On Jan. 6, 2021, the 5-foot-2 Ashli found herself trapped by a crowd in the narrow corridor leading to the Speaker's Lobby of the U.S. Capitol.

In that crowd was Zachary Alam, a 30-year-old with a criminal past. He reached between the three Capitol Police officers guarding the doors to the lobby and began smashing the glass, shouting a very un-MAGA like, "F--k the Blue."

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Appalled by Alam's behavior, Ashli's military police training kicked in. "Call f---ing help!" she shouted at the feckless officers as they they stood in place with their backs to the doors, doing nothing.

Frustrated by the police inaction, Ashli took matters into her own hands, literally. A southpaw, she yanked at Alam's backpack with her right hand. As he spun around, she slugged him square in the face with her left fist.

Alam's glasses flew off on impact. Fleeing the madness, Ashli hopped into the window pane now fully free of glass. Only a person as small as she could have managed that feat.

Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd, the incident commander for the House on Jan. 6, promptly shot her, the least justifiable police shooting ever caught on video.

Byrd had all the time he needed to assess the scene. He knew that the doors were heavily barricaded and that other armed officers hovered nearby in the Speaker's Lobby.

According to Aaron Babbit's suit, "The bullet pierced Ashli in her left anterior shoulder, perforated her left brachial plexus, trachea, upper lobe of the right lung and second anterior rib, and landed in her right anterior shoulder."

When shot, Ashli instantly fell backward on to the marble floor. She was still alive after the fall and in obvious agony. When California physician Austin Harris tried to treat Ashli, the police pulled him off.

The FBI would later arrest Harris on the same cocked-up charges they did most other protesters. A half-hour after the shooting, Ashli was pronounced dead at Washington Hospital Center.

As Ashli lay dying, Byrd wasted no time trying to establish his alibi. Within one minute of shooting Ashli, Byrd made an astonishing radio call:

"405B. We got shots fired in the lobby. We got shots shots fired in the lobby of the House chamber. Shots are being fired at us and we're sh, uhh, prepared to fire back at them. We have guns drawn. Please don't leave that end. Don't leave that end "

Less than a minute later, Byrd made a follow-up call: "405B. We got an injured person. I believe that person was shot." Believe? Unaware the shooting had been recorded, Byrd reflexively created his own reality.

The House Select Committee report did not mention Byrd by name, let alone question the shooting. To the degree that the report mentioned Ashli it was to build the specious case that President Trump was indifferent to her death.

As the Babbitt suit makes clear, Byrd violated just about every USCP directive on the use of deadly force. Masked and out of uniform, Byrd did not identify himself as a police officer, did not give Ashli verbal orders to stop, nor give her a chance to comply.

Byrd did not "diligently assess" the situation before firing. He never considered any other defensive tactics or compliance techniques. He disregarded the presence of seven other police officers in his line of fire.

Most critically, Ashli did not pose "an imminent danger of death or serious injury." When Byrd fired, he did not even know she was a female.

For nearly nine months after the shooting, the media showed no interest in Byrd's identity. It was not until Aug. 28, 2021, that the Capitol Police publicly identified Byrd by name.

NBC orchestrated Byrd's official coming-out with a softer than softball interview. The conversation began with Lester Holt asking Byrd why the Capitol Police withheld his name as long as it did. Byrd responded, "Threats."

To further insulate Byrd, Holt followed his initial question with the inevitable, "Racist threats?" Holt wanted the NBC audience to believe that Trump supporters were making racist threats long before internet sleuths even deduced his identity.

In the way of contrast, the Minneapolis PD made no effort to protect Derek Chauvin and his colleagues. They were named the day after George Floyd died. Chauvin was arrested three days later.

In the summer of 2020, Chauvin was not the exception. The media competed to dox police officers, especially white ones, involved in any controversial police action.

As Holt repeated twice, the USCP, the Metropolitan PD and the Justice Department had all cleared Byrd of any wrongdoing. What they could not clear him of, especially after his one-time appearance on NBC, was lying.

