Protecting Church from State

Protecting Church from State

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, American Mind 

An Ohio pastor is seeing firsthand how government can violate the free expression of religion.

Bryan, Ohio, is a fine small town. It’s the kind of place where holiday dinners are potlucks, featuring several versions of homemade meatloaf and bean casserole, and the cooks silently watch to see which desserts are gone first. It’s as flat as a sheet of plywood, and the wind bites bare skin in the winter.

Dad’s Place, a storefront church run by Pastor Chris, occupies an old building a few doors down from the county courthouse. It looks like plenty of other businesses that haven’t yet spruced up their early-20th century buildings. Mentally ill and homeless people shelter in the church, which is open 24/7—but the day of my visit, the local City Hall got a court order to shut it down. The temperature dipped to 16 degrees that night.

Pastor Chris founded Dad’s Place years after his conversion to Christianity in mid-adulthood, after which he entered ministry. He describes his reluctant conversion this way: “It was like a nuclear bomb went off. I can’t describe it—nothing around me happened, I didn’t hear a voice or anything like that.” His eyes welled up at the memory. “But everything changed in that moment.”

Inside of Dad’s Place, there’s a front room that faces the street, with just a table and some chairs. Anyone can walk in off the street. There’s always a live or recorded sermon playing for customers.

In the back is a large industrial-looking room with concrete floors where the church meets. Church members volunteer to care of the people who come in—some mentally ill, some homeless and hungry, some addicted. Some walk in, some are brought there by police. There are no beds or cots, but more than one person has fallen asleep sitting in a warm room listening to a sermon—which is not so different from the churches where the well-washed pay their Sunday obeisance.

But Bryan’s mayor does not like Dad’s Place and has mounted a year-and-a-half battle to close it down. The police stopped bringing people. Instead, City Hall sent fire inspectors, zoning inspectors, building code inspectors—all the petty tools it has to express its displeasure with unfavored members of the community.

Pastor Chris and Dad’s Place have been ably defended by First Liberty and two private law firms, Taft Law Firm from Cincinnati and Spengler Nathanson from Toledo, on a pro bono basis (the Latin phrase does not mean “free”—though the client doesn’t get charged; it means “for good”).

This is a battle over the First Amendment and freedom of religion. Pastor Chris keeps his church open to anybody, all the time, because he believes the words of Jesus as recorded in the 25th Chapter of Matthew’s Gospel: “What you do for the least of these, you do it for me.”

Pastor Chris was in court the first week of December to be tried for a criminal violation of the fire code. He could go to jail. His lawyers believe he is the first person ever to be criminally tried for a fire code violation in Bryan—such things are almost universally handled by a citation, or a civil lawsuit.

The trial produced testimony that the city waives code requirements for older buildings when it is economically burdensome to a business. But it won’t waive it for a church that is trying to live out its faith among the most marginalized people in the community.

At the end of the trial, the judge asked for a briefing on the First Amendment defense raised by Pastor Chris, and deferred ruling from the bench.

I visited Dad’s Place later the week Pastor Chris was on trial. After listening to his story and asking some questions, we moved to the back room where I met the members of his church who help him keep the place open around the clock, and some of the people who find a safe place in the church.

I met a woman sitting at one of the tables with a stack of papers. She flinched ever so slightly when we shook hands, as though human touch had been harmful to her at some point in the past. When I asked about her paperwork, she told me she was looking for a job.

We chatted for a few minutes. Some of her words were out of order or jumbled, but she made herself understood. When I got up from the table, Pastor Chris took me aside and told me that the woman had been coming for about two months. “When she came here, she was non-verbal,” he told me quietly. “She couldn’t even have a conversation.”

I notice a young woman seated behind a computer. She spoke at first in very short phrases and told me that she did graphic design. I asked her if I could see any of her work. She pulled out her phone, swiped several times through various pieces, and then displayed a picture that looked like a photograph of a masterpiece oil painting. I asked her how she had made the image. She began speaking in complete sentences, explaining the software she had used to create it, and that it had taken her two months. It was fabulous.

Having a schedule to keep, I took a photo with Pastor Chris and his family and moved on. That evening, at a Christmas party several counties away, I was told that a different judge in a civil case against Dad’s Place had issued an order that would effectively close it immediately.

