A linchpin of Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s primary campaign for U.S. Senate was that his opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, was backed by the left’s great bogeyman of 2026: “AIPAC.” In El-Sayed’s telling, Israel is a “genocidal,” “illegal apartheid regime,” just as “evil” as Hamas. And AIPAC’s donors, contributors of tens of millions of dollars to defeat candidates like him, are the “rogue” and “bloodthirsty” nation’s complicit foreign agents, pushing our lawmakers to send billions of taxpayer dollars to Israel to drop bombs on innocent Gazans while Americans lack healthcare here at home. Still, “AIPAC and Israel are not the same as Judaism and the Jewish people,” the devout Egyptian-American Muslim stresses. While hemming and hawing when asked if the Jewish state – the beating heart of the Jewish faith, the biblical and ancestral homeland where Jews have maintained a constant presence for over 3,000 years, and where nearly half of all Jews live today – has a right to exist, he assures us, “I love Judaism and I love the Jewish people.” Not only that, but despite being chummy with the Pikers, Farrakhanites, and Hamasniks of the world, the philosemite “physician” wants to “break bread with [Jews]” – albeit at the curious time of “Seder,” the opening feast of a holiday, in Passover, during which Jews may not eat bread.

El-Sayed’s blood libels aim to break an alliance with, delegitimize, and imperil a state, in Israel, that serves as our frontline of defense against shared Islamic supremacist foes, and provides perhaps a greater ROI in military capability, intelligence, and technology than any other nation in the world – weakening the quintessential force-multiplying America First partner and America alike. His thinly veiled anti-Semitic tropes, insinuating a cabal of rich Jews are treacherously doing the bidding of a dastardly foreign government to America’s detriment, aim to demonize American Jewish supporters of that alliance. His presentation of a false choice between being loyal Americans and faithful Jews aims to gin up an existential crisis for American Jews where none exists – we have a right if not an obligation to support relationships that we believe advance America’s national interest. And his splitting of Judaism and Israel aims to alienate us from our religion and ourselves.

Beyond these immediate aims, this sinister propaganda serves to obscure a great and dangerous irony: While El-Sayed decries “AIPAC,” the doctor is an apparent product of, and contributor to a genuinely malign, actual foreign influence machine – one that similarly surreptitiously attacks its targets, spews the same bigoted bile, and in pursuit of the same goal of power. That foreign influence machine is the Muslim Brotherhood. The subversive, transnational Islamist organization seeks not only to undermine Israel, Jews, and America, but to conquer the world.

The record shows that El-Sayed has served in, repeatedly spoken before, and surrounded himself with Muslim Brotherhood affiliates, including unindicted terror co-conspirators; garnered gobs of campaign cash, endorsements, and political support from said organizations; and promoted the Brotherhood, its agenda, and supportive narratives, consistent with its U.S.-based front groups.

His ascent to Democrat U.S. Senate nominee, from a swing state as critical as Michigan, constitutes one of the organization’s greatest coups to date.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Backing of Abdul El-Sayed

The Brotherhood’s motto is straightforward: “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” Founded by Hassan Al-Banna in Egypt in 1928, the group’s goal was and is to create a global caliphate under Islamic law, sharia. The theopolitical ideology it seeks to summon the world to, or impose, is totalitarian, governing every aspect of public and private life. It is antithetical to our constitutional republic.

From its inception, the organization has pursued its ends through means overt and covert, peaceful and violent, including through infiltrating and seeking to overtake existing societal institutions, and creating parallel, putatively religious, social, political, and militant arms that engage in activities ranging from proselytization and indoctrination, to lobbying and litigation, to sabotage and subversion, and, as its motto states, jihad.

Accordingly, to advance its cause here, the group has vowed to exploit the very freedoms it would deny us – including of speech and religion – to execute a “grand Jihad” in pursuit of “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” That is how its North American leaders put in an authoritative 1991 memorandum detailing their strategy for our continent.

That document emerged as evidence in the largest terrorism financing case in U.S. history. In 2004, the U.S. government commenced the ultimately successful prosecution of the then-biggest Muslim charity in America, the Holy Land Foundation, and its leaders, for funneling more than $12 millions dollars to the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, Hamas. Operating under the stated principle that “War is deception,” extensive evidence showed that the terrorism-financing vehicle was but one node of a multi-faceted network established by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee in America to provide “financial, media, and political support to Hamas,” according to Lara Burns, lead FBI agent on the case.

The 1991 memorandum contained a list, corroborated by other seized materials, of “our organizations and the organizations of our friends.” The U.S. government would identify many outfits listed therein as the Holy Land Foundation’s unindicted co-conspirators. Countless members of those organizations would face terrorism-related charges. Included among them are a “Who’s Who” of entities, and/or predecessors of entities, that El-Sayed has served in, spoken before, and from which he has received extensive political support.

One such entity foundational to the Muslim Brotherhood’s operations in America is the Muslim Students Association (MSA). Established in 1963 by Muslim Brotherhood members at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, MSA was the group’s first formal American organization. It would serve as a “a front for Muslim Brotherhood organizing and recruit[ing],” according to counterterrorism expert Kyle Shideler. Its chapters, now numbering over 150 across the U.S. and Canada, have hosted Islamic supremacist speakers, and raised funds for groups later shuttered for funding terrorism. More than a dozen MSA leaders and members have faced terrorism charges. As an undergraduate, El-Sayed served as the Vice President of the University of Michigan’s MSA chapter. His wife, Dr. Sarah Jukaku, who he met and married there, would serve as its president. Said to be an active member of the chapter, El-Sayed helped lead a walkout and spoke in protest of a Young Americans for Freedom-hosted event featuring three repentant ex-jihadists. The protestors panned the gathering for allegedly stereotyping Muslims.

The MSA spawned and served as a feeder for a slew of organizations listed in the 1991 memorandum, chiefly including the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Founded in 1981 by American members of the Muslim Brotherhood, prosecutors identified ISNA as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case. Like MSA’s chapters, ISNA, which exists “To foster the development of the Muslim community, interfaith relations, civic engagement, and better understanding of Islam,” has often hosted terror-sympathizing figures, and spewers of invective aimed at Jews, Christians, and America at its annual conventions. This includes its forthcoming conclave, which will reportedly feature “a rogues’ gallery of notorious Muslim figures who’ve engaged in Holocaust denial and the persecution of Christians and have also been unindicted co-conspirators in terror plots, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.” It will also feature El-Sayed. He likewise spoke at ISNA’s annual convention in 2018, alongside fellow Michigan Democat Rep. Rashida Tlaib. That conference featured future supporters including the noxious Palestinian Arab-American activist Linda Sarsour and Hamas- and Hezbollah-defending Dearborn school board member Amer Zahr – with whom El-Sayed would later headline fundraisers on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked nonprofit, Islamic Relief USA. El-Sayed also spoke at ISNA’s annual convention in 2020 alongside a coterie of Brotherhood-affiliated figures. His father-in-law, Dr. Tayeb Jukaku, who has contributed $300,000 to Fighting for Michigan, a PAC backing El-Sayed, has been a member of ISNA’s founding committee for nearly 20 years. FEC records show that ISNA’s current CEO, Azha Azeez, and board members Malika Khan and Faisal Qazi have also contributed to El-Sayed’s 2026 Senate campaign.

