THE BIG FEDERAL GOVERNMENT LIE

 The Big Federal Government Lie

I can’t answer your (impertinent and inconvenient) question. The matter is under investigation.

William L. Kovacs

The eight most disingenuous words used these days by federal agencies are intended to hide their criminal activity: “I can’t answer. The matter is under investigation.”

These words are used to obstruct, mislead, delay and discourage congressional investigations into the legality of Executive Branch activity. In effect, they say: “Your question is impertinent, inconvenient and intolerable. How dare you question anything Executive Branch agencies are doing?”

Unfortunately, this simple statement often achieves its goal of obstructing efforts by Congress to obtain information that it and the American people need and deserve to have, to ensure “government of, by and for the people,” instead of the federal bureaucracy.

While Congress may be upset with the response, it is often cowed into accepting the assertion that presidents can protect their people from being investigated even for criminal conduct. However, fortunes and precedents can be reversed.

If Republicans win the White House with a presidential candidate who sincerely wants to uphold the rule of law, restore justice to the legal system and hold the “Deep State” accountable, that president can make it happen.

The leading Presidential candidates for the Republican nomination have promised to fire the FBI director and clean house at the Department of Justice. If a Republican wins the presidency in November 2024, FBI Director Wray and Attorney General Garland will resign long before they can be fired.

So, candidates, please, stop pandering. No one will be fired. It’s all pablum – worthless, insipid, oversimplified assertions, threats and promises.

Suppose a new president truly wants to clean up the deep, dark, corrupt state at the DOJ, FBI and other federal agencies. In that case, the Republican president need only waive Executive Privilege and issue an executive order declassifying all investigatory materials sought by the current Republican House of Representatives. Let Congress bleed the truth out of those subverting the Constitution.

Executive compliance is simple. When Congress requests documents, the Executive should order them produced. When testimony is sought, provide it without asserting objections. Cooperate with the Republican House to find the truth and restore our republican form of government.

Since the Nixon administration, presidents have asserted Executive Privilege thirty times to block congressional investigations. Presidential assertions included protecting the president’s brother (Billy Carter), girlfriends (Monica Lewinsky), mismanagement of funds (Solyndra), foreign affairs (Benghazi), gun running (Fast and Furious) and tape recordings (Watergate).

Democrat and Republican administrations have routinely acted as though providing Congress with requested information concerning an investigation will somehow diminish their manhood.

Finding and eliminating corruption is for the benefit of the nation. Hiding corruption does not assist the president in the faithful execution of the law.

The DOJ/FBI’s long-running minuet of never sharing information with congressional committees is a mechanism of deceit, not of protecting the independence and effectiveness of law enforcement, safeguarding informant identities, avoiding pre-trial publicity, or interfering with prosecutorial discretion.

The Supreme Court has long recognized the “…implied power [of Congress] to investigate and to compel the production of information” from the Executive branch.

“Executive Privilege for presidential communications is limited to the quintessential power and nondelegation of Presidential power, and those are the core functions in the Constitution.” It should only be asserted to preserve those core constitutional functions. Claiming it beyond the core constitutional functions is a delaying tactic that often allows illegal conduct to continue.

As to declassifying all documents related to alleged criminal activity in the Executive branch, no president should ever intentionally or unintentionally cover it up. The American Bar Association has written: “Under the U.S. Constitution, the president as Commander-in-Chief is given broad powers to classify and declassify such information, often through executive orders.”

While there are procedures for declassifying the materials, except for certain materials such as nuclear secrets, a president has almost total control to declassify records by executive order. Presidents at all times have the power to shine sunlight on government corruption. When they choose not to expose corruption, it is an intentional coverup.

Unfortunately, since the Nixon administration in the early 1970s, the Executive Branch has forced Congress to issue subpoenas to secure requested documents. Presidents achieve their goal of protecting corruption by requiring years of legal battles to enforce the subpoena.

Hopefully, there will be a Republican Congress, or at least a Republican House sworn in on January 3, 2025, and on January 20, 2025 a Republican president. Between January 3, 2025, and January 20, 2025, the Republican Congress can prepare the appropriate investigative letters to the incoming president, requesting the information needed to root out corruption, especially in the DOJ and FBI, but also in the EPA and CDC over climate, energy and Covid fear-mongering, disinformation and censorship.