There were multiple problems with that order. There was no immediate harm happening that had not been happening for months during the entire pendency of the case. The order did not preserve the status quo during the proceedings, but rather upended it.

One judge, having heard the case and the arguments over religious liberty, had slowed everything down, wanting to get it right. But another judge swung into action and rushed in.

I asked Elliot Gaiser, Ohio’s Solicitor General, to file a friend-of-the-court brief with the trial court in support of Dad’s Place, asking the court to stay its order. The trial court responded by setting a hearing in ten days. There will be further appeals, and Ohio will defend the state and federal guarantees of freedom of religion.

Pastor Chris stayed up all night, preaching to his small congregation, doing “church stuff,” and keeping people off the streets for one more night. But the government should not get a say in what is “church stuff”; it doesn’t get to decide that preaching is OK, but sheltering the homeless is not. And it doesn’t get to grant waivers to secular businesses but single a church out for strict enforcement.

Thomas Jefferson wrote about a “wall of separation between Church and State” to describe the operation of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Establishment clauses. The phrase appears nowhere in the Constitution or the Declaration—but if it means anything, it means that the Church is behind a protective wall that the State may not climb over or go around.

 

FBI spied on likely new director, Kash Patel

 

Report reveals that FBI spied on its likely new director, Kash Patel

Paul Sperry, New York Post 

It’s going to be awkward at FBI headquarters next month when President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the bureau likely takes over. 

According to a new government watchdog report, the FBI spied on its prospective new boss, Kash Patel.

Patel has promised to “clean house” at the Hoover Building, and hold all those who “abused their power” during the Russiagate “witch hunt” accountable.

He might start with the officials and agents who secretly vacuumed up his phone records and emails starting in late 2017, when he led a House Intelligence Committee investigation into the FBI’s reliance on Hillary Clinton’s false opposition research to surveil a Trump campaign official as a supposed “Russian agent.”

According to a nearly 100-page report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, the FBI subpoenaed the records as part of an investigation it opened to find out whether congressional staffers leaked classified information about its Trump-Russia “collusion” case to the Washington Post and other media. 

Working with career prosecutors at Justice, the FBI compelled Google and Apple to turn over the sensitive private information of subjects the FBI identified “between September 2017 and March 2018,” a period when Andrew McCabe was the acting FBI director. (Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions was out of the loop, the report said, having recused himself from the Russia probe.)

The court orders gagged the service providers from notifying Patel and other customers of the intrusion.

As chief counsel, Patel had no idea that the subject of his investigation — the FBI — was collecting his data and increasing the visibility of witnesses he was communicating with, including whistleblowers.

At the time, Patel was demanding to see FBI documents and depose FBI witnesses to find out if the bureau had abused its power in obtaining a FISA warrant to spy on Trump aide Carter Page.

But Patel remained in the dark until 2022, when Google finally was cleared to send him a copy of the subpoena. Outraged, he told me at the time: “The FBI and DOJ subpoenaed my personal records while I caught them doing this to Page back in 2017.”

He said the McCabe FBI didn’t want anybody to find out that it “literally copied and pasted” Democrat opposition research, wholesale, into wiretap-warrant applications.

He added that he hoped those behind the abuses would be prosecuted by a future Trump administration: “They must be held accountable or they’ll only abuse their power again.”

The IG probe reveals that the FBI had renewed the subpoenas each year, snooping on congressional staffers for up to five years. That means McCabe’s successor, Christopher Wray, signed off on the continued collections.

Justice Department IG Michael Horowitz found the unprecedented surveillance created “at a minimum, the appearance of inappropriate interference” by the FBI in “legitimate oversight activity” by Congress. He warned that it could have a “chilling” effect on whistleblowers coming forward.

On Wednesday, the day after the IG report came out, Wray announced he would step down at the end of President Biden’s term, clearing the way for Trump nominee Patel to head the agency.

“This [IG] report highlights exactly why Kash Patel is the perfect leader to reform and rebuild the FBI,” a spokeswoman for Patel told The Post. “Kash understands the critical balance between national security and protecting civil rights [and] will work hand-in-hand with Congress to restore trust.”