Byrd lied about things big and small, even things he didn't have to lie about. Most grandiose was his claim, "I know that day I saved countless lives."

In truth, the bullet that killed Ashli Babbitt was the only bullet fired that day in or around the Capitol. Among those Byrd claimed to have saved were members of Congress who were "disabled" or very nearly so.

"Some of those individuals were in the lobby with me," said Byrd. In fact, there were no members of Congress in the lobby, let alone disabled ones.

To show their indifference to the truth, and their disdain for the MAGA movement, the regime had Byrd promoted to captain two years after the interview.

Meanwhile, speaking of threats, Derek Chauvin struggles to recover from those 22 knife wounds he endured in an Arizona prison.

Where's Lester Holt when we need him?

Note: Jack Cashill is working on a new book, "Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6."

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Powell did help break a window. She pushed against police barricades and encouraged others to surge forward against police lines. Prosecutors asked for eight years, one year, a cynic might suggest, for each of her eight children.

A soft-hearted judge gave her 57 months, 42 more months than New York City attorney Urooj Rahman received for fire-bombing a police car during the George Floyd riots in May 2020.

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"I'm with family right now," Powell texted me on Jan. 7, 2024. "It would be better to write me because I have one day left, which I will spend with family. I might be able to email you as well." Powell left the next day for prison – FCI Hazelton in Braceton, West Virginia.

That evening on CNN, Anderson Cooper showed a recent interview Powell did with a CNN reporter at her home in rural Pennsylvania. She had been confined there for nearly three years.

"I don't have remorse for attending protests," she said calmly. "I don't have remorse for speaking out and saying I believe the election was stolen. I do have remorse for breaking a window and destroying my whole family's life."

Cooper concluded the segment with a homily so deep in mindless sanctimony it belongs in a time capsule.

"It's amazing to me, although it shouldn't be," said Cooper, "that you know she spent three years locked up in her home and could have done some research, and she continues things which are demonstrably false and just lies. I mean, it's pathetic."

Weeks before Cooper opined about things that are demonstrably false, CNN ran a story headlined, "See the surveillance video Trump allies are using to sow doubts about voting."

The video captured illegal ballot harvesting on the incumbent's behalf during a Democratic mayoral primary in Bridgeport, Connecticut's largest city.

A whistleblower handed over the video to the challenger. As a Democrat and a racial minority, the courts and the media had to listen to him. So blatant was the fraud that a judge nullified the election.

This "wild" story being too big for CNN to ignore, the producers found a way to turn it against Trump. Asked anchor Kristin Fisher, "How are Trump and other right-wing figures trying to capitalize off this scandal.?"

Reporter Marshall Cohen smirked, "They have had a bonanza with it in the right-wing media." Cohen dismissed Trump's claims about widespread voter fraud as "completely wrong." The reporter had consulted with the "experts," and they assured him that voter fraud is extremely rare. Case closed.

Not so fast. Two weeks after the "pathetic" Rachel Powell headed to prison, a victim of Trump's alleged lies about voter fraud, the New York Times dug a little deeper into the Bridgeport scandal.

Knowing its readers were not keen on learning about voter fraud, the editors put their minds at ease with the semantic pretzel of a headline, "Election Fraud Is Rare. Except, Maybe, in Bridgeport, Conn."

Here too, "experts" were recruited to assure readers that "election fraud is rare." Bridgeport was an exception but, reporter Amelia Nierenberg conceded, the 2023 election was not a one-off.

"Ballot manipulation has undermined elections for years," reported Nierenberg. "Residents of the city's low-income housing complexes described people sweeping through their apartment buildings, often pressuring them to apply for absentee ballots they were not legally entitled to."

Added Nierenberg, "Sometimes, residents say, campaigners fill out the applications or return the ballots for them – all of which is illegal." This was the kind of scheme Project Veritas unearthed in Minneapolis in 2020, and that the Times so grossly misreported that Project Veritas felt compelled to sue for libel.

The Dinesh D'Souza film "2000 Mules" used geo-tracking data to make the case that schemes similar to Bridgeport's were not unusual in large Democratic cities.