ISNA maintains a “foundational supporting relationship” with another entity founded by the MSA and fingered as an unindicted co-conspirator in Holy Land case, in the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT). NAIT is a waqf, an endowment under Islamic law, that held title to up to one-quarter of all mosques in the U.S. at one point. One such mosque is the Islamic Center of Columbia Missouri, an affiliate of both MSA and ISNA. El-Sayed’s father, Mohamed, an engineering professor and also an imam, served as the mosque’s president in the 1980s. One of his predecessors, Ali Bagegni, would go on to serve on the board of directors of, and as a secretary of the U.S. branch of the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA), also based in Columbia. An ostensible charity, in 2004, after years of investigation, federal authorities designated IARA-USA as a terrorist organization for allegedly providing financial support to al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Hamas; shut it down; and prosecuted its leaders, including Bagegni. When the feds raided its Missouri headquarters, one employee, who reportedly worked in programming for the sham philanthropy from 1999 onward, Fatten Elkomy, lamented to the local Columbia Daily Tribune that “I’ve been working there serving orphans and children with at least one deceased parent…and it just breaks my heart that they’re not going to get any help.” The federal government’s exhibits list told a different story. It contained evidence indicating Elkomy was involved in executing foreign financial transactions, and relevant calls with donors. Elkomy was never charged. She is El-Sayed’s biological mother, and the woman who raised the Michigan Democrat’s Hamas-supporting, ICE-hating, radical stepsister Eman Abdelhadi.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is by far the most influential organization to emerge as an unindicted co-conspirator from the Holy Land case. Evidence in the case, including a wiretapped 1993 meeting of Palestine Committee leaders in Philadelphia, shows that the Hamas support network established CAIR to defend its front groups via both information warfare and lawfare – operating under the correct assumption that Hamas would be designated as a terrorist organization. Those fronts included the Holy Land Foundation, the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), its propaganda arm, and the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), its think tank. A year later, two Philadelphia meeting participants, including the IAP’s Nihad Awad, co-founded CAIR. From the outset, as Burns has written, CAIR would “aggressively denounce[] media and law enforcement actions against elements of the U.S.-based Hamas infrastructure, knowingly and falsely labeling those as acts of ‘Islamophobia’ and alleging the war on terror was a war on Muslims.” CAIR’s ties to terror would extend beyond the Holy Land Foundation case to encompass the terrorism-related prosecutions of a number of its officials, the organization’s hosting of jihadists and their sympathizers, and its leaders’ relationships with Muslim Brotherhood leaders and institutions abroad. Consequently, Florida, Texas, and the United Arab Emirates have designated CAIR as a terror organization. El-Sayed has spoken before the organization on numerous occasions, and in furtherance of shared causes. In 2022, keynoting a CAIR-Oklahoma event, he railed against the state’s effort to bar the use of sharia in state judicial decisions as akin to the “Trail of Tears.” He spoke before that chapter in 2020 as well. It paid El-Sayed over $5,000 in connection with one of his speeches. El-Sayed also spoke at CAIR’s annual banquets in 2017 and 2018. A Fox News digital analysis indicates at least 41 CAIR employees or leaders past or present have contributed more than $100,000 to El-Sayed’s campaign. Awad, CAIR’s co-founder, and longtime executive director, who said of Hamas’ October 7^th massacre that he was “happy to see” Gazans “break the siege,” and whose jihad-sympathetic rhetoric and Muslim Brotherhood ties are legion, was one of them. During El-Sayed’s first Michigan campaign for governor in 2018, he raked in some $58,760 from senior CAIR officials as well. El-Sayed’s father-in-law was formerly president of CAIR’s Michigan chapter. CAIR’s 501(c)(4), CAIR Action, endorsed El-Sayed in the Senate primary. What’s more, a super PAC established by CAIR Action’s national executive director, the Unity & Justice Fund, made a $175,000 contribution to the El Sayed-backing Fighting for Michigan PAC in the run-up to the primary. To boot, according to the New York Times, CAIR organizers “called more than 48,000 Michigan voters to encourage them to cast their ballots” in the run-up to the Democratic Senate primary.

The Times too noted that organizers from Emgage, which “educates and mobilizes Muslim American voters,” “knocked on more than 15,000 doors and sent nearly a million text messages targeting registered voters” prior to El-Sayed’s victory. Emgage Action, its 501(c)(4), likewise endorsed El-Sayed’s candidacy. Shideler recently testified that Emgage’s advocacy arm “was created by a former CAIR member who at one time was on a terror watch list and was also a consultant to convicted terrorist Sami al-Arian” – an apparent reference to attorney Khurrum Wahid. Emgage’s Deputy Director of Organizing, Nada Al-Hanooti, was formerly the executive director of the Michigan chapter of Emgage. She spoke at, and her organization helped arrange a “My Muslim Vote Rally” in 2018 featuring El-Sayed. Al-Hanooti is the daughter of a former CAIR Michigan Director Muthanna al-Hanooti, who was sentenced to a year in prison for violating sanctions against Iraq, and granddaughter of Sheikh Mohammed Al-Hanooti, a major Muslim Brotherhood player and Hamas supporter identified as an unindicted co-conspirator in both the Holy Land case and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case against the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman. Nada, a Palestinian Arab-American, has vowed that “One day I’m going to seek justice for my ancestors and purchase a home right in my ancestral land.” “Everything I do is for me to return,” she says.

Another El-Sayed endorser tied to the Muslim Brotherhood via the Holy Land case is American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), which backed him via its 501(c)(4), American for Justice in Palestine Action. Several former IAP leaders founded AMP a year after the Palestine Committee entity folded in an apparent attempt to skirt a $156 million Anti-Terrorism Act judgment against it for its Hamas support. AMP was established in 2006 “to educate and organize the Muslim community to take action for Palestinian rights,” and lobby accordingly on Capitol Hill. It would birth National Students for Justice in Palestine, with the two entities, and Students for Justice in Palestine college chapters, collectively propagating Hamas-backed propaganda and helping foment the anti-Semitic, anti-American, pro-Hamas agitation on campuses across the country following the October 7^th massacre. AMP’s current Executive Director, Osama Abuirshaid, previously served not only at IAP, but UASR. Abuirshaid, who has spoken at events overseas hosting Hamas officials, praised their “resistance” efforts, and written and contributed to foreign Muslim Brotherhood publications, cut El-Sayed a $1,000 campaign check this cycle. Other staffers who held prominent IAP positions to later work for AMP include its former president, and a founding CAIR board member, Rafeeq Jaber, and Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee. The Trump administration is seeking to deport Sarsour, an alleged criminal illegal alien from Jordan, who is “suspected of funding terror organizations and lying on immigration forms.”

Beyond these affiliations, El-Sayed has also received campaign backing from those convicted by Egyptian courts for their alleged support of the Brotherhood, and spoken glowingly of, and received the political blessing of a plethora of like-minded, often Hamas- or Hezbollah-sympathizing imams.