A former ally of Patel on the Hill, who was also spied on by the FBI, called the leak investigation a “fishing expedition”: Former Senate investigator Jason Foster claims McCabe used it as a “pretext” to find out what he and Patel were doing to expose FBI corruption in its Russiagate probe of Trump.

At the time, his Senate panel, the Judiciary Committee, had forced the FBI to turn over the shady Page FISA applications. Foster noted that the inspector general determined that no one was ever charged in the FBI’s years-long investigation of the unauthorized disclosures to the media, despite the wide net McCabe cast.

Foster also noted that McCabe himself was investigated for leaking to the media about an earlier Clinton-related investigation, and then lying about it to the IG, as well as FBI inspectors.

“Mr. McCabe lied about his own leaking and should have been prosecuted for it, according to the Obama-appointed Justice IG [Horowitz], but wasn’t,” he told The Post. “Now that this fishing expedition into the communications of congressional attorneys has been confirmed by the same IG, the new administration needs to finally hold people accountable.”

Currently chairing a whistleblower support group, Empower Oversight, Foster said that what the McCabe FBI did is more egregious than reported. It also swept up the phone records of spouses, including his own wife.

He said, “My head was spinning” when he found out. And he said agents and prosecutors withheld from the DC magistrate judge who approved the subpoenas and non-disclosure orders the fact that the targets were congressional attorneys.

“They misled the court,” he said. “They left out the key fact we were all congressional attorneys. They claimed over and over, with no basis, that we were flight risks or would ‘destroy evidence.’ “

IG Horowitz agreed that the language agents and prosecutors used in the subpoenas was “boilerplate,” making it more likely the judges would rubberstamp them.

As a result, “they got all kinds of information on who we were talking to, and when, with no probable cause and no notice to congressional leadership, so there was no chance for Congress to challenge it,” Foster added. 

“And they can still get that kind of information,” barring reforms to protect separation of powers in the future.

Horowitz confirmed the personal data collected from the subpoenas (including more than 75,000 text messages), along with the electronic communications documenting the opening of the investigations and the FBI interview reports, are stored at FBI headquarters.

He noted he only reviewed “a select number” of the thousands of files, which leaves loose ends for Patel to investigate.

A handful of agents and supervisors involved in the case are still employed there, the IG said, and maintain access to the files.

Bad actors remaining at the bureau could be fired, but how can those who have left be held accountable? The five-year federal statute of limitations has expired, making prosecution of suspected criminal abuses by current and former FBI officials and agents a non-starter. 

Foster suggested they still could lose their coveted national security clearance. As FBI director, Patel would have the authority to strip McCabe and other former officials of their classified credentials, making it virtually impossible for them to work again in federal law enforcement. Patel said in a recent podcast that any official involved in framing Trump as part of the “Russiagate hoax” should have his clearance revoked.

On CNN, where he works as an analyst, McCabe recently opined that Patel wasn’t qualified to lead the FBI: “He doesn’t really have a fraction of the qualifications that any former FBI director chosen by any president has.” 

McCabe says he worries Patel will turn the bureau back to the days of J. Edgar Hoover, when it was “essentially the enforcement arm for the president’s political activities.”

He fears Patel will trample over civil liberties? That’s rich, Patel points out, as it was “gangster” McCabe who signed one of the illegal FISA warrants to spy on Page.

Paul Sperry is a senior reporter for ­RealClearInvestigations. Follow him on X: @paulsperry_ 

Daniel Penny Found Not Guilty

Daniel Penny Found Not Guilty

in Subway Death of Jordan Neely

The verdict brings an end to a controversial case that drew national and international attention.

Michael Washburn, Epoch Times 

NEW YORK CITY—A Manhattan jury on Dec. 9 acquitted Daniel Penny of criminally negligent homicide over the death of Jordan Neely, a mentally ill homeless man whom Penny put in a chokehold and wrestled to the ground on a subway in May of last year.

On Friday, Judge Maxwell Wiley had agreed to dismiss the top charge of manslaughter in the second degree when the jury could not reach a unanimous decision after three days of deliberation.