Specifically, D'Souza accused the Democrats of throwing the 2020 election to Biden through the use of massive illegal vote harvesting in the major cities of critical swing states.

The much anticipated film premiered in packed theaters across America on Monday, May 2, 2022. On that same May 2, 2022, Politico reported on the leaked initial draft of the Supreme Court opinion striking down Roe v. Wade.

The leak was unprecedented. In fact, as Politico reported, "No draft decision in the modern history of the court has been disclosed publicly while a case was still pending."

This story gave the media all the excuse they needed to ignore "2000 Mules" and all the leisure time its "fact checkers" needed to "debunk" and "discredit" the film's claims.

The leaker, of course, was never identified. The deep state takes care of its own. Its minions are busy right now memory holing the saga of Bridgeport.

Jack Cashill's latest book, "Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America's Cities," is now available in all formats.

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They were speaking specifically of that day's New Hampshire primary but more generally about Nikki Haley, Donald Trump and Republican voters.

In listening to the pair I was reminded of the recent fate of Sports Illustrated. Once the flagship brand of sports media, SI shut its doors recently, the victim of its own past success.

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Like SI, NR long ago came to think of itself as more righteous than its audience. Putting a fat girl on the cover of its famed swimsuit edition last year signaled SI's capitulation to its own hubris. For NR, Nikki Haley has been that fat girl.

Conservative readers prefer Donald Trump in much the same spirit that SI readers liked hot models. There is a natural connection. Trump has an earthiness, a rawness, a pugnacity lacking in every other GOP candidate of the past 30 years. NR doesn't get him.

In truth, editors at the flagship publication of the respectable right have had trouble relating to its potential audience since its founding in 1955.

This strategic caution became obvious in 1960 when NR condemned the less "respectable" John Birch Society. Rationalized an editor in an internal memo, "We can't afford to jeopardize the grudging status we've earned in the liberal community."

Not to deny the dazzling National Review founder William Buckley his due, but Buckley established a modus operandi that has endured to this day.

During the Obama years, editor Lowry never stopped worrying about the "status" the liberal community begrudged his publication. As Lowry once noted, "Mr. Buckley's first great achievement was to purge the American right of its kooks."

Today those kooks are all that stand between the continued success of the world's greatest republic and its ruin. Lowry and Cooke don't get it. While the nation is poised to rupture, they are busily arranging the canapés for their next editorial board meet.

As nominal members of the right, the NR people are uncertain of their status in the Jacobin club that rules Washington. So they try hard not to displease.

In the way of background, in 1789, in Paris, a caucus of increasingly radical deputies from the National Assembly met in a former convent. There, the deputies formed the Society of the Friends of the Constitution. In time the group would become better known by the name of the convent in which they met, "The Jacobins."

Harnessing the wrath of the Parisian mobs to intimidate opponents, the Jacobins seized a major share of power. Swearing allegiance to the "Cult of Reason," the Jacobins and their allies encouraging the looting and desecration of Notre Dame and renamed the famed cathedral "The Temple of Reason."

Now with thousands of clubs nationwide, the aggressively godless Jacobins hunted down their political and spiritual enemies. The "reign of terror" they unleashed resulted in at least 30,000 executions, many without even the show trials afforded Parisian dignitaries.

To restrain the mobs, the Jacobins finally centralized power under the Committee of Public Safety and ruthlessly suppressed free speech. It was too late.

In 1794, having sown the wind, the Jacobins reaped the whirlwind. The Jacobin Club was shut down that year, and its most influentially ally, Robespierre, was hoisted headless on his own petard.

Ignoring the lessons of history, America has developed its own increasingly faithless elite that eerily mimics the French Jacobins. Thinking themselves wiser than God, Jacobins have set out to "fundamentally transform" America in their own light.

To this "club" in Washington belongs every elected Democrat, some elected Republicans, much of the intelligence community and most of the administrative state.

Jacobin clubs in Hollywood and Silicon Valley exercise nearly monopolistic control over their respective industries. Jacobins rule higher education and increasingly, through its fully owned teacher unions, the public education establishment.