Despite this damning record, El-Sayed has never renounced any of these individuals or institutions that have supported him, let alone distanced himself from or returned money to them. Nor has he ever expressed concern about their ties to terror or their service to a revolutionary foreign organization, in the Muslim Brotherhood, that seeks to overthrow the U.S. government.

In recent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, former federal prosecutor Arielle Klepach, who has litigated against Brotherhood front groups, asserted that its “named affiliates, including mosques, schools, civil-rights groups, student organizations, and legal nonprofits, are now endemic to American civic life and are the cornerstones of the Brotherhood’s deliberate political strategy for the gradual establishment of Islamic governance.”

El-Sayed’s candidacy is the poisonous fruit of that strategy – and not only because of the raft of Muslim Brotherhood affiliations, but because he has taken positions consistent with, and in furtherance of their apparent shared agenda, beginning long before his quest to the height of political power.

Abdul El-Sayed’s Backing of the Muslim Brotherhood

For starters, in 2011, El-Sayed, then a graduate student, wrote a series of articles supporting the Egyptian uprising against the Hosni Mubarak-led government. In so doing, he sought to dispel fears that the Muslim Brotherhood, the only organized political force that was poised to assume power, would engage in a coming Islamist crackdown, painting it at as a social services provider, and pointing to its alleged support for a transitional government led by the non-Brotherhood Nobel Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei as evincing its moderation. He chided those dubious of the Brotherhood, writing that “our preoccupation with…the Muslim Brotherhood appeals to the orientalist need to explain the Egyptian struggle for self-determinism via religiously or culturally stereotyped explanations” – an orientalist orientation, he added that “has been used at home to excuse our assault on the dignity and civil liberties of our Arab-American and Muslim-American neighbors.”

The Brotherhood would of course sweep into power, taking near total control of the country and its institutions under Mohamed Morsi. When, in November 2012, Morsi declared that all presidential decisions were “final and not subject to appeal,” ElBaradei said of the Islamist strongman that “Morsi today usurped all state powers and appointed himself Egypt’s new pharaoh.” Several days later, members of the Egyptian diaspora in America released a statement pledging their support for Morsi and his policies. El-Sayed was a signatory.

The Morsi regime would collapse in July 2013, with the Brotherhood designated as a terrorist group. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, on the stump today El-Sayed is critical of the Egyptian government. While unabashed about his desire to end military aid to Israel, to portray himself as even-handed, he has also called for cutting off Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. What unites these countries? All have outlawed the Brotherhood.

In addition to ending military aid to Israel, El-Sayed wishes to impose an “immediate arms embargo” on the Jewish state and dismisses the idea that there is a difference “between ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ weapons.” These are all positions beneficial to Israel’s sworn enemies – and Americas – Hamas included. But El-Sayed does not only wish to break the U.S.-Israel alliance, and leave the Jewish state disarmed and defenseless. Too, beyond wanting to prevent Israel and the U.S. alike from crippling our shared enemies, he wants to strengthen them – under guise of charity. On his campaign website, El-Sayed calls for “immediate re-investment” in humanitarian-focused foreign aid. In connection therewith, he names a single specific beneficiary: UNRWA. UNRWA is of course a pivotal tool for Israel’s would-be destroyers, not only by perpetuating the idea Israel displaced Palestinian Arabs, and leveraging a “refugee” population that is forever multiplying against the Jewish state, but because it serves as a cover organization for and material supporter of Hamas and a slew of like-minded genocidal jihadist groups.

These policy positions aside, El-Sayed has also propagated a series of narratives consistent with Brotherhood affiliates, who Burns has noted not only castigate counterterrorism policies, and chill critics by casting them as Islamophobes, but “portray terrorist organizations as resistance movements, [and] excuse acts of violence.”

El-Sayed has repeatedly, dating back well over a decade, rationalized jihadism against Americans, attributing it to factors including “anti-Muslim sentiment” after 9/11, “continued U.S. military occupation of majority-Muslim countries,” “media coverage suspicious of Islam and Muslims,” and resentment over “FBI scrutiny of American mosques.” On the stump, he has continued to claim terrorism is a response to policy that creates “a level of pain and frustration” leading to “heinous” acts. Infamously, in the wake of the attempted massacre of Jewish children and adults alike at West Bloomfield, Michigan’s Temple Israel by the brother of an assassinated Hezbollah commander earlier this year, he said that “hurt people do hurt people.” And when one of his own former campaign workers was charged this past summer as a co-conspirator in an effort to terrorize “University of Michigan leaders, law enforcement, and businesses with coordinated criminal acts” to get them to sever ties with Israel following Hamas’ Oct. 7th massacre, he claimed the Justice Department was imposing a double standard of justice versus the pardoned “Jan. 6 terrorists.”

El-Sayed has also rationalized Hamas’ jihadism against Israelis, writing the day after October 7th that “Gaza/West Bank are a pressure cooker because of the economic blockade, expanding settlements, etc. Nothing justifies the killing of civilians. But more killing doesn’t help.” Amid reports of the Nova music festival slaughter, El-Sayed said, “I condemn it. But perhaps they could start with addressing the crippling impacts of a 70+ year occupation, economic/political blockade, etc?”

El-Sayed has drawn moral equivalence between the 9/11 attackers and the U.S. in its response to their jihadism, and Hamas and Israel.

El-Sayed has on multiple occasions sought to delink Islam and jihad, even painting himself as a victim of the 9/11 attacks by those who “exploited Islam as a pretext for an act of violence rooted in tribalistic grievance.” In separating Islam and jihadism, he followed in the footsteps of his father, who, in remarks delivered at Ford Motor Co. as part of an “Islam 101” series the company convened months after the 9/11 attacks, he claimed that the hijackers misinterpreted the Koran’s call, in his reading, to “Fight those who fight you.” El-Sayed the younger, incidentally, backed the building of the infamous Ground Zero Mosque – an outrageous but mercifully failed project itself with roots in the Muslim Brotherhood – writing in 2010 that it represented “an exemplary response to those who question whether our country can stick to its principles in times of pressure…”

El-Sayed refused to make light of the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, a sworn enemy of America, this past spring, because it was a sensitive spot for his like-minded constituents, many of whom he said privately would be upset. This was likewise reminiscent of how his father addressed a similar situation, when, after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, amid a ceremony organized by Muslims celebrating his life in Columbia, MO, he declined to protest the gathering or speak ill of the murderous theocrat.

And El-Sayed has, as detailed, sought to blame America’s ills on untoward “Zionist” influence via the AIPAC canard – using AIPAC as a stand-in for Jews, the hatred of which consumes the Muslim Brotherhood, and cements the Red-Green alliance El-Sayed personifies.

In sum, the son of an Egyptian imam, who has devoted himself to live his life in a “Sharia-compliant” way, and actively concealed the Islamic texts in which he has immersed himself – including an exegesis written by a Muslim Brotherhood member – pledged support to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood; wants to cut U.S. support for its sworn enemies and delegitimize, disarm, and imperil the existence specifically of our chief regional ally, Israel; flow aid to its Palestinian wing; and all while obfuscating about, downplaying, rationalizing, and whitewashing jihadism.

