National Archives lawyer central to Mar-a-Lago raid documents sued Reagan while at ACLU

Gary Stern has been the general counsel for the National Archives and Records Administration since 1998.

Updated: August 30, 2022 - 11:33pm

The general counsel for the National Archives and Records Administration, who was central to coordinating between NARA and former President Donald Trump's attorneys regarding the documents at Mar-a-Lago, previously sued then-President Ronald Reagan in 1989 while working at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Mar-a-Lago was raided by the FBI's Washington Field Office on Aug. 8, after Trump's team had voluntarily given documents to NARA and was working through issues of executive privilege.

Trump defense attorney Evan Corcoran wrote NARA General Counsel Gary Stern on April 29 that the former president wanted to personally review the documents that NARA had received from Mar-a-Lago before letting the FBI access them "in order to ascertain whether any specific document is subject to privilege."

President Joe Biden empowered NARA to waive any claims to executive privilege that Trump might assert to block DOJ from gaining access to the documents.

Earlier this year, Stern was reportedly frustrated while working with Trump's team regarding the return of documents to NARA from Mar-a-Lago, according to CNN. Stern has been the general counsel for NARA since 1998.

Stern's NARA bio notes that he was a plaintiff in the case of Armstrong, et al. v. Executive Office of the President while a staff attorney for the Washington Office of the ACLU. The case, which began towards the end of Reagan's presidency in 1989, wasn't decided until 1993.

The U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia decided in favor of the plaintiffs with regard to the Reagan administration having to maintain electronic records, but noted the distinction between federal records and presidential records.

The court said that, according to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, it "has no power to review compliance with the [Presidential Records Act], and thus, no power to review the record keeping procedures of [Executive Office of the President] components whose 'sole responsibility is to advise the President.'"

Stern spoke on a panel in January 2021 called "Preserving Presidential Papers and Archives," where he explained the Presidential Records Act of 1978 — which was central to the Armstrong case — and how presidential records are supposed to be maintained.

In response to a question about someone leaving government and taking presidential records with them, Stern said that if original government documents that NARA doesn't have are removed from the White House, then NARA will tell the person that "they have something that doesn't belong to them and is government property and belongs to us."

Most of the time in such cases, he said, the person gives it back. But, he added, "If they don't, we can enforce that with the support of the Department of Justice to file a legal claim."

Katie Sullivan, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Trump Justice Department, told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Monday's episode that Stern's statements on the panel of "what he feels about presidential records" were "sort of a shot across the bow."

She mentioned a February CNN report about Stern, which mentioned his frustration with obtaining documents from the Trump team.

Sullivan said that the situation with NARA seeking documents from Trump and the subsequent Mar-a-Lago raid appeared to her "like this has been something that was certainly cooked up for some time."

According to the CNN story, Stern reached out to a White House Counsel's Office attorney and another Trump lawyer regarding the documents to be turned over.

Trump said in a statement at the time that the boxes he took to Mar-a-Lago "contained letters, records, newspapers, magazines and various articles" that would "someday" be featured in his presidential library, CNN reported.

"The papers were given easily and without conflict and on a very friendly basis," the former president added.

NARA said in a statement at the time, "Former President Trump's representatives have informed NARA that they are continuing to search for additional Presidential records that belong to the National Archives."

https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/national-archives-lawyer-central-mar-lago-raid-sued-reagan-while-aclu

Updated: August 31, 2022 - 11:16am

Federal government gives controversial Wuhan-linked org $1 million to 'prevent future pandemics'

Nonprofit has been at center of pandemic politics for 2+ years.

The federal government has awarded a controversial nonprofit a $1 million grant for research to help prevent future viral pandemics, an award that comes after more than two years of suspicions that the nonprofit in question may have been bankrolling certain types of highly dangerous coronavirus experiments in the city where the COVID-19 pandemic began.

EcoHealth Alliance"was awarded a $1 million Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention Phase I (PIPP) grant by the National Science Foundation," EcoHealth said in a press release announcing the grant.

"The team of scientists will strategize methods of early infectious disease detection and intervention," the nonprofit added.

EcoHealth has been in the spotlight of pandemic investigations for roughly two years due to its role in funneling considerable federal grant money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology that was used to conduct experiments in coronavirus virility and pandemic potential.