The verdict brings a conclusion to a closely watched trial that took a little over one month, from voir dire and the seating of a jury at the end of October to witness testimony throughout November up to this week’s closing statements and jury deliberations.

Witnesses were unanimous that Neely got onto an uptown F train at Manhattan’s Second Avenue station and immediately began screaming that he was hungry, homeless, and did not care if he went back to prison.

Their testimony differed slightly as to the explicitness of Neely’s threats. Some said he had cried out that he was willing to hurt others if they did not give him what he sought.

Lori Sitro, who had her small son with her on the train when Neely got on at Second Avenue, said Neely’s conduct made her fear for the boy’s safety so much that she placed his stroller in front of the boy to shield him from Neely.

The boy was too small to move quickly off the train with her, Sitro said, who expressed gratitude toward Penny for taking swift action to protect passengers.

Sitro’s testimony was consistent with that of others present, such as Yvette Rosario, who said Neely’s conduct scared her so badly she thought she might pass out, and she placed her head on a friend’s chest.

Dan Couvreur said the incident went far beyond other tense moments he had experienced on the subway.

Another witness, Alethea Gittings, called Neely’s words “very loud, very menacing, very disturbing,” and thanked Penny for stepping in to protect her and others on the train.

The lead prosecutor, Dafna Yoran, noted in her closing statements to the jury on Dec. 3 that some of the jurors might now feel grateful to Penny for springing into action to protect passengers and that weighing his potential guilt or innocence would not be easy.

Yoran said that it might be hard to convict a man who had tried to do the right thing and did not act with the intent to take someone’s life.

The defense argued that in light of the testimony of those present on the F train, Penny had acted bravely and selflessly and the government was trying to make a scapegoat of a good man.

The prosecution and defense differed sharply as to the causes of Neely’s death, the appropriateness of using deadly physical force to protect passengers on the train from Neely, and the validity of defense claims that Penny’s actions were justified under New York law.

A Parade of Witnesses

Over the trial, the jury heard from an array of witnesses including people who were present on the F train and saw Penny and Neely struggle, former Marine comrades of Penny’s, a friend of the defendant, his mother, and two medical experts who contradicted each other’s accounts of how Neely had died.

Prosecutors brought to the stand Dr. Cynthia Harris, a New York City medical examiner who performed Neely’s autopsy.

Harris said she had found synthetic cannabinoids in Neely’s body that were more potent than marijuana and were, in fact, on par with cocaine in terms of their ability to make someone aggressive.

She said the vascular compromise and airway compromise that Penny’s chokehold inflicted were the causes of Neely’s death. These resulted in “a low-oxygen state for the brain to be at,” a condition “sufficient to cause death,” Harris testified under oath on Nov. 15.

The defense sought to counter those claims and raise reasonable doubts about the prosecution’s theory by putting on the stand Satish Chundru, a certified forensic pathologist.

Under direct examination from defense lawyer Steve Raiser, Chundru said that a number of factors, acting in concert, had brought about the death of Jordan Neely.

Chundru said Harris should have considered the role of other factors, such as the drugs in his system, his schizophrenia, and a sickle cell trait that became a crisis under the stress of the chokehold.

He said that red blood cells in the body of someone with this trait change shape under stress. Instead of their usual round form, they take on what Chundru described as a “crescent moon or banana shape,” and no longer carry out their critical life-supporting function of conveying oxygen to tissue cells.

During the chokehold, Neely suffered a sickle cell crisis, and died as a direct consequence of it, Chundru stated.

He argued that blaming the death solely on the chokehold ignored the extent of Neely’s sickle cell condition and its propensity to have fatal complications during an incident that would not be deadly for the average person.

Differing Theories

The prosecution and defense clashed repeatedly over what cell phone footage taken at the scene of the incident did or did not capture.

Lawyers for both sides continually played this footage on screens in the courtroom and shared conflicting theories as to when Neely lost consciousness and the meaning of nonverbal evidence such as the position of his tongue and motions of his legs while he lay prone in Penny’s chokehold.

Yoran sought to impeach testimony from Chundru that made Neely out to be conscious and still struggling at a point in a video when she argued Penny had made him lose consciousness.