Given the foregoing, is it any surprise that at the very time Arab publications are castigating El-Sayed as Brotherhood-backed, the Brotherhood’s website, Ikhwan Online, is cheering his primary victory?

Shideler has said that while the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. has engaged in “indoctrination, recruiting, training, and funding of terror groups…its primary purpose is to exert influence over the U.S. political system and manipulate U.S. policies to its own advantage.”

El-Sayed is dutifully serving that purpose.

As I have reported at RealClearInvestigations, he is the most powerful insurgent among a crop of candidates uniting Islamists and left-wing revolutionaries who, a la the Brotherhood’s 1991 memorandum, each seek to fundamentally transform America.

Senator Ted Cruz, who led the recent hearing on the Brotherhood’s rise in America at which Burns, Shideler, and Klepach testified – coincidentally just hours after El-Sayed’s primary triumph – concluded that “Behind El-Sayed’s political rise sits” the Brotherhood’s “entrenched institutional network.”

If anything, that might understate the case. At every turn, the Brotherhood’s network can be found. Whether that says more about El-Sayed or the success of its insidious strategy is open to debate.

The pivotal question in the immediate term however is whether that network, working hand-in-glove with its left-wing partners, will make El-Sayed the Muslim Brotherhood’s man in Washington.

How Hamas’ Attack on Israel Is Transforming American Politics

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Democrats’ U.S. Senate primary in Michigan last Tuesday was the latest sign of an emerging kingmaker in U.S. politics – a little-known super PAC that has tapped the wealth of a new cadre of Muslim-American mega-donors to support far-left candidates.

Since it was launched just six months ago, American Priorities has channeled millions of dollars, primarily from donors with Arab, Muslim, and/or Middle Eastern backgrounds, to a string of winning candidates in high-profile races.

Despite having lived the American Dream, the donors are backing candidates, via the independent expenditure vehicle, who are running on various radical and revolutionary democratic-socialist policies that would prove nightmarish for millions. But the one area in which all candidates are aligned, consistent with the PAC’s mission, is in their antagonism towards Israel, the U.S. relationship with the Jewish state, and American supporters of that relationship.

With several such candidates considered locks for the U.S. House in deep blue districts and potentially Michigan’s Senate seat in November, American Priorities is at the forefront of an increasingly politically influential and growing Muslim-American community – one that has ascended as the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict has become a central U.S. political issue following Hamas’ massacre of 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023.

As new groups of immigrants establish themselves in America, typically they seek room for their voice in politics and culture. The key issues that have mobilized Muslim-Americans and the positions held by associated organizations, however, are far outside the mainstream. Polls show such voters are significantly more hostile towards Israel and Jews, and tolerant toward groups and ideas the U.S. government has linked to terrorism than the general public – views reflected by the insurgent crop of leftist candidates they are increasingly backing.

A recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing convened by Sen. Ted Cruz raised a more chilling issue. The Texas Republican alleged, and witnesses concurred that – in a parallel to what has transpired in countries like France, Germany, and the United Kingdom – the Muslim Brotherhood, a subversive transnational Islamist organization, has cultivated an “entrenched institutional network” in America of NGOs, advocacy groups, and political organizations to advance its leaders’ recorded mission to “destroy … Western civilization from within.” That network, terrorism expert Kyle Shideler found, has actively partnered with the Democratic Socialists of America, as part of what Cruz called a “Red-Green Alliance,” that Shideler said is “united around a revolutionary objective advocating for the overthrow of the U.S. Constitution.” Democrats on the panel boycotted the hearing in protest, claiming in a statement the Texas senator was “[s]capegoating Muslims.”

While such partisan conflicts simmer, Muslim-Americans, who represent meaningful percentages of the population in dark blue New York and purple Michigan alike, are buoying the leftists increasingly dominating the Democrat Party. All indications are that this bloc is positioning itself not only to play an outsize role in shaping the next Congress but also in defining the 2028 presidential contest and America’s future.

I’ve got the story on (i) the emerging wave of Muslim-American mega donors playing kingmakers in the midterm elections and beyond, (ii) the revolutionary candidates they are backing, and (iii) the fusing of an intersectional Muslim-American-leftist alliance over their shared anti-Zionism if not anti-Semitism and antipathy towards America and the West, in a new report at RealClearInvestigations.

For this interested in diving deeper, I would also recommend my book, American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party, which forecast six years ago much of what is transpiring in U.S. politics today — and which delves into the theology, philosophy, and history to explain how we got here.

Counting Noncitizens In The Census Undermines American Democracy

The Trump administration’s finding that some 250,000 noncitizens reside on the voter rolls of just four states — California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania — represents a clear and present danger to the integrity of our elections. Revelations from Democrat Gov. Mikie Sherrill of a purported Garden State “glitch” accounting for 6,600 noncitizen registered voters, hundreds of whom illegally cast ballots, further confirm the danger and vindicate the administration’s vigorous effort to obtain and review every state’s voter records to identify ineligible voters and compel states to remove them.

But the revelations also ought to turn America’s attention to a related threat: the counting of noncitizens in the Census, which distorts congressional apportionment and the allocation of Electoral College votes for presidential elections. The threat is one the administration may be preparing to confront head-on.

At the end of June, the Census Bureau proposed a rule for addressing this threat. The Office of Management and Budget Review rule titled “Decennial Census of the Population of Americans; Proposed Residence Criteria and Proposed Regulations for Demographic Questions” has neither been published nor finalized. But we got a hint as to what it might entail based on the administration’s correspondence with the plaintiffs in a case brought by the state of Missouri.

I’ve got the story on this underreported rule and the broader fight likely to unfold in a new piece at The Federalist.

After Barbara: Illegal Aliens and the Census, Part I

In a calamitous capper to its most recent term, the Roberts Court blessed birthright citizenship for the hundreds of thousands of children born annually in the U.S. to illegal aliens and “birth tourists.” Would that same Court be willing to abide by the removal of the birthright babies’ parents, along with millions of fellow illegal aliens, from the census figures used to apportion House seats, redistrict, and distribute trillions in federal funds?

Trump v. Barbara begs that question. Given several notable parallels between immigration-related exclusions to birthright citizenship and cases poised to arise concerning immigration-status-related exclusions to the apportionment base, it is fair to examine what a future case may hold based on the Court’s ruling in Barbara.

If the Supreme Court were to take a similar tack, it would prove disastrous for our country. It would legitimize the further twisting of the Constitution and a Reconstruction-era amendment to grant millions of non-citizens representation in our political system—a prospect never contemplated by the 14th Amendment’s drafters. It would distort the American political map, dilute Americans’ voting power, and incentivize still more illegal immigration and sanctuary policies.

In a new piece at the American Mind, I explore the parallels between the Barbara case and challenges almost sure to arise should the Trump administration follow through on its rhetoric and reprise a first term effort to omit illegal aliens from the apportionment base.

The implications are concerning — but as I will detail in a coming follow-up piece, all hope is not lost.

Read Part I here.