Harnessing the faux moral power of the George Floyd mobs in 2020, Jacobins now control almost every major newsroom and most corporate boardrooms as well as the health care establishment. Increasingly, they have wormed their way into strategic positions in the military.

To appease those mobs, the Jacobins have no more trouble putting innocent people in prison than did their French role models. Even a former president is now fair game for Jacobin justice.

For club members in the know, the ultimate goal is power, global power. Having transcended the nation state, they ally themselves with Jacobin elites throughout the world.

Standing in the way of these elites and the mobs they control is one man. Lowry and Cooke think him a kook, Cooke sneeringly. At their post-New Hampshire editorial meeting, they will decide whether NR will back Donald Trump for president in 2024.

Best guess is they'll sit this one out and hope that the tumbrils they hear rolling through the D.C. streets are coming for someone else.

Jack Cashill's latest book, "Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America's Cities," is available in all formats.

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In their continued persecution of Chauvin, now 47, for his role in the death of George Floyd, prison officials have made Chauvin's life even more miserable than it was prior to the stabbing. "It was like he was the perpetrator," Chauvin's mother, Caroline Pawlenty, told me.

While he recovers, Chauvin is locked away in a small windowless medical unit. The only real difference between his cell and a standard one is the steel procedural table in the middle with a rail on its side for easy handcuffing.

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The only regular human contact Chauvin has is with the guards who open his door to give him his meals. He is allowed one 10-minute phone call a week.

While in the general population before the stabbing, Chauvin had access to TV, the internet and the library. He had a tablet for games and the like, could rent movies and exercised daily, running 10 or so miles a day.

The last time Caroline saw her son before the stabbing he had a tan. When she visited him earlier this month, she was "horrified" to see him looking so gaunt and pale.

He never leaves "the infirmary" and, until her visit, had not been outside or received any natural light since November.

He suffers from some nerve injury from the attack, which causes him to him limp when he walks around the room.

The last few months have been a nightmare for Chauvin and his parents. Caroline learned about his stabbing only through an Associated Press article.

It horrified her that the prison contacted Minnesota's racist attorney general, Keith Ellison – his relationship with the Nation of Islam cost him the DNC chair – before anyone contacted her.

"He was duly convicted of his crimes," said Ellison after the stabbing, "and, like any incarcerated individual, he should be able to serve his sentence without fear of retaliation or violence."

In truth, Chauvin was anything but duly convicted. The medical examiner, Dr. Andrew Baker, was coerced into adding "neck compression" to Floyd's pathology report to cover up the real cause of Floyd's death.

Said Dr. John Dunn, who has followed this case from the beginning, "I knew when I read the autopsy that Dr. Baker was deceitful by intention, failing to properly declare the likely cause of death as from natural causes, most likely cardiac arrest from cardiac arrhythmia due to excitement and his very bad heart documented in the autopsy."

Floyd had severe coronary artery disease and an enlarged heart from high blood pressure. The fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system did not help either.

Keeping a low profile, Mrs. Pawlenty attended her son's trial every day. What disturbed her most was to see the Minneapolis police chief Medario Arradondo lie on the witness stand about the maximum restraint technique (MRT) Chauvin and his colleagues used to control Floyd.

Accusing Chauvin of murder, Arradondo insisted that the Minneapolis police were never trained in MRT. Caroline wanted to scream. She had the copy of her son's training manual with a fully illustrated description of the MRT procedure.

A frightened judge refused a change of venue, and a frightened jury convicted Chauvin of murder. Turscak stabbed him once for every year he is to spend in prison. He chose "Black Friday" as execution day to show his support for Black Lives Matter.

If not exactly hopeful, Caroline Pawlenty is relentless. She calls the prison every day questioning the treatment of her son and demanding answers as to why he has been treated as he has.

The recent film by Liz Collin, "The Fall of Minneapolis," has opened up a lot of eyes about the flagrant injustice done to Chauvin and his colleagues.

