© 2018 Clifford Ribner – June 30, 2018. The following is the new Preface/Forward for the next edition of Clifford Ribner’s book, Freedom’s Last Stand.
PREFACE / FORWARD
I completed the book you are about to read in late summer, 2016, with Obama still president. Although I was then already on record, in an article I had published at my website — CliffordRibner.com — on June 1, 2016, both predicting and actively advocating for the election of Donald Trump, his name is not even mentioned in the book.That is because mine is a history book, describing and analyzing only events and ideas and people associated with them which had, as of the time of the writing, actually happened.
Now, two years into the Trump presidency, its truly historic nature and its singularly dramatic and illuminating relevance to what you will read in this book could not be more pronounced. So much has changed, yet so much remains the same. Hence, this Preface/Forward.
The Counterrevolution Continues, And with a Vengeance, While Americans’ Lives Improve
The ongoing Second Civil War/Counterrevolution, the central focus of this book, continues and, in its Collectivists’ unhinged response to Pres. Trump and his anti-anti–Americanism/implicit anti-Marxism, have stopped even trying to conceal the limitless, cold-blooded, hate-driven, anti-Constitutional lengths they are willing to go in “resisting” and eradicating all opposition to them. The radicalized federal courts and administrative bureaucracies individually and together still comprise the true, brutal power base for all of the forces of the Counterrevolution.
As I show in the book, those bureaucracies institute a rule of men, the opposite of rule of law, wielding tyrannical (according to The Federalist #47 itself), discretionary power over the citizens, tyranny which the founders promised the Constitution would preclude. Eliminate all of them, and disempower their unelected bureaucrats – dramatically enhancing the freedom, strength, security and prosperity of the nation and the citizens – and the Counterrevolution loses its most potent coercive power, power which it has so successfully deployed to impose itself throughout society.
Although, like any revolutionary change, that disempowerment would produce some short-term chaos, its beneficial results to the overwhelming majority of Americans would become apparent almost immediately, and it would in fact be the least chaotic, least bloody revolution in world history. It should, indeed, be completely bloodless, unlike any previous revolution, with any violence simply arising from intolerant lawlessness from collectivist radicals, lawlessness which state governments, possibly assisted by the National Guard, should be more than capable of containing.
Since power over the citizens has always been the one, actual quest of the Counterrevolution, its disempowerment is its defeat. Without it, there is simply nothing to keep its Collectivist hold over people and institutions intact.
With the Marxist (as I prove in the book) administrative state unmasking and revealing its true self blatantly, as it never has before, in its undeniable Justice Department/FBI/CIA etc. mutiny against the president, the Constitution itself, and the majority of Americans who support them both, Pres. Trump, alone or, preferably, leading his majorities of Republicans in both houses of Congress, may well agree that the bloodless revolution I propose is what the nation needs and deserves.
In this book, I show how that can be accomplished by just one house of Congress alone, or the President alone, deploying the strategy I describe.
What else has changed since the summer of 2016? The economy’s strength and growth-rate, together with the optimism of the American people, have dramatically improved under the Trump administration policies compared to what they were under the Obama and Bush presidencies, even with almost no assistance, apart from the significant tax reform it passed, from the Republican Congress and Senate.
The Mutiny – And Its Only Cure
And, as suggested, the Administrative state bureaucrats (Executive branch employees all) have been viciously and openly sabotaging/revolting against the President himself, refusing to accept the legitimacy of his Electoral college landslide election, because of his strong disagreement with their self-proclaimed value, primacy and permanence – precisely as I predicted in the book would occur when they are challenged, a challenge no previous president has ever seriously raised.
As I say in the book, the cancer that is the Administrative State has long made itself impervious to being reformed, and can only be tamed by removing it entirely. The procedures I outline in the final chapter for effecting that completely peaceful revolution of undoing the Administrative state in its entirety are now vastly easier to effect with Pres. Trump in the White House.
In the book, I describe completely Constitutional procedures which any elected branch of the federal government, including either house of Congress acting alone, could follow to accomplish the peaceful revolution of completely eliminating the entire Administrative State (other than the IRS, for reasons shown in the book). Those procedures are such that that result could have been achieved even during the last years of the Obama administration, since Republicans then had majorities in both houses of Congress. Those procedures would include announcing and publicizing important information to the public so that it would be aware of what is going on and why it needs to be done for the Constitution and liberty to be preserved.