John Roberts Again Undermines SCOTUS Legitimacy With Irreconcilable Slaughter And Cook Opinions

Last Monday, the Roberts Court struck a massive blow against the administrative state when, in a majority opinion drafted by the chief justice, the court affirmed in Trump v. Slaughter that “the President may remove his subordinates” within so-called independent agencies “at will.”

It should have been a given that in agencies subject to executive control and exercising executive authority by way of executive-appointed principals, the executive would be free not only to hire but to fire such principals — that “independent agencies are not ‘independent’ in the sense that they are free of the President,” as the court declared. But for more than 90 years, precedent in Humphrey’s Executor shielded the likes of the plaintiff, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a Democrat-appointed Federal Trade Commissioner, and other leaders in the alphabet soup of multimember agencies from accountability.

Now, it seemed, the justices were putting an end to the chimera of agencies possessing a mix of powers of the three branches of government, untethered from democratic control, and unaccounted for in the Constitution.

Yet in classic Roberts Court form, it snatched partial defeat from the jaws of total victory, when on Monday it also handed down a confounding and contradictory counterpart ruling — suggesting our Constitution abides a fourth branch of government on self-evidently political grounds.

I’ve got the story at The Federalist.

National Insecurity: America’s Continuing Reliance on Critical Chinese Materials

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 – with face masks, gloves, and other basic protections in high demand – Chinese leaders threatened to plunge America into the “mighty sea of coronavirus” by withholding essential medical supplies in retaliation for measures such as the U.S. travel ban on visitors from China.

The threat, issued through a Chinese Communist Party organ, brought into stark relief China’s strategy to subdue would-be foes by rendering them reliant on its exports for life’s necessities – prompting a pledge from U.S. policymakers to address supply chain issues that made the country vulnerable to a hostile power.

Six years later, despite a raft of initiatives – including tariffs, made-in-America requirements, and the makings of a responsive U.S. industrial policy embraced by the Biden and Trump administrations – America’s effort to reduce dependence on China in pivotal sectors has been slow and faces a slew of challenges.

Headlines heralding the decline in U.S. imports from China to levels not seen since the depths of the pandemic mask the fact that America’s chief rival continues to control chokepoints in supply chains that provide urgent military assets, key technologies, and important medicines.

I’ve got the story in a new report at RealClearInvestigations.

Will the war with the Islamic Republic of Iran have resulted in stunning tactical victories, but ultimately a strategic stalemate if not defeat?

The 14-point U.S.-Iran Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) meant to end current hostilities, and stave off future chaos, bloodshed, and nuclear war for America and our allies begs that question.

Below is my analysis of the pact by way of a series of queries pertaining to its main points — followed by concluding remarks on the war and desired peace.

Why would the U.S. agree to “permanent termination” of war against a regime that has been at war with us since its inception 47 years ago, has the blood of thousands of Americans on its hands, and is the world’s leading state sponsor of jihad? The regime has not renounced its ideology. Nor has it made any shows of good faith that we are aware of outside of the MOU to demonstrate that it has given up on its desire to dominate the world and fulfill its Twelver Shia apocalyptic vision. If it remains bellicose, why would we commit not to combat it in the future? Why not just declare a temporary cessation of hostilities while trying to work out a (longshot) diplomatic resolution?

Separately, did the U.S. pledge Israel to the MOU with respect to ending military operations in Lebanon against Hezbollah? Israel is not a signatory to the document. Its people were forced by the tens of thousands out of the north due to the rockets raining down from Iran-backed Hezbollah after Iran-backed Hamas inflicted the October 7th massacre. The Hezbollah threat persists. No country would tolerate it. Lebanon’s leaders have proven unable or unwilling to neutralize the Iranian proxy that dominates the country. There has been no sign that Iran is willing to pressure the group to stand down, let alone force it into exile and cut ties with it altogether.

Moreover, why did the U.S. allow Iran to link Lebanon/Hezbollah to any such deal? Doing so validates its proxy strategy and knowingly invites potential friction between the U.S. and Israel. It suggests to Iran that it can get the U.S. to restrain Israel — removing a key impediment to the mullocracy’s murderous machinations.

Under the MOU will Iran shut down its ongoing influence operations? Will it cease its information warfare and cyber warfare efforts? Will it order its terrorist cells home? Again, we have not seen any action suggesting Iran’s commitment to peaceful relations with the U.S. We have however seen in the past that it will pocket concessions and at best bide its time and maintain its malign activities surreptitiously and perhaps at a slower cadence until conditions are more propitious for it to re-engage in overt hostile acts.

Under the MOU is Iran only pledging to keep the Strait of Hormuz toll-free for 60 days? What about thereafter? And why is there no language prohibiting the seizure of the Strait of Hormuz going forward? Even if there was such language of course, there does not appear to be any enforcement mechanism baked into the MOU. We will just have to take Iran’s word for it, it seems. That the U.S. would use all levers of power, including force, to break a future chokepoint maneuver, seems to only be a threat extant outside the document. And any momentum towards a final deal, not to mention midterm elections and other domestic and foreign considerations may deter the U.S. from acting should Iran test us.

To “reaffirm” its commitment not to “procure or develop nuclear weapons” Iran would’ve had to affirm such a commitment in the first place. When did it ever do that? The purported fatwa against nuclear weapons was of course a farce. Iran never had any need for highly enriched uranium other than for a bomb. The evidence of Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon — despite regime protestations to the contrary — over the decades has been overwhelming. And the whole purpose of destroying Iran’s nuclear capability was to prevent it from getting such a weapon.

Is “down-blending on site under the supervision of the IAEA” not in and of itself a U.S. concession, to say nothing of punting issues of enrichment, presumably inspection and verification regime, etc. till future negotiations? And why does a nation as oil-rich as Iran have need for any nuclear infrastructure? After all, it is implied here that such capabilities are negotiable when talking of “Iran’s nuclear needs.”

Does maintenance of the “status quo” include permitting freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz? Ceasing the production of ballistic missiles? Severing all support for terrorist proxies? Prohibiting operations targeting U.S. government leaders, Jewish individuals and institutions, members of the Iranian diaspora, and every other cohort and nation that the regime has historically threatened abroad? Freeing political prisoners, and ending the practices of taking, torturing, and murdering them? If not, the “status quo” would appear to be nothing more than a paper commitment for Iran not to produce and procure nuclear weapons in exchange for hundreds of billions of dollars in unfrozen funds, sanctions relief, and new investment.

When is the MOU defined as “implemented?” Under one reading of this document, Iran would appear to get unfrozen billions of dollars in funds before committing to anything other than reopening the Strait of Hormuz (perhaps temporarily), and a written commitment to no nuclear weapons. The MOU also does not explicitly prohibit Iran from flowing those funds to forces hostile to the U.S., our allies, and partners.

Will the MOU or any future Iran deal ultimately be subject to the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act (INARA)? There’s a compelling case to be made that any Iran nuclear deal should have to go to the Senate as a treaty, but there has not been any talk of such a process at this point.

Two additional questions result from the document:

Why does the U.S. seem to commit to giving Iran nearly all the benefits of the MOU, in exchange for almost zero tangible Iranian concessions, if the regime’s conventional strength has been eviscerated, and its new leaders are supposedly ready to make peace?