Speculations and conspiracy theories have swirled that the EcoHealth-funneled grant money may have bankrolled dangerous "gain of function" research that created deadlier and/or more transmissible strains of coronaviruses.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology sits just a few miles from where the Chinese Communist Party government claims the first major COVID outbreak was detected.

In its announcement of the grant, EcoHealth indicated that the grant money will not go to outright viral experiments of any kind.

The funding, rather, would be spent, in part, "compiling a list of mutagenic RNA viruses with a high risk of spillover based on their ability to spread, cause outbreak, and cause severe illness," as well as "identifying locations at risk of spillover and localized spread by assembling a list of animals known to host one or more of the focal viruses."

https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/federal-government-gives-controversial-wuhan-linked-org-1-million

Biden vows Iran will never acquire nuclear weapons

The call comes amid reports that Lapid could not contact Biden to discuss the Iranian nuclear situation

By Ben Whedon

Updated: August 31, 2022 - 4:15pm

President Joe Biden affirmed on Wednesday that the United States would not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, in a call with Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid.

"The President underscored U.S. commitment to never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon," the White House said of the call, according to Reuters. Lapid's office said the pair "spoke at length about the negotiations on a nuclear agreement, and their shared commitment to stopping Iran’s progress towards a nuclear weapon."

The call comes amid reports that Lapid could not contact Biden to discuss the Iranian nuclear situation.

The Biden administration has sought to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or Iran Nuclear Deal, which then-President Barack Obama negotiated with the Islamic regime in 2015. President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the agreement in 2018.

Some analysts have argued, however,that the White House is not looking to directly revive the JCPOA(lying again, none of them cannot lie), but rather is offering Tehran considerably more generous terms than the original agreement.

Israel has insisted it will not be bound by a revived JCPOA, per Reuters.

Iran, for its part, has continued a string of plots and alleged assassination attempts against prominent members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment such as former Trump adviser John Bolton.

What an idiot, he’s going to pay them trillions to not get nuclear weapons where there is proof, they are already very close to finishing one

https://justthenews.com/world/middle-east/biden-vows-iran-will-never-acquire-nuclear-weapons

>>17473038

And wasn't itTime that wrote the Victory Dance of the Elite Cabal taking Trumpout of office. This is interesting "Time" hid that magazine and cover on their site. I had a really hard time finding it earlier this year. Time seems to regret publishing the full story.

Time is really big into their covers, eh?

It turns out that American elites were conspiring against Donald Trump all along and they want you to know what really happened in the 2020 election. You can read about the plot against him in Time. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce was part of the conspiracy against Donald Trump. Leftwing activists also sold out to Corporate America and the plutocracy in order to own MAGA.

Time:

“In a way, Trump was right.

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy. …

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program. …

That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures. …”

The real conspiracy was always hidden in plain sight: Big Tech censorship to suppress and defund the populist Right and turn social media into another “mainstream” echo chamber, violent street protests orchestrated by Black Lives Matter and Antifa and backed by the Democratic establishment to create a climate of chaos and changing the election laws to swamp Trump with mail in ballots.

Instead of doing investigative journalism and exposing the real conspiracy against Trump, the Trump base was lulled into complacency with QAnon prophecies and discredited themselves by latching onto conspiracies which had no basis in fact like COVID-19 being a hoax, voter fraud in black cities or Dominion voting machines being rigged to switch votes. Trump voters were led by grifters down an endless series of these rabbit holes. Donald Trump also tweeted about censorship and the GOP held performance art hearings about the issue until they lost control of the White House and Senate. It would have been a violation of conservative and libertarian ideology for “big government” to take down Big Tech. Finally, they felt bold enough to just wipe Trump himself and his supporters off the internet.

The key takeaway is that there was a conspiracy. It was just not the conspiracy that ordinary people were led to believe. Now that the existence of the real conspiracy has been established by Molly Ball in Time, it should be easier for them to move on as cooler heads can start working to piece together what really happened. They were basically right that “something was going on” behind the scenes.

https://occidentaldissent.com/2021/02/05/time-the-secret-history-of-the-elite-cabal-who-conspired-against-donald-trump/

>>17473149

Here's the article by Time onThe Secret History of the Cabal..