Because of the revolutionary nature of the result of following those procedures, it clearly would be advantageous for as much of the country, and as much of the government itself (not including agencies which are to be eliminated, of course) to approve such. With Pres. Trump in the White House, it is now possible for those procedures to receive the kind of support from him and Congress that gives actual legislation, following Constitutional procedures, its legitimacy and the public’s acceptance of it.
Particularly if the Republicans increase their majorities in both houses in the 2018 elections, it may well be possible to fulfill those procedures with actual legislation. That would remove any conceivable legal argument that anything remained of the Counterrevolution in our laws. That removal would also drastically deflate its power and influence everywhere else in our culture and lives.
Those Congressional majorities, perhaps super majorities, in both houses of Congress could then impeach numerous judges who had joined in the self-proclaimed “Resistance” by issuing facially-frivolous rulings for political reasons solely to defeat the policies of a duly-elected president.
Similarly, judges, including Supreme Court justices, who had been issuing opinions in direct violation of the Constitution, as now newly explained to the nation by the President and the Congress, could be impeached for that reason alone as well (violating their oaths of office to uphold the Constitution, clearly a “high crime”).
The Administrative State’s Assault On the Citizens And Empowerment Of Prosecutors
As mentioned, the previously-masked, cold-blooded viciousness, and contempt for the Constitution, of the Administrative State has now unquestionably revealed itself for what it is, particularly in the extremely-public misconduct of the Justice Department which, as I show in my book, has always been the tip of the spear for the entire Administrative state: it is the one agency particularly empowered to impose the most extreme suffering and destruction – ruinously-expensive and terrifying (for targets, not the prosecutors) investigations/assaults on privacy, dignity etc. and criminal prosecutions – on anyone its bureaucrat prosecutors individually, or any of the other agencies, choose to target.
Its bureaucrat prosecutors are able to attack any citizen they choose with those investigations/assaults, which are punishing enough even if no prosecution results, under any of the endless criminal “laws” all the agencies have unconstitutionally (as I show) enacted in their ongoing quest to massively increase their police power over the citizenry by massively criminalizing harmless conduct.
When I say those agency-invented criminal “laws” (no purported “law” can become a real law unless Congress passes it, following procedures very-precisely specified in the Constitution) are “endless,” that is no exaggeration. Quite simply, no one knows how many of them there are.
Agencies have created tens of thousands of pages of “regulations” (their euphemism for the purported laws they enact unconstitutionally) and violating any of them is deemed a crime. They are so numerous that anyone engaged in any normal business activity potentially violates them constantly without having any idea he is doing so (ignorance of any of them is not a defense!).
If federal prosecutors prosecuted everyone in the country guilty of any of those crimes, untold millions of citizens would have to be jailed – possibly over half the country. For manpower reasons alone (the country’s and theirs), they couldn’t begin to do that.
The result is that prosecutors are empowered by the sheer multitude of potential criminal “laws” so that, as a practical matter, they can only prosecute crimes selectively – picking and choosing who to prosecute and for what. Since prosecutors are endowed with virtually endless discretion in their selections, their own biases – political or otherwise – inevitably control who they select as targets for prosecution, or just investigation.
And as terrible as it is for anyone to be subject to FBI/DOJ investigation where, as a practical matter, all rights to privacy and fair treatment disappear, with judges granting endless discretion to the investigators, the Kafkaesque world of being actually prosecuted by them is truly unspeakable in what is supposed to be a free nation.
Specifically, besides the fact that they have endless financial resources, the entire playing field could not be more slanted against the target. Courts permit them freely to lie about anything, and to use endless tactics of deception, whereas a single false statement, even if inadvertent, by a target, can become a felony.
Additionally, As Paul Manafort has discovered, a single, very brief phone call, however blameless, with a potential witness in his case was enough for an accusation of witness tampering by the prosecutors, resulting in his being jailed until trial even though he has been convicted of nothing, and is charged exclusively with long-ago, technical, financial crimes which the Justice Department had previously determined insufficient for any prosecution whatsoever.