And does the MOU not reward the mullocracy for and prove the merits of its strategy of pursuing nuclear weapons, seizing chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz, and siccing proxies like Hezbollah on its foes to survive, if not recapitalize and ultimately thrive?

Let me conclude by stating this: Whether in crippling the mullocracy’s nuclear infrastructure, destroying its conventional military capabilities, or decapitating its leadership, America, working in concert with Israel, undeniably landed major blows that will have set back the regime’s malign efforts for years. It was a righteous effort. It was a courageous effort. And it no doubt will have sowed fear and doubt in the minds of our adversaries.

But, as I have cautioned throughout the conflict, it is hard to see how America can achieve the president’s stated objectives on a permanent basis if the mullocracy survives.

That is because Iran’s ruling regime, as noted, is guided by a Shia Twelver ideology that is theocratic, imperialistic, and apocalyptic. All of the mullocracy’s most malign efforts, be it in developing nuclear weapons, launching ballistic missile barrages, fostering and fomenting terror proxies, or closing off vital chokepoints to inflict maximum economic pain, flow naturally from the regime’s ideology.

A durable and decisive victory then could only be ensured if the regime were to surrender, collapse, or be overthrown and replaced by a non-hostile government.

Perhaps President Trump believed that the U.S.-Israeli operation would lead to the mullocracy’s fall.

Perhaps, in the face of the growing economic pain and domestic and foreign pressures to end the war, he calculated that the cost-benefit analysis weighed against doing whatever was necessary to crush the regime.

Perhaps he felt buying time via the Memorandum of Understanding was the best of a series of suboptimal options; that Iran may well blow up an extremely generous deal, undermining its position; that internal chaos could ensue should it not get needed sanctions relief while the Strait of Hormuz stood de-mined and re-opened; that the president’s operational freedom might increase; and that the conditions for the U.S. to win the war might therefore prove better in the future.

Or perhaps he believed that having suffered losses of such great size, the mullocracy would genuinely set its ideology aside and play ball.

Whatever the case, the proposition that Iran’s regime, having suffered a near-death experience, has been transformed, will now be tested.

DOJ Takes On Leftist Attempt To Punish Any Lawyer Who Disagrees With Democrats

The Department of Justice last week announced the creation of a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to repay victims of left-wing lawfare. While it remains to be seen whether this funding could go to MAGA lawyers who are victims of frivolous left-wing ethics complaints brought before Democrat-dominated bar disciplinary authorities, other remedies are already underway.

With a new landmark lawsuit, the Trump Justice Department is finally fighting this “barfare” — leftist efforts to render the right defenseless by crushing or chilling conservative attorneys via stress-inducing probes, costly trials, and crippling penalties that include disbarment. On May 13, the DOJ filed a complaint against the bar disciplinary authorities of Washington, D.C., in defense of former Trump I DOJ official Jeffrey Clark, the Constitution, and the rule of law itself.

In a new piece at The Federalist, I break down the lawsuit and explain why it represents an initiative that transcends an attempt to halt the outrageous weaponizing of a legal disciplinary authority against one conservative lawyer.

As I argue, it represents a vital step toward ending an un-American war on disfavored attorneys and defenders of disfavored causes more broadly — a war that would do irrevocable damage to our justice system and republic.

Read the whole thing here.

Don’t Overlook Justice Clarence Thomas’ Concurrence In Racial Gerrymandering Case

In Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court struck a major blow against race-based policymaking, holding that the law protects voters from discrimination, rather than mandating that states create racial gerrymanders as an ostensible corrective to discrimination. The decision builds on a string of cases whereby the Roberts Court has distinguished itself by rightly opposing present “anti-racism” as a remedy for past racism — with potentially massive political implications.

Yet as righteous and monumental as Louisiana v. Callais may be, it modifies legal precedent. It does not jettison it. And in a terse but provocative two-page concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas, hearkening back to an underappreciated opinion of his from some 32 years ago, argues that to achieve constitutional colorblindness the Court must go further.

He would dispense with new legal interpretations of the Voting Rights Act, or updated judiciary-created tests to determine the legitimacy of political maps. To end the “disastrous misadventure” that has seen the Court drive “legislatures and courts to ‘systematically divid[e] the country into electoral districts along racial lines,’” Thomas argues that judges should get out of the business of entertaining districting and related challenges under the VRA altogether. Rather than just rolling back racial gerrymanders, he would have the Court junk the entire corpus of fundamentally corrupted jurisprudence that spawned the pernicious practice.

I unpack Justice Thomas’s argument, rooted in his courageous concurrence in Holder v. Hall, in a new piece at The Federalist.

If SCOTUS Values Free Speech, It Will Stop California’s Persecution Of John Eastman

Are conservatives entitled to vigorous legal defense in America? Or should they be condemned to second-class status in civil society and court, rendered bereft of advice and counsel because capable lawyers abandon the field, fearing ruin should they represent the right?

In a tyrannical travesty of “justice,” California appears to be trying to usher in the latter, dystopic world by disbarring constitutional scholar John Eastman. The Golden State’s Supreme Court blessed this position when, on April 15, it denied the conservative lawyer’s petition for review of the state bar’s yearslong disciplinary jihad against him and ordered him stripped of his license to practice law.

What was the nefarious behavior that this former Supreme Court clerk, university law school dean, and public interest litigator allegedly engaged in? Effectively, in the eyes of the bar and California’s highest court, his thoughtcrime, punishable with professional destruction, was “lawyering for MAGA.”

Eastman faithfully represented President Donald Trump and his campaign in connection with his 2020 election challenge and vigorously advocated for the president’s positions in the court of law and public opinion. The attorney compiled substantial evidence that the election was marked with fraud and irregularities, and that non-legislative officials had effectively made new election law, further delegitimizing the contest. He evaluated alternatives on behalf of the president for remedying those deficiencies through a careful study of legal history, theory, and precedent. And he presented them to the president’s team, drafted court filings in defense of the president’s positions, and argued for the president’s positions in media and before the president’s supporters.

In a word, he did his job.

But California’s state bar and judges, apparently working hand-in-glove with a prominent lawfare co-conspirator, transformed these actions into a sinister plot to steal the 2020 election.

I write about this notorious episode of Barfare, the persecution Eastman endured at the hands of the left’s Lawfare apparatus, and the imperative for the Supreme Court to take up Eastman’s claims of First Amendment and due process rights violations — in defense of the rule of law that protects us all — in a new piece at The Federalist.

Wall or Sieve? Attacks Raise Doubts About U.S. Immigration System

25 years after the attacks of September 11, 2001 spurred myriad reforms designed to protect the homeland from jihadists, a slew of recent terror attacks and related immigration status revocations have raised chilling questions about the effectiveness of those reforms — particularly when it comes to the vetting of foreigners.

While the Trump administration has effectively closed the southern border, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has concluded that “prior screening and vetting measures” of people who cross the border legally “were wholly inadequate,” creating “significant national security and public safety risks [that] compromise the integrity of the immigration system.”

