By Jay Michaelson:
“Ultimately, freedom of speech is about ascertaining the truth,” Sessions, an Alabama Republican, told Horowitz’s audience on Nov. 14, 2014. “And if you don’t believe there’s a truth, you don’t believe in truth, if you’re an utter secularist, then how do we operate this government? How can we form a democracy of the kind I think you and I believe in… I do believe that we are a nation that, without God, there is no truth, and it’s all about power, ideology, advancement, agenda, not doing the public service.”
The comments have not been previously reported, nor have any of Sessions’s colleagues asked about them at his confirmation hearings.
While plenty of elected officials may hold similar beliefs, Sessions is a nominee for attorney general, the chief law enforcement officer in the country. His comments raise questions as to which set of “truths,” religious or secular, would motivate his Justice Department’s decisions on which laws to prosecute, which liberties to protect, and which interpretations of legal and constitutional texts to adopt.
“It goes against the values our country was founded on to intertwine religion and government in the way that Sessions described,” Michael Keegan, president of the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way, told The Daily Beast. “The equality of every American, regardless of his or her religious beliefs or nonbelief, is one of the core principles of our democracy. If Jeff Sessions can’t understand that, he’s unfit to serve as attorney general.”
Indeed, to describe freedom of speech as being about “ascertaining the truth” flies in the face of 200 years of Supreme Court precedent, which protects artistic expression, commercial speech, and free expression of all types, regardless of whether they are intended to ascertain the truth.
Showing posts with label dailybeast. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dailybeast. Show all posts
Monday, February 27, 2017
Monday, November 7, 2016
Daily Beast: Meet Donald Trump’s Top FBI Fanboy
By Wayne Barrett:
Back in August, during a contentious CNN interview about Comey’s July announcement clearing Hillary Clinton of criminal charges, Giuliani advertised his illicit FBI sources, who circumvented bureau guidelines to discuss a case with a public partisan. “The decision perplexes me. It perplexes Jim Kallstrom, who worked for him. It perplexes numerous FBI agents who talk to me all the time. And it embarrasses some FBI agents.”
Kallstrom is the former head of the New York FBI office, installed in that post in the ’90s by then-FBI director Louis Freeh, one of Giuliani’s longtime friends. Kallstrom has, like Giuliani, been on an anti-Comey romp for months, most often on Fox, where he’s called the Clintons as a “crime family.” He has been invoking unnamed FBI agents who contact him to complain about Comey’s exoneration of Clinton in one interview after another, positioning himself as an apolitical champion of FBI values.
* * *
Kallstrom, whose exchanges with active agents about particular cases are as contrary to FBI policy as Giuliani’s, formally and passionately endorsed Trump this week on Stuart Varney’s Fox Business show, adding that Clinton is a “pathological liar.”
Kallstrom, who served as a Marine before becoming an agent, didn’t mention that a charity he’d founded decades ago and that’s now called the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation, was the single biggest beneficiary of Trump’s promise to raise millions for veterans when he boycotted the Iowa primary debate. A foundation official said that Trump’s million-dollar donation this May, atop $100,000 that he’d given in March, were the biggest individual grants it had ever received. The Trump Foundation had contributed another $230,000 in prior years and Trump won the organization’s top honor at its annual Waldorf Astoria gala in 2015.
The Full Story (November 3, 2016)
Back in August, during a contentious CNN interview about Comey’s July announcement clearing Hillary Clinton of criminal charges, Giuliani advertised his illicit FBI sources, who circumvented bureau guidelines to discuss a case with a public partisan. “The decision perplexes me. It perplexes Jim Kallstrom, who worked for him. It perplexes numerous FBI agents who talk to me all the time. And it embarrasses some FBI agents.”
Kallstrom is the former head of the New York FBI office, installed in that post in the ’90s by then-FBI director Louis Freeh, one of Giuliani’s longtime friends. Kallstrom has, like Giuliani, been on an anti-Comey romp for months, most often on Fox, where he’s called the Clintons as a “crime family.” He has been invoking unnamed FBI agents who contact him to complain about Comey’s exoneration of Clinton in one interview after another, positioning himself as an apolitical champion of FBI values.
* * *
Kallstrom, whose exchanges with active agents about particular cases are as contrary to FBI policy as Giuliani’s, formally and passionately endorsed Trump this week on Stuart Varney’s Fox Business show, adding that Clinton is a “pathological liar.”
Kallstrom, who served as a Marine before becoming an agent, didn’t mention that a charity he’d founded decades ago and that’s now called the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation, was the single biggest beneficiary of Trump’s promise to raise millions for veterans when he boycotted the Iowa primary debate. A foundation official said that Trump’s million-dollar donation this May, atop $100,000 that he’d given in March, were the biggest individual grants it had ever received. The Trump Foundation had contributed another $230,000 in prior years and Trump won the organization’s top honor at its annual Waldorf Astoria gala in 2015.
The Full Story (November 3, 2016)
Monday, October 31, 2016
Daily Beast: Inside Donald Trump’s One-Stop Parties - Attendees Recall Cocaine and Very Young Models
One of the two men I spoke with, a fashion photographer, requested anonymity because he has fathered several children since his Trump days and doesn’t want his past dredged up. “There’s no upside for me,” he says.
The other man… well, you’ll read his words. Both confirmed that Trump, as I’ve reported, used to host parties in suites at the Plaza Hotel when he owned it, where young women and girls were introduced to older, richer men. This is hardly aberrant behavior in the modeling business. Indeed, it is standard operating procedure.
But both men also put Donald Trump in the room with cocaine, very young women and underage girls, and rich, old men there to—pardon my language, but if the Times can say pussy on its front page, I can say this—fuck them.
I’m sorry, Ivanka, I really am, because your mother raised you well and I can’t blame you for supporting your father (even if he did give—at the least—his blessing when you were 15 and signed on as a model yourself with Elite, the hard-partying high-end agency founded by notorious teen-fucker John Casablancas) but here’s the sad truth: Your dad’s not a dog. He’s a pig.
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