But his prosecutors are not only free to engage in endless, real witness-tampering with anyone, they have been empowered by the courts to pressure witnesses into saying things, including lies, to accuse targets endlessly. The pressure they can bring on those witnesses is the threat of prosecuting them under any of the endless federal “crimes” if they don’t say what the prosecutor demands. In other words, the prosecutors, with all their endless other resources, are permitted to play by a completely different set of rules (no rules at all really) than their victims.
Beria, Stalin’s police state chief, reputedly said “Show me the man, and I will show you the crime.” Any federal prosecutor today could say the same thing.
Do they select targets for political reasons? What does common sense tell you, along with all we already know about the handling of their investigation into Hilary Clinton versus the radically-different handling of the investigations of people involved in the Trump campaign – investigations conducted by the same federal bureaucrats who made no secret among themselves of their utter hatred of Donald Trump.
The idea, absurd on its face, that federal bureaucrats are selfless, endlessly-wise, saints, acting without regard to their own personal biases and beliefs, political and otherwise, even though they have almost endless discretion to do whatever they like in their preying on citizens of their choosing, is a myth they and their supporters in the media have promoted endlessly in an effort to increase their power over the citizenry.
The Justice Department’s Particular Hubris
The mutiny being very publicly conducted in the Justice Department against the President himself – an open assault on the plain meaning of the Constitution – actually represents the culmination of an effort begun no later than the Nixon administration, in which the Justice Department, notwithstanding the facts that it is but a part of the Executive branch and all its employees are nothing but unelected bureaucrats, effectively claims legal supremacy over the president himself!
Article II of the Constitution could not be clearer in precluding any such hubris: the president alone is granted all executive power under the Constitution and, as Hamilton made plain in the Federalist #70, the supremacy of the president over everyone in his department is a mandatory requirement of the Constitution itself to insure the liberty of the people it is intended to preserve. Because the president alone in that department must answer to the people in elections, those subordinates must answer to him. Otherwise, they would answer to no one – an unconstitutional abomination checks and balances throughout the Constitution preclude.
In the Nixon presidency, the fact that the president “is not above the law” was massively distorted by Nixon’s political enemies, including the press, to claim that the president could break the law (supposedly obstruction of justice) if he removes any (necessarily-subordinate to him) bureaucrat in the Justice Department who might be conducting a criminal investigation into his affairs, or those of his associates. This Constitutionally-baseless proposition has been massively promoted by the Counterrevolutionaries ever since.
In our Republic, the federal government, and each officer whose office is described in it, derive all their power solely from whatever the Constitution provides them. No Justice Department, let alone any special prosecutor, is even mentioned in the Constitution, let alone granted any power whatsoever. Indeed, none of the agencies of the Administrative State are mentioned in the Constitution and, for reasons I show the book, that is far from an oversight by the founders, and none of them other than the IRS have any Constitutional validity.
The Counterrevolution’s Justice Department Supremacy Big Lie
The principal legal project of the Counterrevolution, as discussed in the book, has been to establish and empower the agencies which comprise the Administrative State, all of which are filled exclusively with unelected bureaucrats who wield massive, purely-discretionary power over the citizenry.
Precisely because the entire Administrative State edifice is unconstitutional, its activists have strived mightily to find a means to defeat the power over it of elected officials who alone have power, power which they could, and actually should, exercise at any time to eliminate it.
That is the Counterrevolution’s very purpose for establishing, through its multiple power bases in society, as “truth” in the minds of the public the fiction that the president himself, along with members of Congress, is subordinate to unelected Justice Department bureaucrats – to disempower those actual, Constitutional officials relative to the tip of the spear of the Administrative State, the Justice Department.
Since, as discussed below, according to its unconstitutional “regulations,” as interpreted by its own bureaucrats, the Justice Department head claims the power to appoint a special counsel to investigate anyone it wants and, according to it, even the president is precluded from firing any prosecutor involved in that proceeding, it can use the threat of doing so to preclude, as a practical matter, any control over it whatsoever by any of the actual, elected officials: “Question my actions or power, and I’ll destroy you with an endless investigation for as long as I like, which you are precluded from ending.”
If successful in establishing this power over elected officials, including the president himself, there would be no limit whatsoever on the Administrative State’s power to prey on citizens. Think this is all far-fetched? Just consider what Rod Rosenstein has been doing since he took control of the Justice Department, as discussed below.