Today at RealClearInvestigations, I examine what those standards look like, and why we continue to be plagued by apparent failures to keep those who would do us harm — not to mention those who hate our guts — out of the country.

My review of congressional testimony and research, and interviews with immigration and national security experts, reveals long-standing flaws in the system – some of which were exacerbated by the Biden administration’s lax immigration policies. Challenges run the gamut from incomplete information about applicants to inconsistent enforcement of the law, to an historic unwillingness to seriously and comprehensively screen for hostile ideologies.

In my view, these issues reflect a far too-liberal posture with respect to immigration altogether.

Read the whole report at RealClearInvestigations.

Separately, my colleagues at RealClearInvestigations have just launched a wonderful new program offering $20,000 grants for ambitious, big-idea, granularly-detailed pieces of investigative reporting. The grant consists of a:

• $17,000 stipend for a 6,000 to 10,000-word article or series.

• $2,000 travel budget

• $1,000 photography budget

If you would like to apply, you can find relevant details here.

With Missouri V. Biden Settled, It’s Time For Censorship Reparations

Last week, the Department of Justice settled a landmark lawsuit, Missouri v. Biden, originally brought against the Biden administration four years ago for censoring disfavored online speech at mass scale.

Under the consent decree, the surgeon general, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Agency (CISA) are prohibited from taking any “actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly … to threaten Social-Media Companies with some form of punishment (i.e., an adverse legal, regulatory, or economic government sanction) unless they remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech” for the next decade.

The deal also prohibits the triumvirate from “unilaterally direct[ing] or veto[ing] social media content moderation decisions” from Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

What is the real significance of this decree? How powerful might it actually prove? Has the Censorship-Industrial Complex truly been brought to justice?

You can find my answers to these questions in a new piece at The Federalist.

Ed Martin Challenged The D.C. Bar’s Political Vendetta. Then They Charged Him

Just days after the Trump Justice Department proposed a rule to combat the left’s use of “barfare” to destroy conservative lawyers, the legal disciplinary authority in the Department’s own backyard may have vindicated its effort by launching an attack on U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin.

On March 6, the Washington, D.C. Office of Disciplinary Counsel filed charges and initiated disciplinary proceedings against the MAGA stalwart in a case that could drag on for months or longer, waste precious taxpayer resources, and result in sanctions up to and including disbarment.

The Disciplinary Counsel claims that Martin, then-serving as Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, violated his oath of office. How? He alleges that when Martin sent letters to Georgetown Law School’s leaders asking whether the school was continuing to teach and promote DEI, suggesting the school should stop, and indicating that its responses could bear on its nonprofit status and federal funding, he violated the First and Fifth Amendments.

After a retired judge and Georgetown Law alumnus brought a complaint over the alleged impropriety of the inquiry, the Counsel solicited a response from Martin. Martin initially declined, appealing to the judges of the D.C. Court of Appeals — which presides over the disciplinary authority — to resolve the matter, alleging the Disciplinary Counsel had engaged in “uneven behavior” and “prejudicial conduct.”

The Chief Judge directed Martin on multiple occasions to follow standard protocol and cooperate with the Counsel, and he ultimately complied. The Counsel found that Martin’s pleadings violated still more codes of conduct, including unauthorized ex parte communications with a judge and interference “with the administration of justice.”

Operating on the incomplete record of a de facto indictment, there are myriad potential issues with the Counsel’s charges on the merits. For example, the Counsel is effectively seeking to punish Martin for executing the Trump administration’s policies to counter discrimination masquerading as anti-discrimination under DEI — based on the disciplinary authority’s own opinion of constitutionality. If Martin had acted so egregiously, Georgetown could have sought remedies in court rather than relying on a seemingly chance complaint from a seemingly unconnected retired judge.

The procedural claims seem ticky-tack. And there is a glaring double standard: federal attorneys engaged in absolutely outrageous conduct without ever facing this authority’s wrath during the last decade of government weaponization against conservatives — from Russiagate/Spygate, to Biden’s Jan. 6 jihad, to the Lawfare against Candidate Trump during the 2024 election, and beyond. For state or local bar disciplinary authorities to police the work of federal attorneys raises all manner of Constitution-threatening, chaos-inducing, and chilling issues.

But there’s perhaps an even more significant strike against this case that has gone overlooked: Vital context omitted in reporting on l’affaire Martin suggests the Disciplinary Counsel’s charges are the culmination of a long-running vendetta from the institutional left against the former Interim D.C. U.S. Attorney and Weaponization Working Group head — if not outright retaliation. That institutional left has long aimed to punish Martin, including via a D.C. legal disciplinary authority whose alleged politicization Martin was himself probing.

That is, the charges lodged against Martin come months after he had alleged the Disciplinary Counsel had been targeting conservatives on political grounds — allegations made both to the Counsel, his overseers, and that leaked to the public as well — and following the egging on of myriad left-wing Lawfare groups.

I’ve got the whole story in a new piece at The Federalist.

Trump DOJ Is Finally Taking On The Corrupt DC Bar Association

Last Tuesday, word came that the legal disciplinary authority in Washington, D.C., was charging U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin with ethics violations, kicking off proceedings that could result in penalties up to and including disbarment.

In so doing, it might have just helped make the case for the action the Trump Justice Department recently initiated to begin to combat the weaponization of such bar disciplinary tribunals — namely, against conservatives.

The D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility alleges that while serving as U.S. attorney last year, Martin — a conservative stalwart long loathed by the left — violated local rules of legal conduct in probing Georgetown Law School for its alleged continued promotion of DEI in its curriculum, and refusing to hire those affiliated with the school until it purged DEI accordingly.

“Lawfare/Barfare is alive & well,” said Jeff Clark, the recently departed chief Trump administration regulatory officer. “Apparently, DC’s Disciplinary Counsel cares not that 1) DEI is an unconstitutional violation of equal protection of the laws; & 2) the President had issued an executive order banning it if an institution takes federal money. Blatantly political.”

Martin himself had questioned that very Disciplinary Counsel, Hamilton P. Fox III, the former head of the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility, about whether his tribunal was operating politically in correspondence from February 2025. Martin wrote a letter to Fox then, suggesting that the Democrat-dominated panel might be targeting those with opposing viewpoints with unmerited ethics probes and seeking information to ascertain whether it was true.

He would cite the D.C. Board’s pursuit of a former Trump I Justice Department official — one who would face years of Kafkaesque proceedings over his own alleged ethics violations in faithfully serving the president in connection with the 2020 election challenge. That official was none other than Jeffrey Clark.

These are but two of the myriad, often dubious, and historically unsuccessful but nevertheless crippling complaints brought against conservative lawyers, typically by the left’s lawfare apparatus, before like-minded state and local disciplinary authorities across the country — a practice, “Barfare,” about which I reported last fall for RealClearInvestigations. By making life hell for conservative counselors by hitting them with such complaints, the idea is to pick such legal talent off the playing field — while spooking others who might otherwise enter it — and thereby eliminate the left’s legal opposition.

Now, the Trump Department of Justice may finally be mounting a counterattack. On Feb. 26, it proposed a rule that would provide DOJ lawyers past and present with a modicum of protection from frivolous complaints by giving the attorney general the ability to intervene when they come under siege.