On January 20, when the Republican president enters the White House, his first order of business should be to issue an executive order waiving executive privilege and formally declassifying the documents relating to all congressional investigations.

These waivers should encompass all alleged DOJ/FBI corruption, as described in the Durham, Mueller and Horowitz Reports, records of payments received by Joe and Hunter Biden and their family members from foreign countries, all matters associated with the development of a two-tier system of justice, efforts by the federal government to force social media companies to manipulate or censor information distributed to the public, and all other matters of high-level DOJ, FBI, EPA and CDC corruption.

By taking this approach, the president will tremendously assist the congressional investigation of executive agency misconduct, without investigating the departments he leads. If Congress finds evidence of criminal or unethical activity, it will refer the evidence to new appointees at a DOJ for appropriate prosecution.

Suppose Executive Branch personnel refuse to testify, or “take the Fifth” to protect their constitutional right not to be a witness against themselves.

In that case, Congress can grant the Use Immunity, which compels their testimony but provides immunity to the witness for the new information provided. A witness who refuses to testify after being given Use Immunity can be cited for contempt of Congress and imprisoned.

It's time for the federal government to get serious about corruption in government.

More intriguing and overdue would be having a president who followed the advice humbly presented here. The nation might uncover who is actually running the Deep State.

William L. Kovacs has served as senior vice president for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, chief counsel to a congressional committee, and a partner in DC law firms. His book Reform the Kakistocracy (government by the least qualified, most unscrupulous) is the winner of the 2021 Independent Press Award for Political/Social Change. He can be contacted at wlk@ReformTheKakistocracy.com

BLOOMBERG FINANCES & COOPTS STATE ATTORNEYS GENERAL

State AGs aid Bloomberg quest for ‘green’ energy 

that threatens planet, wildlife and people

Paul Driessen

When you’ve built a financial information and media empire and become the world’s seventh richest person, you get to say dumb things, like suggesting that farming is easy: “You dig a hole, put a seed in, put dirt on top, add water – and up comes the corn.”

Being ultra-wealthy also shields Michael Bloomberg from any fallout from the climate and energy policies he pursues so zealously. He will doubtless be able to afford electricity at any price for his multiple mansions, from any source, backed up by thousands of battery modules to cover the repeated blackouts his policies will unleash. The other 99.9% won’t be so fortunate.

Mr. Bloomberg bankrolls campaigns against coal and natural gas; supports efforts to populate the Biden Administration with rogue regulators equally intent on “transforming” America’s energy system, society and living standards; and champions ESG principles for financial firms, companies and investors. His company even has Sustainability and ESG & Climate divisions. Mr. Bloomberg serves as UN Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions, enabling him to advance his agendas internationally.

ESG (Environmental Social Governance) helps unelected asset managers use their control over trillions of investment dollars to pressure companies, lenders and consumers to embrace far-left activist versions of public welfare and justice, even if it causes clients’ portfolio values to decline. ESG is a subversive way to bypass legislatures, voters and democratic processes, to impose unpopular political and ideological agendas, often in violation of fiduciary obligations.

ESG opposes fossil fuels, insisting they are causing climate cataclysms. Any company in that business, or offering to finance a drilling project, gets blackballed. But companies building or financing “clean, green” energy score in the ESG stratosphere – even though most such projects destroy vast swaths of wildlife habitats, involve slave and child labor, and leave widespread toxic pollution in their wake. ESG human rights, ecological and climate justice principles are duplicitous and hypocritical.

As New York City mayor, Mr. Bloomberg infamously advocated exorbitant taxes on large sugary drinks, claiming they lead to obesity and thus to diabetes, cancer, heart disease and premature death. He simply wanted to help poor people live longer, he asserted, by making Big Gulps less affordable.

It’s thus puzzling that he now wants to banish reliable, affordable gas heat and coal- and gas-generated electricity for heating and air conditioning – in favor of pricey, weather-dependent wind and solar power, backed up by outrageously expensive batteries. Those policies shorten lives.