The reluctance by prominent Republicans – including those in the Pawlenty family – to take up Chauvin's cause has not helped, but Derek and his mother have been heartened by the increased attention from everyday people around the world.

Chauvin was offered up as sacrificial lamb in the summer of 2020. The riots that ensued scared corporate America into accepting a rigged election.

The Democrats promise much more of the same this summer. So police are advised not to do what Chauvin did on that fateful day in May 2020 – volunteer to work on a day he wasn't scheduled.

In woke America, no good deed goes unpunished.

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"There are people of various races, ethnicities, orientation, etc that are regularly excluded from hiring consideration," tweeted Cuban, "By extending our hiring search to include them, we can find people that are more qualified."

A little history lesson is in order. In researching my newest book, "Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America's Cities," I can affirm that Cuban, if he means what he says, has no idea what he is talking about.

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My up-close observation of the DEI phenomenon starts with Amiri Baraka, born Leroy Jones, New Jersey's angriest black radical back in the day and the father of current Newark Mayor Ras Baraka.

As it happens, Baraka graduated from my neighborhood high school, Barringer, in 1951. He was one of four African Americans in his senior homeroom of 29.

At Barringer, Jones/Baraka was a member of the science club and the Latin Honor Society. Upon graduation, he was offered a four-year scholarship to Seton Hall University and lesser scholarships to Holy Cross and Rutgers Newark.

This was unusual. On my largely white working-class Newark block at that time, no one went to college, let alone on a full scholarship. The age of racial preferences had already begun.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson gave the practice its official name with executive order 11246. The order entrusted the secretary of labor with the power "to take affirmative action to ensure equal opportunity based on race, color, religion, and national origin."

In urban America, affirmative action – a misnomer from the beginning – would cause unending friction, especially in police and fire departments. This zero-sum game openly pitted working-class blacks against working-class whites. Worse, no one was supposed to notice.

I first noticed in that same year, 1965, the year I graduated from high school. Sometime that spring I ran into an old friend from grade school named Albert.

Albert and I got to talking about college. I told him about my guidance counselor's response to my college of choice. "Princeton?" he laughed. "How are you going to afford that?"

I couldn't. I had to go where the money was, and that was someplace with considerably less ivy than Princeton. When I asked Albert about his plans, he said sheepishly, "Columbia."

I was amazed. "Columbia?" I said. "How did you pull that off?" He was almost too embarrassed to answer. "Oh, it's a Negro thing," he said apologetically. Albert, we both knew, was a good student but not Ivy League good.

Fast-forward 10 years. I am finishing up my Ph.D. in American studies at Purdue University. My wife is finishing up her Ph.D. in English.

We come to New York for a hiring convention. We stay with my widowed mother at her apartment in a Newark public housing project. I sleep on a canvas cot. I remember because I put my knee through it.

I escort my wife to the hotel where the convention is taking place and leave her at the designated room. This is one of several interviews she has lined up. I take the elevator back to the lobby.

On the elevator, are a young black man and a young white woman, talking about their job interviews. She has eight. He has 14.

Collectively, the white males in Purdue's English department, where I teach, have zero. I have none as well. By the time the elevator hits the lobby I have quit academia.

An innocent at the time, I had no idea why powerful white people tolerated racial practices that flew in the face of the Civil Rights Act.

When I started meeting powerful white people I began to understand why. They had juice enough to get their kids into the school of their choice.

Mark Cuban's daughter goes to Vanderbilt. It must be nice.

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Although all parties know the "insurrection or rebellion" clause refers specifically to recently completed Civil War, the Department of Justice argues for a much more elastic definition, all the better to hang Donald Trump with.

Yet if there were one president guilty of insurrection in recent years, that president would have to be Barack Obama. In late 2016 and early 2017, Obama knowingly conspired with others to subvert the presidency of Donald Trump.

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Thanks to the zealous note taking of his once and future factotum, Susan Rice, we have documentation of this flagrant act of sedition.

The formal plot to unseat President Donald Trump was launched with a White House meeting on Jan. 5, 2017 – 15 days before Trump's inauguration.