If the subordination of the president to the Justice Department were to become a legal reality, it would literally create an absolute rule of lawyer bureaucrats, instead of the rule of law our liberty and the Constitution require. Because the then-sovereign Justice Department would then answer to no one, and so would achieve absolute power over the elected representatives of the people – a complete abomination of the Constitution, which the unitary executive demanded in the Constitution, and explained by Hamilton, is precisely intended to preclude.
The failure by elected officials to repudiate Justice Department claims of supremacy in this regard has already resulted in them acting as if they, in fact, rule supreme, as Rod Rosenstein’s actions described below make plain. Their invocation of law as the pretext for their lawless, arbitrary actions are living proof that as power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Special Counsels and the Constitution
The creation of extra-Constitutional Special Prosecutors in recent years has been an attempt to institutionalize Justice Department supremacy over the president – and everyone else. In 1978, Congress passed legislation authorizing such Special Prosecutors. But that legislation by its own terms lapsed, and Congress explicitly refused to renew it.
However, the Justice Department, further building on its Constitutionally-baseless “supremacy” proposition, and in plain violation of Congressional intent and the requirements for legislation in Article I of the Constitution, drafted and enacted its own “regulations,” purporting to create its own “law,” with no underlying statutory basis whatsoever. Those “regulations” purport to authorize the Atty. Gen. on his own (subject to some bureaucratic limitations) to appoint a Special Counsel to investigate/prey on anyone for anything. The unelected Atty. Gen. would have complete authority over that Special Counsel – but, according to the Justice Department supremacy fiction, supposedly no elected official would.
Adding insult to that Constitutional injury, Atty. Gen. Sessions inexplicably abandoned his own primacy over the Justice Department, turning it over to Rod Rosenstein, a 28-year career bureaucrat in the Justice Department. Rosenstein, based on Democrat political demands, but zero evidence, proceeded to appoint Mueller as Special Counsel (in a secret memo), granting him an unlimited charter to investigate anyone remotely connected to the Trump campaign for anything, an appointment which itself violated even the minimal requirements of the illegal “regulations” the Justice Department had unilaterally “legislated” into existence.
For reasons described below, Rosenstein himself should have been disbarred and imprisoned at the time Sessions turned the agency over to his whims, and Rosenstein had especially dirty hands with respect to investigating the Trump campaign about evidence-free allegations it “colluded” with Russia – the purported justification for the Mueller investigation/inquisition.
That inquisition, predictably, has proceeded to do as much harm as it can to anyone remotely connected to the Trump campaign, using the kind of brass knuckles pre-dawn no-knock break-in tactics normally reserved for terrorists or Mafia dons.
But that entire Special Counsel edifice is built on a foundation of nothing but unconstitutional hot air.
Because, in fact, the president may indeed remove any prosecutor, Special or otherwise, he believes is engaging in misconduct, or, indeed, any employee in the Executive department he wishes to fire, for any reason or no reason at all. That is the plain meaning of the fact that he alone has all Constitutional Executive power and any, necessarily-subordinate to him, employee of the department has only so much power as he chooses to permit.
And the president can commit no crime in the course of carrying out his Constitutional powers and duties, including firing any Executive branch employee he chooses. He alone is who answers to the people, and who they elect, and it is through his unitary power alone that the people’s will can be achieved.
Rod Rosenstein Delendum Est
The Justice Department mutiny could not be more extraordinary, having begun as an illegal effort by Obama officials to massively interfere in the 2016 presidential election by surreptitiously surveilling, and otherwise harming, the Trump candidacy, and assisting the Clinton one, obviously at the behest of multiple, high-ranking bureaucrats, with the approval, if not the active direction, of Obama himself, with that mutiny continuing after the inauguration and for the entire duration of the investigation/inquisition of special counselor Mueller who, it should be said, does nothing that is not approved, if not specifically directed, by Rod Rosenstein.
Career bureaucrat Rosenstein, based on claims of institutional superiority, has been blatantly refusing to produce documents demanded by Congress and, in some cases, purporting to produce documents while actually concealing them, solely because of their damaging impact on the FBI, with the concealment invariably justified by the false pretext that national security requires it.
It is apparent that documents which Rosenstein is particularly refusing to disclose to Congress are documents revealing the origin, including its actual timing, of the investigation/surreptitious surveillance by the Obama administration of the Trump campaign.
