TheFrontPageCover
~ Featuring ~
A Victory for Free Speech
by Judge Andrew Napolitano
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Monday Top Headlines
by Media Editors: Ragged, growing caravan of migrants continues march toward U.S. (Associated Press)
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HHS moves to reestablish a scientific definition of sex and gender; New York Times promptly goes into a meltdown (Hot Air)
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Gallup confuses terms in poll showing high opposition to assault weapons ban (The Washington Free Beacon)
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~The Patriot Post
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Bret Baier grills Saudi foreign minister over
death of US-based columnist in consulate
by Andrew O'Reilly
{foxnews.com} ~ Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister offered his condolences on Sunday to the family of a Washington Post columnist killed... in the country’s consulate in Turkey almost three weeksago, but offered no new information on how Jamal Khashoggi was killed or if the country’s crown prince was involved. Speaking during an exclusive interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir said that the country is currently investigating Khashoggi’s death and that the 18 people implicated in his slaying would be punished appropriately. “The individuals did this out of the scope of their authority,” he said, adding that none of those involved in Khashoggi’s death had close ties to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. “There were not people closely tied to him. This was an operation that was a rogue operation.” Al-Jubeir noted that the investigation was still in its early stages and said that Saudi officials currently don’t know the exact cause of Khashoggi’s death or where his remains are...President Trump Withdraws from Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces Treaty With Russia
{reuters.com} ~ According to the administration Russia has been violating the terms of the INF treaty... with the development of a mobile ground launched intermediate-range nuclear missile system capable of striking targets in Europe. Russia has denied the claim and National Security Advisor John Bolton will be in Russia on Monday to discuss the issue. President Trump told media today in Nevada that he would be removing the United States from the agreement based on those violations from Russia. The INF treaty was one of the centerpieces of nuclear agreements between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. “Russia has not, unfortunately, honored the agreement so we’re going to terminate the agreement and we’re going to pull out,” Trump told reporters after a rally in Nevada... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-trump/trump-u-s-to-exit-nuclear-treaty-citing-russian-violations-idUSKCN1MU0Z8?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=Social
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President Trump Impromptu Media Presser in Nevada
by sundance.
Alabama justice asks Supreme Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade
{conservativeinstitute.org} ~ The presence of Justice Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court has emboldened pro-life advocates, including one state judge... who just made a gutsy recommendation to that Court. “I urge the Supreme Court of the United States to reconsider the Roe exception and to overrule this constitutional aberration,” wrote Abalama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker. The justice inserted the message into his concurring opinion in the case of Jesse Phillips v. State of Alabama, which the Alabama Supreme Court decided on Friday. Jesse Phillips was before the Alabama Supreme Court to appeal a death penalty conviction for the murder of his six to eight-week pregnant wife. The argument that he attempted to make was that he should not receive such a punishment because the unborn child should not be considered a person under state law. But, clearly, Phillips did not know where he was. There is no shortage of pro-lifers in Alabama, which twelve years ago allowed the state legislature enact the “Brody Act” in order to protect pre-born babies by including within the definition of “person” “an unborn child in utero at any stage of development, regardless of viability.”...
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The FBI Admits Using Several Spies on Carter Page
by Chuck Ross
{dailycaller.com} ~ Carter Page must be the most innocent and law-abiding man alive today. We knew that the FBI and DOJ got four FISA warrants on him and that his phones were bugged and probably his email and other communications too... Now, we find out they several paid sources spying on him. And through all that, they don’t have a thing on him. That in itself is amazing. How many people could say the same thing if they went through that for over a year? The FBI won’t say exactly how many or who or even how much they were paid for spying. Getting them to admit to multiple spies who were paid for their work is still remarkable. The U.S. government revealed in court filings Friday that the FBI used multiple confidential informants, including some who were paid for their information, as part of its investigation into former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. “The FBI has protected information that would identify the identities of other confidential sources who provided information or intelligence to the FBI” as well as “information provided by those sources,” wrote David M. Hardy, the head of the FBI’s Record/Information Dissemination Section (RIDS), in court papers submitted Friday....
A Victory for Free Speech
by Judge Andrew Napolitano
{townhall.com} ~ The litigation brought by Stormy Daniels against Donald Trump has had its day of reckoning. The adult-film star who sued the president for defamation not only lost a portion of her lawsuit but was ordered to pay the president's legal bills. All this was a resounding victory for the freedom of speech.