In conference with Rice and Obama were his national security team, including all the usual suspects: the FBI's James Comey, the CIA's John Brennan, then Vice-President Joe Biden, DNI James Clapper and Acting Attorney General Sally Yates.

Following the meeting, Obama asked Yates and Comey to stick around along with Rice, his trusted scribe. Obama had a reason for singling out Comey and Yates. Unlike the others, they were staying on in their jobs.

On the very day at the very moment Trump was being inaugurated, Rice sent to "self" a peculiar email memorializing this meeting.

"President Obama began the conversation," wrote Rice, "by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities 'by the book.'"

The "issue" in question was the framing of Donald Trump for collusion with Russia. Obama had to know by this time that the collusion accusation was spawned by the Clinton campaign.

The law firm that served as cutout for Clinton, Perkins Coie, was the same law firm that magically produced Obama's birth certificate in 2011. There is evidence that Obama knew in early August of the provenance of the infamous Steele dossier.

In 1974, Nixon campaign aide Donald Segretti made "dirty tricks" a household phrase. The nation was scandalized that Segretti would send fake letters using the letterhead of presidential candidate Edmund Muskie. For his dirty tricks, Segretti served four months in prison.

For hers, the mother of all dirty tricks, Hillary Clinton walked away without even a scolding. The Steele dossier proved to be the most consequential dirty trick in American political history.

There is no "book" that justifies what Comey and pals did in the weeks immediately following this meeting while Obama was still president.

The next day, Jan. 6, 2017, the conspirators released the declassified version of the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA).

Commissioned a month earlier by Obama, the ICA was John Brennan's way of welcoming the president-elect to Washington.

Titled "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections," the report concluded that Putin "ordered" an influence campaign, the goal of which was "to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency."

The corollary of this, of course, was that "Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump."

The "Obama dossier," as Rep. Devin Nunes called the ICA, reads like one of my college term papers, filled with sundry bits of information gathered from here and there just hours before the due date.

Although Comey lobbied to have the Steele dossier included in the body of the text, wiser heads prevailed, and it was relegated to the appendices.

On the same day the ICA was released, Jan. 6, Comey, Clapper, Brennan and the NSA's Mike Rogers briefed the incoming president at Trump Tower, sort of.

"[W]e were not investigating him and the stuff [in the dossier] might be totally made up but it was being said out of Russia and our job was to protect the president from efforts to coerce him," Comey wrote in his notes to self following the meeting.

At least three of the four men were investigating Trump, and it was not the Russians who were doing the coercing.

Only Comey stayed behind to brief Trump about the Steele dossier. It had not yet been published. CNN had the story, Comey knew.

He also knew that by telling the president about the dossier, he would give CNN the necessary news hook to report the dossier's allegations, at least the more plausible ones.

One of the conspirators promptly leaked the news of the more intimate briefing to CNN. On Jan. 8, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe emailed his senior FBI colleagues. "CNN is close to going forward with the sensitive story," wrote McCabe, emphasis his.

"The trigger for [CNN] is they know the material was discussed in the brief and presented in an attachment." McCabe sent this email under the heading, "The flood is coming."

The flood came. It inundated America's newsrooms for the next two and a half years and washed away the Republican House majority in 2018.

And we're charging Donald Trump with insurrection? Please! Pass the bananas.

Jack Cashill's newest book, "Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America's Cities," is available in all formats.

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Harvard worthies Doris Kearns Goodwin, Laurence Tribe, Charles Ogletree and Fareed Zakaria have all been forced to wear the Scarlet P just in the last 20 or so years.

One Harvard plagiarist, however, has managed to escape scrutiny, at least from the mainstream media. But then again, former President Barack Obama escaped scrutiny on all fronts in his miraculously "scandal free" White House years.

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Although I have documented Obama's perfidy in the past, I raise the issue again, not only because the subject is in the air, but also because others on the right have been raising it without attribution.

If I might offer friendly advice to my allies and imitators, it is wise to avoid even the appearance of plagiarism when scolding others as being plagiarists.

