From the Brownstone Institute

By el gato malo 

Somewhere amid the 1,500+ pages of legislative clutter in the latest Continuing Resolution—the bill apparently killed by public exposure alone—lies a provision so audacious, so shameless, I can only assume it was drafted by a cabal of Congressional career criminals. Section 605—a sterile title masking its true intent—amounts to nothing less than a legislative fortress erected to shield Congress from the Justice Department, the FBI, and, most troubling of all, accountability.

At a time when President-elect Trump’s administration prepares to restore integrity and justice, Congress appears to have donned its armor, hiding its secrets behind a wall of bureaucratic legalese. This provision, if left unchallenged, sets a dangerous precedent: members of Congress placing themselves above the law, protected from scrutiny by the very agencies tasked with upholding justice.

Section 605: The House above the Law

Let’s strip away the camouflage. Section 605 does three things with surgical precision:

First, it declares that Congress retains perpetual possession of all “House Data”—a broad, almost limitless category including emails, metadata, and any electronic communication touching official House systems. This means providers like Google or Microsoft, who store or process this data, are mere bystanders, unable to act as custodians for investigators. The House claims total dominion.

Second, courts are ordered to “quash or modify” subpoenas for House Data. Investigators from Trump’s Justice Department, no matter how compelling the evidence, will now face a procedural minefield laid by Congress itself. Compliance with the legal process will be, in essence, denied.

Third—and most chilling—this protection applies retroactively. Any ongoing investigation that hasn’t yet secured House data is now dead on arrival. Existing subpoenas? Nullified. Pending warrants? Quashed. Section 605 doesn’t just safeguard future misconduct; it effectively buries the past.

The Investigations behind the Curtain

This isn’t a hypothetical problem. There are two glaring examples of why Congress is so eager to cement its immunity.

First, let’s talk about Shifty Schiff and Eric Swalwell. For at least three years, the DOJ has been investigating these two California Democrats—Schiff, now a senator, and Swalwell, perpetually ensconced in mediocrity—over illegally leaking classified documents to the media. A courageous Congressional staffer blew the whistle, revealing that both men had routinely fed classified information to friendly reporters to score cheap political points. The Grand Jury concluded that these leaks broke the law, yet the investigation’s smoking gun lies in House communications.

Under Section 605, that investigation would be dead. The DOJ and FBI would find their subpoenas quashed and their warrants denied. Schiff and Swalwell, guilty of weaponizing national security secrets, would escape justice—retroactively.

Second, there’s the case of Liz Cheney—a name that now evokes memories of hubris and betrayal among Republicans. During her star turn on the January 6th Committee, Cheney engaged in witness tampering to shape Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony. By all accounts, Cheney pressured Hutchinson to craft a narrative favorable to the Committee’s political objectives, a flagrant abuse of power that would warrant criminal investigation.

But with Section 605 in place, the DOJ’s efforts to uncover the truth would be paralyzed. Cheney’s communications—the very evidence needed to prove witness tampering—would be walled off. Congress would simply claim that its data is untouchable, its members above reproach.

Historical Parallels: A Republic’s Betrayal

The Romans had a term for this sort of legislative cunning: privilegium—a law that benefits a select few at the expense of justice. Cicero, in his fight against corrupt senators, warned that “the closer a man clings to power, the more strenuously he seeks to avoid the law.” Section 605 is the embodiment of Cicero’s warning. It allows the very lawmakers tasked with overseeing government to shroud themselves in secrecy, impervious to scrutiny from Trump’s incoming Justice Department.

This is not the first time Congress has played such games. During the Watergate era, Richard Nixon famously claimed that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” Nixon’s arrogance, of course, led to his downfall. But now, it appears Congress has adopted the same mantra: when members of Congress write the law, they are beyond its reach.

Undermining Justice in the Age of Trump

Make no mistake: Section 605 is an act of preemptive lawfare. Trump’s Justice Department will soon be tasked with untangling years of corruption, leaks, and abuse of power that have flourished in Washington. The DOJ and FBI, freed from the shackles of political interference, are primed to restore the rule of law.

Yet Congress, fearing exposure, has pulled up the drawbridge. Section 605 would ensure that leakers like Schiff and Swalwell remain untouchable. It would protect Cheney from accountability for witness tampering. It would obstruct investigations, shield misconduct, and shatter public trust.

This is not about protecting Congress from political harassment. It’s about protecting Congress from justice.

The Rule of Law or the Rule of Congress?

The Framers never intended Congress to be a castle immune from oversight. The very idea that lawmakers can exempt themselves from the justice system would have been anathema to Jefferson and Madison, who understood that accountability is the lifeblood of a republic. When one branch of government declares itself untouchable, the balance of power collapses.

Section 605 cannot stand. It must be challenged, overturned, and consigned to the legislative ash heap. For if Congress succeeds in placing itself above the law, then the rule of law itself will become nothing more than a hollow promise.