Even if manmade or natural climate change causes average global temperatures to climb 2-3 degrees, modern technologies would keep us safely comfortable. But if laws, policies and ESG pressures make heating and AC inaccessible or unaffordable, indoor temperatures can soar 15-25 degrees in summertime and drop as precipitously in wintertime. People die – and cold is far deadlier than heat.

When people, especially the elderly, cannot heat their homes properly, they can perish from hypothermia or illnesses they would likely survive if they weren’t so cold. The Economist calculated that expensive energy may have killed 68,000 more Europeans than Covid did last winter.

LIHEAP (Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program) will help the poorest families – until the subsidy money runs out – but not middle/working classes, and not small businesses.

Even worse, three billion people worldwide still do not have access to reliable, affordable electricity. Message to climate zealots like Mr. Bloomberg: Access to intermittent, unpredictable wind/solar electricity doesn’t count, especially if it’s only enough to charge a cell phone or power a lightbulb or one-cubic-foot refrigerator. Lack of access to sustained, affordable energy kills.

The billionaire’s legal power grab is even more insidious and dangerous to democracy.

In 2017 he began covertly funding New York University Law School’s State Energy and Environmental Impact Center, which provides grants to progressive (Democrat) state attorneys general, enabling them to hire “special assistant” AGs or “fellows.”

The Center’s mission is to provide “direct legal assistance” to interested AGs “on specific administrative, judicial or legislative matters involving clean energy, climate change and environmental interests of regional and national significance,” when AGs say they lack sufficient public funds to hire such help.

NYU now says “the fellows’ sole duty of loyalty is to the attorney general in whose office they serve.” However, these partisan Bloomberg grants pay salaries and “generous benefits packages” to “special assistants” whose functions are dictated by the Center; address specified “regional and national” issues normally beyond the purview of state AGs; are routinely coordinated with energy and climate activists and donors to those causes; and often launch “public nuisance” or RICO litigation against oil companies, to the detriment of targeted industries and the consumers and ratepayers who depend on their products, within the AGs’ home states and in distant states and communities.

It is the Bloomberg agenda that is being served, by grants that effectively conscript and coopt the public authority and power of the attorney general’s offices.

As a 2022 report by the American Tort Reform Foundation notes, “These SAAGs are private attorneys placed in public positions to exercise government authority. Yet, they are not independent or impartial because their mandate is to carry out an overtly political agenda funded by wealthy private donors.”

This “unique” arrangement, the Foundation continues, “allows well-heeled individuals and organizations to commandeer state and local police powers to target opponents with whom they disagree, raising the specter of corruption and fundamental unfairness in what should be public enforcement of the law.”

Those same considerations also appear to raise fundamental ethical, legal and constitutional issues. They certainly raise questions about laws governing gifts, campaign contributions and bribes – and where Bloomberg-funded lawyers are involved in prosecutions, serious due-process concerns.

And yet the NYU Center has already placed at least 11 special assistants in eight state attorney general offices, which have filed at least 20 lawsuits against a few selected oil companies, charging them with “climate denial” or causing planetary warming, rising seas, more frequent and intense hurricanes and tornadoes, and other “offenses.”

This litigation ignores the actions of hundreds of other oil and gas companies across the globe; steadily rising emissions from China, India and other rapidly developing nations; the role of natural forces and emissions from wind turbine, solar panel and battery mining, processing and manufacturing; the lack of evidence to support claims of a climate “crisis” or more frequent and violent storms; and the fact that these issues should be litigated in federal courts or relegated to a democratic political process.

The US Supreme Court recently had an opportunity to quash this rampant litigation, but it chose not to review the state and local cases and send them to federal courts. The seemingly endless lawsuits and acrimony are creating a legal, constitutional, scientific and public policy nightmare for businesses, consumers, courts, states and the nation.

Rest assured, billionaires like Bloomberg, Gates, Kerry, Zuckerberg and Soros – who demand that we commoners give up our cars, gas stoves and furnaces, steaks, air travel and suburban homes – don’t intend to give up anything.

Let’s hope the pro-America governors, AGs, legislators, judges and business groups battling ESG and other woke campaigns tackle this NYU Impact Center hornets nest as well..

Paul Driessen is a senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environmental, and human rights issues.