I worry less about credit for myself than for my informal research associate, Shawn Glasco. It was Shawn who first alerted me to Obama's pillaging of Kuki Gallman's 1994 memoir, "African Nights," for his 1995 memoir, "Dreams from My Father."

In his mid-40s at the time, Shawn worked in construction, did some surveying and served as a ski resort jack-of-all-trades in Colorado.

Doing research when not working, Shawn had earlier helped me with my investigation into Bill Ayers' involvement in "Dreams." Shawn, too, had deduced that the young Obama's poem, "Pop," was about his creepy communist mentor Frank Marshall Davis.

At the time, the world's literary critics were insisting the poem was about "Gramps," Obama's grandfather. Shawn and I were right.

At the local library in 2013, while researching books about Kenya, Glasco stumbled upon Gallman's books, "I Dream of Africa," later made into a movie, and "African Nights."

Published just a year before "Dreams," "African Nights" may well have saved Obama from ruin. According to "Dreams" publisher Peter Osnos. Obama met with him and editor Henry Ferris in 1994 to review progress on his much-delayed book.

Wrote Osnos, "He was determined, he said, to finish the book, which would involve a trip to Kenya for research about his father, who had died there in a car accident."

According to official accounts, Obama made only two trips to Africa before his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004. The first one in 1988 he discussed in"Dreams."

The second trip he took with Michelle in 1992. A third trip to research Kenya would have had to take place in 1994 as "Dreams" was published in 1995.

In his 2013 Obama biography, "Barack Obama: The Story," David Maraniss reported that the draft submitted to editor Ferris did not include the lengthy Kenya section of the book.

This material, claimed Maraniss, came from notes Obama made in his journal during the 1988 trip to Kenya. "I almost transcribed my journal into the book," Obama told Maraniss.

Maraniss had earlier interviewed Ferris, who told Maraniss, "Obama in fact traveled to Kenya a second time for further research before turning in the last part of the book."

The language strongly suggests that Obama traveled to Africa after the first submission of the book to Ferris in 1994 but before the final one later that year.

In his interview with Maraniss, Obama seemed to back Ferris's account. "The second trip was essentially me doing more background on things like Kenyan history," Obama told Maraniss. "That was as close as I came to fact-checking, was that second trip."

In his 2017 Obama biography,"Rising Star," David Garrow reported that Obama was able to flesh out the Kenya portion thanks to copies of letters he sent during a Kenya trip in 1988, later provided to Obama by an old girlfriend.

A Pulitzer Prize winner like Maraniss, Garrow had access to Obama as did editor Ferris. Ferris believes Obama went back to Kenya in 1994 to do research.

Maraniss implies he might have made that trip but argues Obama took the Kenya material from his journals. Garrow reports that this material came from letters Obama sent to an old girlfriend.

Shawn Glasco, who has no Pulitzer Prize and no access to the president, figured out on his own how Obama likely got the Kenya chapter finished.

Instead of going to Africa, Obama may have spent his six-week leave from his law firm copying passages from "African Nights"

Glasco found scores of phrases and words in Obama's"Dreams" that also show up in "African Nights": Baobab (a tree), bhang (cannabis), boma (an enclosure), samosa (a fried snack), shamba (a farm field), liana (a vine), tilapia (a fish), kanga (a sheet of fabric), shuka (decorative sashes).

Both books feature women "wrapped" in their kangas and "dressed" in "rags." The women in both books wear shukas, head shawls, head scarves and goatskins, and they balance baskets on heads graced with "laughing" smiles.

Men in both books spearfish in "ink-black" waters and hunt by torchlight. Elephants are seen "fanning" themselves, birds "trill," insects "buzz," weaver birds "nest," and monkeys "mesmerize."

The books share a veritable Noah's ark of additional fauna: crickets, crocodiles, starlings, dragonflies, cattle, lions, sand crabs, vultures, hyenas, "herds of gazelle," and leopards that can hold small animals "in their jaws."

On the flora front, the shared references are just as compelling: roadside palms, yellow grass, red bougainvillaea, pink bougainvillaea, fig trees, shady mango trees, thornbrush, banana leaves, Baobab trees, liana vines, tomatoes.

