The Brew: Peculiar Days for the Presidents
A whiff of hair ... or corruption?
Happy Monday!
Donald Trump’s Peculiar Week
President-Elect Donald Trump has had an unusual week. Today he will be certified as the 47th president of the United States — and vanquished foe Kamala Harris, in her role as president of the Senate, will have to do the certifying. (That’s gotta be tough. Like forcing the loser of the Super Bowl to hand the Lombardi Trophy to the winning team, or officiating the wedding ceremony of the ex who refused to marry you.)
On Friday, however, Trump will be back in a New York kangaroo courtroom to face sentencing in the Alvin Bragg/Biden DOJ lawfare case involving his non-disclosure payment to Stormy Daniels. Judge Juan Merchan, whose daughter made millions from the efforts to get Trump and actually worked for Harris, refused Friday to dismiss the case. The good news for Trump? Once he has been sentenced, he can finally appeal. Merchan has signaled he won’t be seeking any penalty for Trump, but he and his Democratic pals get to officially call Trump a “convicted felon” before he takes office.
Expect us to talk a little more this week about lawfare. Yours truly was at Mar-a-Lago Saturday for the premiere of the documentary The Eastman Dilemma: Lawfare or Justice?. John Eastman is the constitutional expert who advised Trump that among his several options after the 2020 election was the potential, constitutionally legitimate path for Mike Pence to delay certifying electors from states that did not follow state or federal election law in order to give those states time to double check their results. For his trouble, the powers that sent armed federal agents to raid Eastman’s house, sought to have him disbarred, and have tried to toss him in prison.
The Eastman Dilemma is scheduled to be available to stream for free today. Hopefully the film’s website will have updated information on that today. Will have more tomorrow in our report on the film and lawfare panel that preceded it.
Not incidentally, today also is the fourth anniversary of the J6 riot on Capitol Hill — or as the FBI calls it, the “Agents Jamboree.” Today you won’t see protests, or hardly anyone in DC, for that matter. The District of Columbia is most likely going to be pounded by Winter Storm Blair. Expect travel issues in the Mid-Atlantic region and beyond. I’m waiting for Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to declare snow plows racist.
Biden’s Peculiar Use of a High Presidential Honor
The Presidential Medal of Freedom used to stand for something. Now it stands about as well as Biden does on a beach in a hurricane. Biden — or whoever is making all of his decisions — decided to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to some of the most odious creatures in American politics, namely Hillary “Benghazi” Clinton and George “I Never Met a Democracy I Didn’t Want to Destroy” Soros. It would have been bad enough if The Big Guy had pardoned this duo for national destruction. But the Presidential Medal of Freedom?
Why? So his pardon of his son and criminal coconspirator Hunter wouldn’t look so bad? To get one last chance to sniff Hillary’s hair?
Or perhaps it’s just one last pucker-up to his global elitist masters. One last bid for membership in a club that has long considered him a useful idiot.
A quick pause, if you don’t mind. Yes, I am sounding a bit prickly about Biden and the FBI this morning. For all the splendor and sensation and great conversation from Saturday night’s event at Mar-a-Lago, one moment sticks with me: joining Eastman on a discussion panel before the film was shown was a former veteran DOJ official named Jeff Clark. He, too, had been asked to give Trump advice about his possible options in contesting some of the (clearly) corrupted swing state results in 2020. Just a DOJ legal mind doing his job for his boss. He, too, was raided by the feds. The FBI took all the devices in his home, including his daughter’s laptop.
“Daddy,” she cried after agents left, “is the FBI going to read my diary?”
Hearing her father’s heartbreak in telling the story, in the very home where the same FBI stormed in and looked through all of Barron’s belongings and Melania’s drawers in a separate lawfare case, doubles the resolve to remain vigilant against all who would abuse power for their own political, partisan and personal ends.
Uneasy in the Big Easy
Good news for people worried about security for the Super Bowl in New Orleans: Police Commissioner Anne Kilpatrick has ordered city officials to string Mardi Gras beads across Bourbon Street to prevent another terrorist attack. (Boy, do I wish that was wildly off the mark.) But no. On Friday we learned that Kilpatrick did not even know the city had L-shaped Archer barriers, an effective weapon against vehicle-based threats. That’s like the head of a bakery running out of bread and then saying, “What do you mean, we had flour?”
Call me crazy on a Monday morning, but perhaps Kirkpatrick should have spent more time trying to understand and take inventory of the tools she has to keep residents safe and less time teaching DEI. We’ve said before that our first reaction to the horrendous deadly attack was, “How could Bourbon Street be unblocked on New Year’s Eve?” Now we know the answer.
A big helpful hint for the Big Easy: Let the good times roll, not terrorists.
Along The Stream…
Nolan Llewellan returns with “Jesus’s Response to ‘Lord, Tell Us How to Pray’ Went Beyond the Lord’s Prayer.”
Meanwhile, Joseph Mattera offers a timely words about “Seven Significant Challenges in Transition.”
Al Perrotta is The Stream’s Washington bureau chief, coauthor with John Zmirak of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration, and coauthor of the counterterrorism memoir Hostile Intent: Protecting Yourself Against Terrorism.