Specifically, from now-publicly-known facts, it is apparent that there was zero evidence supporting that investigation’s commencement (any such evidence would have leaked long ago had it existed), that grifting/sting operations were conducted by paid executive branch operatives in an effort to trick Trump campaign Associates into saying or doing things inadvertently to provide the appearance of a pretext for the investigation (those efforts came to naught), and that it arose solely based on corrupt, illegal, political ambitions. It’s a safe bet that Rosenstein would be happy to disclose the investigation’s origins to Congress if they were legitimate and not completely damning of the entire travesty.
That complete lack of “probable cause” for the investigation’s commencement means that no otherwise-deployable evidence it may have gathered against anyone can be used, since all of it would be “fruit of the poisonous tree,” in manifest violation of Constitutional “Due Process” requirements. It is inconceivable that Rosenstein and Mueller do not know this. If Mueller simply had basic competence and decency, he would have immediately ended the entire matter as soon as he became aware of this.
The fact that he and Rosenstein are continuing their mutiny involving both their extremely-nasty inquisition against the president and his supporters and their refusal to honor their disclosure obligations to Congress, indicates that they are going to continue to do so, even if the president ordered them to make the disclosures to Congress and/or perhaps fired one or both of them. Indeed, perhaps they are hoping for such a firing and the likely political firestorm that would ensue, a firestorm they would look to for cover for the rest of what they have been doing.
Absent that, having doubled down on their mutiny, it seems they are counting on corrupt federal judges to rescue them, and/or political outcries from Democrats, the media, etc., in the event they are challenged by the president, Congress, or anyone.
For reasons of his own, Pres. Trump has not intervened in this travesty at all; nor has Jeff Sessions, for reasons that remain as mysterious as his abdication to Rosenstein in the first place.
Rosenstein is obviously obsessed with massively increasing his power and jurisdiction and is directing the mutiny, as he has been as an active participant in it from its very start during the presidential campaign. Indeed, it is possible that his actions in the mutiny are, at least in part, his use of an offense, as the best defense, against his extreme legal jeopardy for his own previous actions before the FISA court.
Specifically, he was one of multiple Justice Department bureaucrats who knowingly sponsored, as purported “evidence,” a completely bogus document containing nothing but third-hand hearsay disinformation/lies from KGB agents to its author, Christopher Steele (he admits this, though not straightforwardly), as a pretext for impugning Donald Trump and others in his campaign to the public and to a court as having committed treason during the campaign by enlisting Russia, supposedly to rig the American election on his behalf.
Anyone with the slightest knowledge of the document’s provenance alone, let alone any familiarity with KGB disinformation, or any common sense, would have no reason even to bother checking any of its allegations to know its utter baselessness and absurdly fictitious nature, and that offering it to any court as supposed “evidence,” as Rosenstein and multiple other Justice Department lawyer bureaucrats did, was a blatant fraud on the court – a genuine, monstrous crime and disbarment-worthy offense.
And so that baselessly-claimed treason by Trump and his campaign itself became a pretext for the Obama administration, on behalf of the Clinton campaign, surreptitiously to spy on the Trump campaign and then to continue doing so even when Pres. Trump was president, as a direct assault by the previous administration on him, his office and supporters, and on the Constitution – and on the electorate.
And that crime was done repeatedly by Rod Rosenstein himself as an active participant in proffering that bogus document – the “Dossier” – to the FISA court , pretending that it was a legitimate basis for seeking a federal warrant to conduct massive surveillance on a Trump campaign associate so as to facilitate surveillance on that entire campaign, by virtue of drawing in as additional targets for surveillance anyone who spoke to the named target of the warrant obtained from the FISA court – Carter Page.
Requests for that surveillance warrant from the FISA court were repeated three times, with all the signatories of those requests, including Rod Rosenstein on every such request, for many months, even after Pres. Trump was inaugurated, making each of those requests an active, blatantly-fraudulent mutiny against the president and everyone who could be affected by the warrant obtained from the court.
In other words, the Obama bureaucrats actually did what the Watergate burglars (without Nixon’s knowledge) tried unsuccessfully to do, except multiplied by many orders of magnitude, and continuing even after the opposing party’s candidate won and was even in office.