At The Federalist, I analyze the rule and its pros and cons, and explain why this fight against Barfare is so imperative.

The Grey Zone: When Do Protest Observers Become Lawbreaking Participants?

When an ICE agent shot and killed Minneapolis resident Renee Good after she allegedly obstructed immigration authorities with her vehicle, disobeyed their commands, and attempted to flee – drawing fatal fire from an officer nearly struck by the vehicle – politicians and pundits decried her death as murder. They called it particularly unjust because she was not acting as a protester but a legal observer.

After federal agents arrested Don Lemon for allegedly disrupting a St. Paul church service in protest of the same Twin Cities immigration enforcement surge Good had opposed, his lawyer defended the former CNN anchor as a journalist, persecuted by the Trump administration for having carried out “constitutionally protected work” in violation of his First Amendment rights. So too did myriad media organizations ranging from the National Association of Black Journalists to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

While Good’s shooting presents a distinct issue, her case and Lemon’s highlight the complex legal issues surrounding those who claim to be chronicling protests. What happens when self-described legal observers and journalists act, or are seen by authorities as unlawful protestors rather than the neutral parties they are supposed to be? To what degree do their titles afford them special protections from prosecution in a court of law? Are these legal terms of art, or political ones?

As growing numbers of Americans have vowed to ramp up resistance to President Trump’s policies, and the administration remains committed to arresting what it deems unlawful actors, these definitions may take on added significance. Judges and juries will have to weigh First Amendment-protected activities against law enforcement imperatives and make judgment calls about where to draw the line based on the facts and evidence in each case. So too will prosecutors, often operating in Democrat-dominated jurisdictions, who must weigh these competing claims.

I’ve got the story of this burgeoning legal and political battle in a new report at RealClearInvestigations.

Striking Down Tariffs, SCOTUS Gives Congress Permission To Be Useless

Many have disagreed with the rationale for the Trump tariffs, lamented their content and consequences, and been alarmed about the president’s expansive use of emergency powers to impose them. But the Supreme Court’s ruling challenging them ought to be alarming because it allows Congress’s dereliction of duty to continue while tipping the balance of power even further toward the judiciary.

The Supreme Court’s decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, is also alarming for a number of other reasons. To begin, it was dubious, seeing as how a splintered majority dismissed all “[s]tatutory text, history, and precedent” to the contrary in holding that tariffs are not a means to “regulate … importation” under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), as Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, persuasively argued in his dissent. The court’s decision was also nonsensical, given that under its ruling, per the dissent, a president could “shut off all or most imports from China, but not … impose even a $1 tariff on imports from China.”

Further, the court’s decision represented a disturbing new intrusion into the president’s national security and foreign policy prerogatives. Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, relied on a major questions doctrine “never before applied … in the foreign affairs context, including [in] foreign trade,” Justice Kavanaugh observed, to invalidate the tariffs. They did so under a reading of the law that might even prohibit a president from imposing tariffs to protect strategically significant industries or combat an enemy in an actual shooting war.

In addition, the court’s decision reflects its wild inconsistency, with a prior Roberts Court morphing Obamacare’s “individual mandate” into a tax to save that president’s signature policy, while this Roberts Court morphed tariffs — long levied by presidents to “regulate …importation” — into a tax, wrongly (as Justices Clarence Thomas and Kavanaugh alike detailed in their dissents) to doom the IEEPA-based Trump tariff policy.

More important, by ruling as it did, on top of this parade of horribles, the judges let Congress off the hook, further incentivizing the legislature’s dereliction while effectively usurping power from the political branches of government.

I explain in a new piece at The Federalist.

If SCOTUS Bans Illegals From The Census, Dems Could Lose Power For Years

There are many drivers behind the new nullification crisis that the left is stoking over immigration, but perhaps the most significant political one is that the Trump administration’s mass deportation policy poses a greater threat to Democrat Party power than perhaps any other single initiative.

If federal authorities were to successfully remove millions of illegal aliens from the country, some estimates suggest it would result in the reallocation of nearly a dozen House seats and electoral college votes. Billions of dollars in taxpayer funding would be redirected out of blue states and into red ones.

That is because the census figures used for congressional apportionment, redistricting, and redistributing federal funds have historically counted all residents including illegal aliens. On balance, this has benefited Democrat-led states — where such populations are largely though not exclusively concentrated — over Republican-led ones.

The projected outmigration of citizens from blue to red states would compound the negative effect of the deportations for Democrats as we head towards the 2030 census, potentially swinging control of the House and the presidency in Republicans’ favor going forward.

Thus, defeating the Trump administration’s immigration policy by any means necessary may be seen as an existential imperative by the left. The Minnsurrectionists and their comrades-in-arms across the country, including in the courts, are trying to stymie the president’s deportation push. But Missouri has just filed a lawsuit that could provide critical insurance against the continued distortion of our political system by the non-citizens who might remain.

I break down that suit, and preview the coming critical clash over the census and citizenship in a new piece at The Federalist.

The Small Business Administration’s 8(a) program, which gives so-called “socially and economically disadvantaged businesses” entrée to tens of billions of dollars in no-bid or limited competition contracts annually, was the key focus of that story. It has been ground zero for Trump administration scrutiny and reform — with major related developments in just the last few days.

Building on my reporting and those developments, I sat down for an extensive interview last week with SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler to discuss her agency’s efforts to DOGE-ify and combat DEI at her agency. Check it out below:

I also discussed the 8(a) program recently on the “Charlie Kirk Show.” Being as this was my first appearance on the show since his assassination, I had the opportunity to reflect on Charlie’s loss at the outset with some heartfelt words. You can find that appearance here or below:

Separately, following up on my recent reporting on the Justice Department’s breathing of life into a dormant FACE Act clause protecting prayer and houses of worship, I appeared on the “RealClearInvestigations Podcast” with RCI Editor J. Peder Zane and Senior Reporter John Varney. We further discussed that story and the related news of the charging of Don Lemon and others under the FACE Act in the Cities Church case out of Minnesota. Check out that conversation below starting at around 19:07, and be sure to subscribe to the show:

In other news, Jewish News Syndicate Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Tobin was kind enough to invite me on his “Think Twice” podcast for a wide-ranging discussion on both the ‘Minnsurrection’ and fraud out of Minnesota — and what it reveals about Democrats in general and Rep. Ilhan Omar in particular — as well as Iran and the Trump administration’s Middle East and Israel-Gaza policy. You can find that interview below:

Finally, you can catch me near-daily across Newsmax’s programs, where I am a Contributor.

Thus far this week I am slated to appear:

• 2/2 at 4pm ET on Newsmax 2’s “National Desk at 4” with Matthew Foldi

• 2/3 at 1pm ET on Newsmax’s “Newsline” with Bianca de la Garza

• 2/4 at 5:15pm ET on Newsmax 2’s “The Todd Starnes Show” with Todd Starnes

• 2/7 from 11-1pm on Newsmax’s “Saturday Report” with Rita Cosby

And of course, you can catch me weekly on “The NatCon Squad” podcast.