I would invite my liberal friends who have been gleefully comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler on Facebook to make a more relevant comparison: Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton.
Spoiler alert: It is Hillary who proves to be the greater threat to constitutional liberty, and, as at least one imprisoned video producer can attest, there is nothing theoretical about her abuses.
As the world knows, Trump proposed a moratorium on Muslim immigration. Writing in the New York Times, constitutional scholar Peter Spiro called Trump’s plan “reprehensible” – no surprise there – but he conceded the plan’s constitutionality.
Spiro quotes a 1977 Supreme Court decision to the effect that “in the exercise of its broad power over immigration and naturalization, Congress regularly makes rules that would be unacceptable if applied to citizens.”
Nor does the president need Congress to act. Spiro further notes, “The Immigration and Nationality Act gives the president the authority to suspend the entry of ‘any class of aliens’ on his finding that their entry would be ‘detrimental to the interests of the United States.'”
As the world may not know, Hillary Clinton revealed this week on George Stephanopolous’s Sunday show on ABC why no respecter of the Constitution can vote for her in good conscience.
Stephanopolous asked Clinton to clarify her conflicting accounts about the inspiration for the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi in September 2012.
At 11:12 p.m. on the night of the attack, Sept. 11, Hillary emailed daughter Chelsea, “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an ‘Al Queda-like group.'”
The following day, even more specifically, she emailed the Egyptian prime minister, “We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack, not a protest.”
Yet two days later, on Sept. 14, in separate conversations, Clinton told at least four grieving family members – from three different families – that an online anti-Islam video provoked a mob to act.
Charles Woods, the father of Navy SEAL hero Ty Woods, took notes of the meeting. “I gave Hillary a hug and shook her hand,” he recounts. “And she said ‘we are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son.'”
To his credit, Stephanopolous showed clips of two family members making these claims. “Did you tell them it was about the film?” Stephanopolous asked.
“No,” Hillary lied. She traced the family members’ apparent confusion to their “continuing grief” and blamed “the fog of war” for her own seeming inconsistencies.
In fact, the family members were not confused at all. The proof that Charles Woods remembered correctly is that Hillary kept her promise “to have the filmmaker arrested.”
For the record, it was Hillary who introduced the canard about “inflammatory material posted on the Internet” in a press release about an hour before she emailed Chelsea.
In the days following, she and Obama set out to identify and punish the maker of that video, and they did so with a speed and severity the attackers themselves were spared.
Scarier still, to the degree the major media noticed, they cheered. Some even abetted the White House in its brutal rush to imprison producer Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a 30-year resident of the United States and a citizen.
Nakoula was vulnerable. In the way of background, he was arrested in 2009 for a check-kiting scheme. After his arrest, he agreed to cooperate with authorities in nailing the scheme’s mastermind, Eiad Salameh.
Given that Salameh was still on the loose at the time, and a genuine threat to Nakoula if he knew the terms of the arrangement, the sentencing transcript was sealed.
By the time Hillary met with the victim’s families, federal apparatchiks had already leaked the key documents the government would use to bury Nakoula.
Key among them was the previously sealed sentencing transcript the Smoking Gun published on Sept. 14 under the all too revealing headline, “Producer Of Anti-Islam Film Was Fed Snitch.”
Just as “reprehensible,” the apparatchiks may have been sharing their strategy for silencing Nakoula with the New York Times.
According to the Times, “Earlier in the week, federal officials appeared to be investigating whether Mr. Nakoula had been the person who uploaded the video to YouTube.”
Earlier in the week? The Times reported this on Sept. 15, just three days after the smoke had cleared in Benghazi.
By this date too, the Times was fully aware of the terms of Nakoula’s parole. Were Nakoula the one who uploaded the video, argued the Times, “He would have violated the terms of his sentencing in a conviction in a 2010 check-kiting case, which includes restrictions against his using the Internet without permission from a probation officer.”
Less than two weeks after the Smoking Gun article, a federal judge ordered Nakoula to be detained without bail for various parole violations, the only salient one being the one the Times predicted, unauthorized use of the Internet.
For daring to flout the left’s “Coexist” narrative, the feds buried Nakoula in a federal pen deep in West Texas before transferring him to a halfway house in Orange County, California.
To sell the lie that the video caused the death of four brave Americans, Hillary Clinton allowed a citizen expressing his First Amendment rights to be imprisoned for more than a year.
Say what one will about Trump, but he has never told a lie this horrific or even threatened to violate anyone’s rights this egregiously.
Media wishing to interview Jack Cashill, please contact [email protected].
|