And they fraudulently induced an actual court to assist them. It remains astonishing that that court has held no one in contempt, let alone demanded the disbarment and criminal prosecution of every lawyer complicit in that fraud, since all these facts have become public. Query: was that judge happily complicit? Is there any bottom to this massive, lawless corruption?
Mueller, Rosenstein’s Pitbull
Rosenstein’s appointment of Mueller as Special Counsel, with an unlimited budget and a staff of Trump-hating prosecutors represented an exponential escalation of the assertion by the Justice Department of its primacy through the power of violence over everyone, including the president.
With unlimited discretion in his personnel choices, Mueller hired a team of lawyers and investigators all of whom had established names for themselves as possessing particular attributes. All were united in their absolute hatred for Donald Trump, their belief in the virtue of their cause – to bring about his destruction, and the destruction of anyone who had assisted him to become president. All were known for being absolutely ruthless and dogged in their pursuit of any target whose scalp they were seeking to remove, always as violently and destructively as possible.
The lawyers on his team were particularly notable for their past, low-blow prosecutions. Those lawyers had shown themselves to be willing to do anything to obtain a conviction, without regard to law, morals or ethics. In real life, such actions are known as grotesque abusive prosecutions, prosecutions which should result in their being disbarred and jailed. Instead, as is typical in the Justice Department, they received at most a slap on the wrist for their misconduct – followed by a promotion.
Specifically, the lead prosecutor on Mueller’s team, as but one example of his approach to his prosecutorial office, was notorious for having relentlessly prosecuted Arthur Anderson by stretching a statute so far that the Supreme Court eventually threw out the conviction he was able to obtain. However, as was absolutely predictable, that prosecution completely destroyed Arthur Anderson, then the largest public accounting firm in the world with many thousands of employees, all of whom lost their jobs. Its ultimate, exonerating victory in the Supreme Court could not have been more Pyrrhic.
And that prosecutor considers that case among his greatest victories – that very gross abuse of purported law to utterly destroy a large institution, without regard to whether such a case should ever have even been brought.
Other prosecutors on Mueller’s team viciously prosecuted the late Sen. Stevens of Alaska. Initially, they obtained a conviction, just before an election, a conviction which resulted in Stevens losing his Senate seat. However, when the judge determined that they had used utterly bogus evidence against him, and had deliberately hidden exculpatory evidence, the judge threw out the conviction as having been obtained improperly and, yes, illegally. But they had already done their damage.
In short, it is no exaggeration to characterize Mueller’s team as a bunch of thugs in suits with briefcases armed with unlimited power to harm anyone they select among the citizenry.
The press have been cheering them on in this endeavor, as have the Democrats, while the Republicans have been enablers by their failure, with a few exceptions, to object to the travesty, and by many of them even publicly heaping praise on Mueller as a supposedly stellar character.
In fact, his career has shown him too to be utterly unprincipled, vicious, and concerned only with inflicting massive injury on anyone he chooses to deploy prosecutorial powers to attack. Millions of dollars of taxpayer’s, but not his, money have had to be paid as compensation to people he deliberately, wrongly and illegally, hiding exculpatory evidence, prosecuted, including the estates of those who innocently died in prison thanks to him.
A full catalog of his many wrongful and abusive investigations/inquisitions and prosecutions would be breathtaking and shocking to anyone with belief in the rule of law, and the slightest common sense and decency.
As is his politically-motivated destructiveness. As an example, as director of the FBI, he insisted on implementing the demands of multiple Islamic groups in America, including those known to be tied to terrorism, in altering FBI procedures and manuals in a manner making it virtually impossible to ferret out all but the most blatant Islamic terrorists. Yet finding such terrorists has been, at least since September 11, 2001, the primary task of the FBI.
The Justice department has thus proven my contention that the only limit which the Administrative state will ever respect is force. There is simply no limit to its hubris, nor to its grasping for power until it is legally, forcefully stopped and eliminated.
Clifford Ribner is a Tax Lawyer, Litigator, and Trial Lawyer based in Tulsa, Oklahoma and he is the author of Freedom’s Last Stand – A Common Sense Guide to Understanding the Tyranny of Collectivist Ideology and How We The People Can Recover Our Stolen Constitutional Rights.
Amazing erudite book on the truths and realities of political anti-humanity and anti-culture. One day, humanity, ourselves, will have the numbers and the power for Good, and for-good!!