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“Hours after President Donald Trump invoked a wartime law to target terrorist organization Tren de Aragua (TdA) Saturday,” Fox News reports, “a federal judge ruled the law could not be used to deport five Venezuelans and ordered the plane they were believed to be on to return to the U.S.” The wartime law was the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The man who ordered their return was James Boasberg, Chief U.S. District Judge of the D.C. Circuit, and there’s more about him the people should know.
A San Francisco native, Boasberg moved to Washington as a child when his father accepted a position in the Office of Economic Opportunity, administrator of President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” programs. So Boasberg fils is something of a “Great Society” diaper baby. The Yale law alum rose through the ranks and in 2011 Obama appointed Boasberg to the DC District Court. He would soon gain promotion to a more powerful post.
In 2014, Chief Justice John Roberts appointed Boasberg to the court established by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a secret body with no precedent in American history. In January 2020 Boasberg began serving as presiding judge of the FISA court. In that role, Boasberg handled a case central to the deep state campaign against candidate and President Donald Trump.
U.S. Navy veteran Carter Page, who worked with the Trump campaign in 2016, had also served as an asset for the CIA. One of the applications to surveille Page came from Kevin Clinesmith, the Assistant General Counsel in the National Security and Cyber Law Branch of the FBI’s Office of General Counsel. Clinesmith altered an email to show that Page was not a CIA asset, exposing him to surveillance as part of the FBI’s covert “Crossfire Hurricane” operation.
In August of 2020, Clinesmith pleaded guilty to altering the email, a felony carrying a maximum five years in prison and a fine of $250,000. That case also came before Boasberg in his post on the DC Circuit. Boasberg told the court that Clinesmith “went from being an obscure government lawyer to standing in the eye of a media hurricane,” a curious choice of words. The FBI’s Assistant General Counsel in the National Security and Cyber Law Branch was hardly an “obscure government lawyer.”
“By altering the email,” Boasbert explained, Clinesmith was “saving himself some work and taking an inappropriate shortcut.” According to the Obama judge, the FISA warrant to surveille Carter Page, would have been approved even without Clinesmith’s “misstatement,” a curious description of a major felony but in one sense accurate. There was no lawyer representing Carter Page when the warrant came before the FISA court. In effect, Boasberg was confirming that he knowingly approve a bogus operation of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
The Obama judge also contended that Clinesmith’s “misstatement” was the “only stain on the defendant’s character that I have been able to discern.” Trouble was, since Clinesmith had already pleaded guilty he was no longer a “defendant” but an admitted criminal awaiting sentence. For a crime commanding a five-year maximum, Boasberg gave Clinesmith 12 months probation and 400 hours community service. In light of the offence, that falls short of the classic tap on the wrist. This travesty of justice was hardly Boasberg’s only service for deep state Democrats, celebrated by their media allies.
“James ‘Jeb’ Boasberg, 60, presides over a building where trials of rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, are underway, as are grand jury investigations of former President Donald Trump,” NPR explains. “In one of his first official acts, Chief Judge Boasberg issued what could become a landmark ruling that directs former Vice President Mike Pence to testify about his contacts with Trump in the days before the insurrection.” Those are tough acts to follow but faithful “Jeb” is up to the task.
At the request of the American Civil Liberties Union, the left’s chief criminal lobby, the Obama judge now blocks the president of the United States from deporting some of the worst violent criminals. This should be challenged all the way to the Supreme Court, which raises another issue.
As Boasberg’s career confirms, the presiding judge of the FISA court is the nation’s true chief justice. Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett et al must operate in public, hear arguments from all parties, and cannot slide down to a lower court and rule on cases they previously heard. The secret FISA court is America’s true robed politburo.
Like the U.S. Department of Education and Senior Executive Service (SES), the FISA court is a legacy of the disastrous Carter Era. Democrats such as Ron Wyden and Richard Blumenthal recognize FISA as a group of judges exercising “vast invisible power” with no accountability to the people. What could possibly go wrong is now evident to all but the willfully blind.
At first opportunity, Congress should eliminate FISA and the DC Circuit, also home to Obama judge Tanya Chutkan, who handled the case of the Democrats mysterious IT man Imran Awan.
Meanwhile, despite Boasberg’s order, Trump continued deporting hundreds of criminal illegals to El Salvador.
“Oopsie. . . too late” posted Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. Secretary of State Marco Rubio added: “We sent over 250 alien enemy members of Tren de Aragua which El Salvador has agreed to hold in their very good jails at a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars.”
Swift deportation of criminals and terrorists will make for a safer nation moving forward.