum of due process.
That said, impeachment is inherently political. Here, it has been launched when we are less than a year out from an election in which the American people are supposed determine for themselves whether the president should keep his job. By the time impeachment has run its course, we could be just a few months from Election Day. Apparently, though, the political class is intent on end-running the sovereign, attempting to remove President Trump on its own. To pull that off, it will need to convince the country that (a) it has grounds so extraordinarily serious that Trump must be ousted forthwith and (b) the procedures under which it impeached were fundamentally fair.
I don’t think they have a prayer of demonstrating the former, such that two-thirds of the GOP-controlled Senate would be spurred to remove the president. (Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is hovering around 90 percent.) As for the latter concern, due process, there must be some and it must be meaningful — not because it is legally mandated, but because it is politically essential.
This is why many of the more pragmatic Democrats knew impeachment was a bad idea. As a practical matter, they don’t have close to the votes to remove, so it’s doomed to fail. The public knows it’s doomed to fail and may well resent Democrats for gratuitously putting the country through it. If Trump is denied due process, the proceedings will look like a kangaroo court and Democrats will be blamed. And if Trump is afforded due process, the case he presents may damage Democrats come November.
We do not have a ton of prior impeachment experience to go on, but the presidents in each episode were afforded the right to present a defense — both in the House proceedings leading to articles of impeachment and in the Senate trial.
The right to present a defense is importantly different from the right to confront the House Democrats’ case for impeachment.
As I noted in Wednesday’s column, the confrontation right emphasized by Senator Paul only allows the accused to cross-examine whatever witnesses the prosecution chooses to call in making its case. It does not give the accused a right to cross-examine every source who may have provided accusatory information, even sources whom the prosecutor does not call. Consequently, if the Democrats believe (as they do) that they could establish their case for articles of impeachment without summoning the so-called whistleblower as a witness, the president and his Republican defenders would have no right to call the whistleblower merely to cross-examine him on the statements made in his hearsay complaint.
By contrast, the right to present a defense is more extensive. Broadly speaking, it empowers an accused to do two things: (1) pointedly discredit the prosecution’s version of events, whether through cross-examination of the prosecution’s witnesses or presentation of the accused’s own witnesses, and (2) present the accused’s own witnesses and evidence in order to prove facts and theories that favor the accused and cast doubt on the worthiness of the prosecutor’s case.
In most any criminal case, courts will give the accused a decent-sized berth to prove and argue that the accused was set up by the investigators; or that the investigative procedures used were underhanded or otherwise skewed against the accused. Here, the president will want to persuade the factfinders (and the country) that Democrats have conspired with like-minded officials in the bureaucracy, particularly in the intelligence agencies (including the FBI and the Justice Department), to paralyze and, if possible, shorten the Trump presidency.
Most defenses based on government misconduct do not get very far. They tend to be fabricated, overblown, or focused on prosecutorial misconduct that is far afield from the charges against the accused. In this instance, however, the president has a great deal to work with.
Prominent Democrats and Trump detractors have been quite brazen in their public rhetoric about Trump (including, as is now being reported, the so-called whistleblower’s counsel, who has spoken explicitly about a “coup” by bureaucrats). Moreover, the Justice Department inspector general’s report on the Clinton emails investigation outlines in wince-inducing detail pervasive anti-Trump bias on the part of government investigators.
The same IG is about to release a report specifically dealing with investigative irregularities in the Trump-Russia investigation. Of course, we do not yet know what that report will yield (and even less what will come of the Barr/Durham probe of the Trump-Russia investigation’s origins). We do know, though, that the FBI and Justice Department represented to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the FBI believed Trump’s campaign was likely complicit in Russia’s hacking operations to influence the 2016 election. And we know that the Obama administration — undoubtedly in collusion with foreign intelligence services — ran informants against Trump-campaign officials in an effort to establish a Trump–Russia conspiracy. Finally, we know that the president was repeatedly told that he was not a suspect of the FBI’s investigation, under circumstances where he appears to have been the central suspect.
After years of very aggressive, expensive investigation — by a special counsel who staffed his investigation with notorious partisans — no Trump–Russia conspiracy was found. Moreover, the FBI and the Justice Department on four occasions obtained warrants to monitor a former Trump-campaign adviser, telling the federal court under oath that he was a clandestine agent of a foreign power and a key cog in the Trump–Russia cyberespionage conspiracy; yet that adviser, Carter Page, was never accused of any crime, much less the traitorous misconduct outlined in the warrant applications.
The president and his supporters will want to lay much of this out in his defense case against any impeachment allegations. It is clearly relevant on the question whether the Democrats are to be believed that the Ukraine episode is what they portray it to be: a matter of such grave severity that Congress should remove the president from power just ahead of an election. The fact finders and the public are entitled to consider whether Democrats are blowing the Ukraine episode way out of proportion, just as they did with the collusion caper. Indeed, in the Clinton impeachment case, the president and his Democratic supporters were permitted to press the case that Republican claims about the egregiousness of his misconduct were overwrought, as evidenced, for example, by Clinton’s high approval ratings.
In the presentation of his defense, President Trump would thus seek to call the “whistleblower” as a witness (a hostile one, no doubt). His counsel and Republicans would proceed to try to demonstrate his connections to senior Democrats with intelligence-community ties who have been scurrilous in their public comments about the president. They would grill him on allegations that he is among the intelligence-community officials who leaked information in a manner intended to cast the president in a poor light. And they would press him on the preparation of his hearsay complaint — his consultation with an Adam Schiff staffer, his close collaboration with overtly anti-Trump lawyers, and so on. I might even have him read aloud from Schiff’s wannabe Godfather IV caricature of the Trump-Zelensky conversation and ask whether he helped the chairman’s staff write it.
It is in connection with the president’s right to present a defense, not his confrontation-clause right, that Senator Paul and the president’s defenders should frame their argument that the “whistleblower” should be subpoenaed to testify at public impeachment hearings.
A cautionary note. When I was a prosecutor, I loved defense cases. They were often not very well thought through — just an effort to dirty up investigators toward no coherent end, or toss in some favorable details about the accused that were quite beside the point of the charges. A defense case can open the door to prosecutors to place before the factfinders a great deal of unflattering information about the accused that would otherwise have been excluded as irrelevant. Defense lawyers tend to be much better at dismantling the prosecutor’s case for conviction than at presenting their own affirmative case for acquittal. When a defendant proceeded with an extensive defense case, I almost always ended up concluding that it had helped me more than it helped the defendant.
Presenting an affirmative case would not be without risk for the president. If the Democrats’ case for impeachment is weak and has no chance of success, he would probably be better advised to leave well enough alone. Nevertheless, if the president wants to argue that the bureaucracy has had it in for him from the start, and has coordinated with Democrats to undermine him, he has an unusual embarrassment of riches to exploit.
By John Vibes
Johnny Liberty, Editor’s Note: As Edward Snowden was correct to reveal to the international press (at the sacrifice of his own well-being and freedom) that the NSA had abused their power and broke the law in gathering metadata on every American citizen, giving more power to the government is not a wise move regardless of the reason. Once they have that power, they’ll always have it (and will eventually abuse it). For example, the USA Patriot Act continues to be in force today without a tangible terrorist threat. Your civil liberties and sovereign rights continue to be compromised daily.
Liberty International News 