As President-elect Trump prepares to take office, let this be a rallying cry: the swamp cannot be allowed to protect its own. If justice is to prevail, no one—not Schiff, not Swalwell, not Cheney—can be above the law.

And that includes Congress.

Author

el gato malo

el gato malo is a pseudonym for an account that has been posting on pandemic policies from the outset. AKA a notorious internet feline with strong views on data and liberty.

From the Brownstone Institute

By Jeffrey A. Tucker  

Brownstone Institute has been tracking a little-known federal agency for years. It is part of the Department of Homeland Security created after 9-11. It is called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA. It was created in 2018 out of a 2017 executive order that seemed to make sense. It was a mandate to secure American digital infrastructure against foreign attack and infiltration.

And yet during the Covid year, it assumed three huge jobs. It was the agency responsible for dividing the workforce between essential and nonessential. It led the way on censorship efforts. And it handled election security for 2020 and 2022, which, if you understand the implications of that, should make you spit out your coffee upon learning.

More than any other agency, it became the operationally relevant government during this period. It was the agency that worked through third parties and packet-switching networking to take down your Facebook group. It worked through all kinds of intermediaries to keep a lid on Twitter. It managed LinkedIn, Instagram, and most of the other mainstream platforms in a way that made you feel like your opinions were too crazy to see the light of day.

The most astonishing court document just came out. It was unearthed in the course of litigation undertaken by America First Legal. It has no redaction. It is a reverse chronicle of most of what they did from February 2020 until last year. It is 500 pages long. The version available now takes an age to download, so we shrunk it and put it on fast view so you can see the entire thing.

What you discover is this. Everything that the intelligence agencies did not like during this period – doubting lockdowns, dismissing masking, questioning the vaccine, and so on – was targeted through a variety of cutouts among NGOs, universities, and private-sector fact-checkers. It was all labeled as Russian and Chinese propaganda so as to fit in with CISA’s mandate. Then it was throttled and taken down. It managed remarkable feats such as getting WhatsApp to stop allowing bulk sharing.

It gets crazier. CISA documented that it deprecated the study of Jay Bhattacharya from May 2020 that showed that Covid was far more widespread and less dangerous than the CDC was claiming, thus driving down the Infection Fatality Rate within the range of a bad flu. This was at a time when it was widely assumed to be the black death. CISA weighed in to say that the study was faulty and tore down posts about it.

The granularity of their work is shocking, naming Epoch Times, Unz.org, and a whole series of websites as disinformation, often with a crazy spin that identified them with Russian propaganda, white supremacy, terrorist activity, or some such. Reading through the document conjures up memories of Lenin and Stalin smearing the Kulaks or Hitler on the Jews. Everything that is contrary to government claims becomes foreign infiltration or insurrectionist or otherwise seditious.

It’s a very strange world these people inhabit. Over time, of course, the agency ended up demonizing much authentic science plus a majority of public opinion. And yet they stayed at it, fully convinced of the rightness of their cause and the justness of their methods. It seems never to have occurred to this agency that we have a First Amendment that is part of our laws. It never enters the discussion at all.

AFL summarizes the document as follows.

• CISA’s Countering Foreign Influence Task Force (CFITF) relied on the Censorship Industrial Complex to inform its censorship of alleged foreign disinformation narratives regarding COVID-19.

• Unelected bureaucrats at CISA weaponized the homeland security apparatus, including FEMA, to monitor COVID-19 speech dissenting from “expert” medical guidance, including President Trump’s comments about taking Hydroxychloroquine in 2020. Many of these “false” narratives later turned out to be true, calling into question the government’s ability to identify “misinformation,” regardless of its authority to do so.
• To determine what was “foreign disinformation,” CISA relied on the Censorship Industrial Complex’s usual suspects (Atlantic Council DFR Lab, Media Matters, Stanford Internet Observatory) — even those discredited for erroneously attributing domestic content to foreign sources (Alliance for Securing Democracy). CISA even relied on foreign government authorities (EU vs. Disinfo) and foreign government-linked groups (CCDH, GDI) that advocated for the demonetization and deplatforming of individual Americans to monitor and target constitutionally protected speech by American citizens.

For years, this story of censorship has unfolded in shocking ways. This document among tens of thousands of pages is surely among the most incriminating. And discussing it is apparently still taboo because the Subcommittee report on Covid never once mentions CISA. Why might that be?

In the strange world of D.C., CISA might be considered untouchable because it was staffed out of the National Security Agency which itself is a spinoff of the Central Intelligence Agency. Thus does its activities generally fall under the category of classified. And its many functioning assets in the civilian sector are legally bound to keep their relationships and connections private.

Thank goodness at least one judge believed otherwise and forced the agency to cough it up.

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.