"Attorney General Bill Barr is planning a full-throated defense of his work inside the Justice Department and that of police nationwide when appearing before hostile House Democrats on Wednesday, condemning both the 'bogus Russiagate scandal' and the senseless violence rocking U.S. cities.

"In prepared testimony released Tuesday evening on the eve of his House Judiciary Committee testimony, Barr declared that liberal activists' 'demonization of police is not only unfair and inconsistent with the principle that all people should be treated as individuals, but gravely injurious to our inner city communities.'

"'When a community turns on and pillories its own police, officers naturally become more risk averse and crime rates soar,' his prepared testimony states. 'Unfortunately, we are seeing that now in many of our major cities. This is a critical problem that exists apart from disagreements on other issues. The threat to black lives posed by crime on the streets is massively greater than any threat posed by police misconduct.'"

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"The Washington press corps seems engaged in a collective demonstration of the legal concept of willful blindness, or deliberately ignoring the facts, following the release of yet another declassified document which directly refutes prior statements about the investigation into Russia collusion. The document shows that FBI officials used a national security briefing of then candidate Donald Trump and his top aides to gather possible evidence for Crossfire Hurricane, its code name for the Russia investigation.

"It is astonishing that the media refuses to see what is one of the biggest stories in decades. The Obama administration targeted the campaign of the opposing party based on false evidence. The media covered Obama administration officials ridiculing the suggestions of spying on the Trump campaign and of improper conduct with the Russia investigation. When Attorney General William Barr told the Senate last year that he believed spying did occur, he was lambasted in the media, including by James Comey and others involved in that investigation. The mocking 'wow' response of the fired FBI director received extensive coverage. ...

"Obama and Biden were aware of the investigation, as were the administration officials who publicly ridiculed Trump when he said there was spying on his campaign. Others, like House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, declared they had evidence of collusion but never produced it. Countless reporters, columnists, and analysts still continue to deride, as writer Max Boot said it, the spinning of 'absurd conspiracy theories' about how the FBI 'supposedly spied on the Trump campaign.'

"Willful blindness has its advantages. The media covered the original leak and the collusion narrative, despite mounting evidence that it was false. They filled hours of cable news shows and pages of print with a collusion story discredited by the FBI. Virtually none of these journalists or experts have acknowledged that the collusion leaks were proven false, let alone pursue the troubling implications of national security powers being used to target the political opponents of an administration. But in Washington, success often depends not on what you see but what you can unsee."

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"There was a brief buzz in the media after former Vice President Joe Biden told a Black man that, if he didn't vote for Biden, he wasn't really Black. But this was more than just one of Biden's many gaffes.

"What really showed how much Biden took the Black vote for granted was his announcement that, when he is president, he would have 'a teacher-oriented Department of Education' and charter schools would not receive 'a penny of federal money.'

"Some of us think schools should be student-oriented. And official statistics show that students in charter schools in Harlem and other low-income minority communities in New York City pass the statewide mathematics tests at a rate more than 6 times the rate at which traditional public school students, housed in the same buildings, pass the same test.

"Why then is Biden against charter schools? Because the teachers unions are against charter schools. And, unlike Black voters, teachers unions -- with millions of members who vote and millions of dollars to donate as political campaign contributions -- do not automatically give their support to either political party, without getting something big in return.

"A majority of the students in charter schools are either Black or Hispanic, and they usually live in low-income communities. So teachers unions' opposition to charter schools is directly in conflict with the interests of low-income minority students. But low-income minority students do not vote, and their parents do not donate millions of dollars to political campaigns. ...

"While the hard facts are on the side of the charter schools, the rhetoric and the politics favor the unionized traditional public schools. Everything depends on how many of the facts reach how many minority group parents, and how many other people who still believe that schools should serve the interests of the students, rather than the interests of teachers unions.

"The stakes could not be higher for minority youngsters, for whom a decent education is often their one best chance for a better life."

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"Today's far left is not interested in winning debates with better arguments. It prefers to shut down debate altogether. It doesn't try to win the contest, it just harangues the referees to stop the game.

"If leftists don't like an op-ed, they want it unpublished. If they don't like a tweet, they want to track down the author and get him fired. If they don't like a tenured professor, they throw around Orwellian accusations that his or her ideas make them feel unsafe.

"This hostile culture is getting results. According to one brand-new survey, it is only far-left Americans who do not feel compelled to self-censor their views because of a hostile climate. Everyone but the far left feels the threat. And 50 percent of self-identified strong liberals say that simply contributing to the GOP presidential candidate ought to be a fireable offense for a business leader.

"In this country?"

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"'[H]e shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.' The Constitution says that's the president's job, but we're not hearing much about that from the chattering classes.