After the right to life, protected by the Fifth and 14th amendments, and the right to be left alone, protected by the Fourth, the freedom of speech, protected by the First, is our most cherished. James Madison, who drafted the Bill of Rights, was careful to refer to speech as "the" freedom of speech so as to underscore the Framers' unambiguous belief that free speech is pre-political. Stated differently, it existed before the government did and thus did not come from the government. As it does not originate in the government, Madison and company believed it originates in our humanity.
Earlier this week, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that Daniels' efforts to use the courts to punish the president for his exercising the freedom of speech were frivolous.
Here is the back story.
Daniels claims that she and Trump had a consensual sexual encounter in a Lake Tahoe hotel room in 2006, shortly after Trump's youngest son, Barron, was born. On CBS' "60 Minutes" program, she told Anderson Cooper of the sexual experience in vivid and graphic detail. Trump has denied many times that he had a sexual encounter with Daniels.
Daniels also told Cooper that she had been with Trump in public after their encounter, and she produced a photo of them together in a public place. She then told him that after she and Trump had ended their friendship, a stranger approached her in the parking lot of a Las Vegas fitness center and threatened to harm her if she failed to keep the existence of her relationship with Trump quiet.
She even produced a sketch of a man she said depicted the person who threatened her. In the same interview, she revealed that Michael Cohen, then Trump's personal lawyer and today a government witness against him, paid her $130,000 to remain quiet about her alleged affair with Trump, and she accepted the money and agreed to stay quiet.
Trump wasn't having any of this. He tweeted that the depiction of the man Daniels claimed threatened her bears a striking resemblance to her former husband and that she had made up the story of their sexual encounter, as well as the story of the parking lot threat. He called the version of events she gave to Cooper a "con job."
While Daniels' back-and-forth with Trump was going on, her lawyers filed litigation in federal court seeking to invalidate the nondisclosure agreement she signed with Cohen and accusing Trump of defamation when he said she had pulled off a con job. On Monday of this week, at Trump's request, a judge dismissed the defamation claim.
Bad cases often make good law, and this is one of them. Whether one believes Daniels or Trump about what may have happened in a Lake Tahoe hotel room 12 years ago, one can appreciate the free speech values at play here. The Bill of Rights in general -- and the First Amendment in particular -- articulates negative rights. Stated differently, the First Amendment doesn't grant the freedom of speech (we know that from Madison's use of the word "the" preceding the word "freedom"); rather, it negates the ability of the government, which includes the courts, to infringe upon speech.
The "free" in "free speech" means free from government infringement. So, if Daniels calls Trump directly or by implication an adulterer on national television, he can take to Twitter to proclaim that she has perpetrated a con job -- and he can do so with impunity.
The failure of the courts to protect Trump's right to challenge his accuser's veracity in public -- or the use of the courts to attempt to intimidate Trump from proffering that challenge by making him pay for it -- would have constituted an infringement by the government of Trump's free speech rights.
Sending a signal that there was no legal basis to claim that "con job" in reply to "adulterer" was defamatory and unwilling to be the instrument through which speech -- even the rough-and-tumble variety Trump often employs -- could be punished, deterred or infringed upon by the government, the court found Daniels' defamation claim to be frivolous. She and her lawyers ought to have known the defamation claim would not prevail, and thus she or they (at this writing, it is unclear who) were ordered to pay the legal bills Trump incurred for defending the defamation claim.
The United States has a long and storied history with the freedom of speech. The same generation that ratified the First Amendment -- in some cases, the same human beings -- also enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts, which prohibited speech defamatory of the government. Thomas Jefferson pardoned all who were convicted under this dreadful and unconstitutional law, including a member of Congress. Yet Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt all punished dissenters for the anti-war speech they uttered in wartime, and they got away with punishing them.
But since a unanimous opinion in 1969 involving hateful words uttered by a Ku Klux Klansman, the Supreme Court has held that all innocuous speech is absolutely protected from government interference and that all speech is innocuous when there is time for more speech to challenge or rebut it. This has led to our robust modern jurisprudence, which declares that individuals decide for themselves what to say and hear. The government does not decide for us.
In America, it may take a tawdry tale of sex in a hotel room to bring these values to light.
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