Yet another aspect of the case had to do with Penny’s character.

While Wiley, the judge, leaned in favor of prosecution arguments that character witness testimony was immaterial in a case of this kind, the judge briefly allowed Penny’s lawyers to put people on the stand who had served with Penny in the Marines.

These witnesses attested to his character as a decent, responsible person who followed rules, got along well with others, and, at least in their personal experience, was never the subject of complaints or negative comments.

Yoran used the testimony of Joseph Caballer, who had taught Penny combat techniques during their time together in the Marines, to try to strengthen her case that Penny’s actions went beyond what his training authorized or condoned.

The chokehold that Penny applied to Neely, she repeatedly asserted, was proper neither from the point of view of Penny’s and Neely’s bodily positioning nor the amount of time that Penny kept Neely in the hold.

According to Yoran, Penny should have quickly released Neely as soon as Neely lost consciousness and was no longer capable of harming anyone, but instead kept Neely in the hold for about six minutes, causing an asphyxial death.

A discontented ghost, Barack Obama

 

Alexander Hamilton Tried to Warn Us About Barack Obama

A discontented ghost, wandering among the people, pining for relevance

Andrew Stiles,Free Beacon 

Barack Obama, the serial memoirist and Netflix producer who owns a $20 million estate on Martha's Vineyard and also served as the 44th president of the United States, has yet to embrace his irrelevance in the field of American politics. He keeps trying to reinsert himself into the national conversation despite the fact that no one cares what he has to say. Earlier this week, Obama interviewed talked about himself while sitting next to former German chancellor Angela Merkel. On Thursday, the former president gave a (ridiculously long and vapid) speech at the Obama Foundation's Democracy Forum in Chicago, where he denounced "our current polarized environment," which he helped create, and stressed the importance of building coalitions that make room "not only for the woke but also for the waking." Whatever that means.

"We have to be open to other people’s experiences and believe that, by listening to these people and building relationships and understanding what their fears are, we might actually bring some of them, not all of them, but some of them along with us," Obama told the crowd of adoring fans. He made similar remarks during his appearance with Merkel in Washington, D.C., where he urged a different crowd of adoring fans to "listen actively and be curious about and learn from the experiences of those who are not exactly like you." Obama routinely complains about "cynicism" and "division" in politics, yet his most memorable contribution to this year's election was lecturing black "brothas" who were reluctant to vote for Kamala Harris and denouncing them as misogynists. He backed Hillary Clinton in 2016, and was "enamored" with Beto O'Rourke in 2020. Nevertheless, he continues to regard himself as a political genius.

Free Beacon reader Barry J. from Arizona reached out to remind us of Alexander Hamilton's opposition to presidential term limits, as outlined in Federalist No. 72, which reads at times like a specific warning about Barack Obama. Hamilton imagined future presidents who might be "vain and ambitious, as well as avaricious," who, upon reaching the end of their allotted time in the "seat of supreme magistracy," would be forced to assuage their considerable ego by "wandering among the people like discontented ghosts, and sighing for a place which they were destined never more to possess." Our astute reader observed that Obama appears to have "a roaring case of discontented ghosthood." He certainly does.

If Hamilton's view had ultimately prevailed, would Obama even have wanted to continue serving as president? Unlikely, given his fondness for accumulating wealth and insatiable thirst for hanging out with celebrities. If he could run again, would he even win? He's become so boring to listen to it's hard to believe he ever did, until you consider who his opponents were—Hillary and John McCain (the embodiment of George W. Bush at the lowest point of his presidency) and Willard Mitt Romney. During the Democratic primary in 2020, Obama's legacy was attacked or swept under the rug. Notwithstanding his widely praised (by journalists) speech at the Democratic convention, he was a non-factor in 2024. Another meaningless celebrity endorsement. The ghost of politics past, slouching towards oblivion with the massive fortune he "didn't build," lecturing his few remaining acolytes about how to understand and connect with their "bitter" neighbors who "cling to guns and religion and antipathy" to "explain their frustrations."

Meanwhile, Obama still hasn't finished part two of his third memoir. (He's the first president since Dwight Eisenhower to require multiple volumes.) If it never gets published, would anyone care?