"We hear plenty of bloviating from the media-Democrat complex, dutifully masquerading the rioting in Portland as 'mostly peaceful protest.' And there is no shortage of faux outrage over President Trump's purported trampling on state sovereignty by dispatching federal agents to address the mayhem. ...

"The Constitution says the president shall perform this obligation. We're not talking about an option or something he may do or not do as he sees fit. It is a solemn duty. It is what being the chief executive is all about.

"The president has two principal, closely related responsibilities: to provide for national security and to see that the laws are enforced.

"The latter duty very much includes the protection of federal property and the execution of laws Congress has constitutionally enacted to address violent crime. ...

"Federal law enforcement agencies may and routinely do take investigative and enforcement action within the territorial jurisdiction of the states.

"They need not provide notice to, much less a request for permission from, the state government and its police agencies."

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"Joe Biden signed the death warrant for his campaign last week, even if he doesn't know it. The joint manifesto he released with Bernie Sanders is 110 pages of radical far-left policies -- from a job-killing $2 trillion climate agenda to eliminating cash bail and dismantling border protection.

"It betrays the working-class voters Biden claims to represent and destroys any pretense that he is a 'moderate.' ...

"Biden's campaign vehemently denies that he supports defunding the police. But in an interview with activist Ady Barkan on digital media site NowThis News last week he said, 'Yes, absolutely,' when asked if 'we can redirect some of the [police] funding?'

"Redirecting 'some' funding away from police is a euphemism for defunding police, at least partially.

"It tells you he has common cause with the anti-cop wreckers. So does the fact a Biden campaign staffer derided police as worse than 'pigs' in tweets which also used the hashtag #Defundpolice."

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"The New York Times is standing by a February 2017 report alleging that Trump associates were in communication with Russian intelligence officers, even after the release of an internal FBI memo that identified numerous inaccuracies in the story.

"'We stand by our reporting,' New York Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy told her own paper for its report on the newly released documents.

"Attorney General William Barr declassified two documents this week related to the FBI's investigation of the Trump campaign. One released Friday is a 57-page memo of interviews that dossier author Christopher Steele's primary source conducted with the FBI in January 2017.

"The second is former FBI official Peter Strzok's annotation of a Feb. 14, 2017, report that said four American officials claimed that authorities had intercepted communications and call logs of Trump advisers speaking with Russian intelligence.

"'This statement is inaccurate and misleading as written,' Strzok wrote in reference to opening paragraph of the Times story. 'We have not seen evidence of any individuals affiliated with the Trump team in contact with [Intelligence Officers].'"

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"Nearly 30% of U.S. voters don't have confidence in November's presidential election being accurately counted and the correct winner being declared, according to a new Just the News Daily Poll with Scott Rasmussen.

"'It's perhaps not surprising, but chilling nonetheless, that a quarter of the nation's voters lack confidence that the votes will be accurately counted and the correct winner of the presidential election declared,' Rasmussen said. 'This year's trend fits with one seen in recent years.'"

"The speech we love needs no protection. The speech we hate does. The government has no authority to evaluate speech. As the framers understood, all persons have a natural right to think as we wish and to say and publish whatever we think. Even hateful, hurtful and harmful speech is protected speech. ...

"Punishing speech is the most dangerous business because there will be no end to it. The remedy for hateful or threatening speech is not silence or punishments; it is more speech -- speech that challenges the speaker."

"There are two key takeaways from the outcome of Tuesday's primaries in Alabama, Maine and Texas.

"First, the big winner of the night was President Trump. Several Trump-backed candidates defeated their opponents and unquestionably benefited significantly from the president's support. The most notable of these was former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville, who defeated former senator and attorney general Jeff Sessions for the GOP nomination for a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama. Tuberville will face Democratic Sen. Doug Jones, considered a highly vulnerable incumbent.

"Second, Democratic primary results show the party is deeply divided, complicating the Democrats' path to winning majority control of the Senate and defeating Trump in the November election. ...

"Meanwhile, in Texas former White House physician Dr. Ronny Jackson, who was endorsed by Trump, won his primary for a U.S. House seat, beating out Josh Winegarner. Winegarner was endorsed by the outgoing Republican Rep. Mac Thornberry, who did not seek reelection.

"In many ways, the weight of Trump's endorsements in Alabama and Texas signals that the president's current chances for reelection may be stronger than national polls indicate. ...

"Given the clear progressive insurgency within the Democratic Party across the country, there will also likely be greater pressure on the party to embrace left-leaning policies, such as defunding the police, which are unpopular with the general electorate. Doing so could cost the Democrats the presidency, the Senate, and even their current House majority."

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