The landscape, occasionally "barren," is rich in "undulating" hills whose "grazing lands" are dotted with the occasional "watering hole." The "mud-and-dung" houses feature "thatched" roofs, "verandas" and "vegetable gardens."

People seem to be carrying "straw mats" everywhere. The stars "glint" and people "waltz" underneath them. Eyes "glimmer" in the light of campfires.

Children sing in "high-pitched" rhythms, and girls endure "barbaric" circumcisions. Obama, like Gallmann, travels to the Great Rift Valley and stands at its edge. Both visit the small trading town of Narok.

Claudine Gay, says Obama, hold my beer.

Jack Cashill's new book, "Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America's Cities," is available in all formats.

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"So sorry," I answered. "He was one of a kind." Said Elizabeth, "Yea he was."

Elizabeth was in a position to know. In the pursuit of truth, she and James – his preferred public name – had endured the worst the U.S. government could throw at them and survived with their integrity and their patriotism intact.

I first met the Sanders in September 2000 at a Kansas City country club where James was making a presentation. A veteran cop turned investigative reporter, he had authored the 1997 book "The Downing of TWA Flight 800," and paid a high price for doing so.

As James explained, 53 TWA employees were on board that doomed aircraft in July 1996, most of them deadheading back to Paris.

Elizabeth had served as a trainer for TWA flight attendants. She knew many of those who had died on the plane and attended more memorial services than she had ever hoped to.

At one of those services she encountered a friend named Terry Stacey, a 747 pilot and manager. Stacey had been working at the investigation site in Calverton on Long Island and harbored deep suspicions about the direction of the investigation.

Knowing that James was an investigative reporter with a couple books to his credit, Stacey asked Elizabeth to introduce them. Her role in what followed would not go much deeper, but for the authorities that was deep enough.

Elizabeth's life began to unravel in March 1997 when California's Riverside Press-Enterprise published a front-page article headlined, "New Data Show Missile May Have Nailed TWA 800."

The story described in some detail Sanders' inquiry into the TWA 800 investigation. A still unknown individual working at Calverton had removed a pinch of seat back material from the plane and sent it to Sanders by Federal Express for testing.

That person was Stacey. Once the story broke in the Press-Enterprise, the Clinton Justice Department (DOJ) had little choice but to hunt down the conspirators.

Lest she be forced to give up Stacey, Elizabeth went into hiding for the next eight months in an Oregon trailer park. That exile almost cost Elizabeth her sanity. James, too, refused to give up Stacey.

The FBI honchos pursued the removal of the TWA 800 evidence with more passion than they pursued the evidence itself. Soon enough, agents found their way to Stacey, arresting him and the Sanderses.

"Conspiracy theorist and wife charged with theft of parts from airplane," the FBI announced much too proudly on the New York office's website.

Despite Sanders' two previous books, the DOJ decided that was not enough output to merit standing as a "journalist." Denied that standing, the Sanderses were tried as thieves, Elizabeth the Bonnie to James' Clyde.

To save his pension, Stacey pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. James and Elizabeth went to trial in a Long Island federal court and were convicted of conspiracy to steal airplane parts.

This was the story James told to a large crowd at the country club. Not until I recalled that Kansas City was the ancestral home of TWA did the size and intensity of the audience make sense to me.

Almost to a person, the TWA people in the room appeared to endorse Sanders' argument that TWA 800 had, in fact, been shot down. This surprised me.

At the time, I thought this theory among the more improbable then in circulation. Admittedly, though, I had paid little attention to the investigation.

Being on the board of the group that invited the Sanderses, I went to dinner with them afterward. We sat at a long table, and I found myself at the end of it seated next to Elizabeth. We had a chance to talk.

As she related, when she and James first met, he was a police officer and accident investigator in Orange County, California, and she a Polynesian dance instructor. Of Filipino descent, she looked the part. She was sweet, soft-spoken and agelessly pretty.

By evening's end, I had begun to reassess Sanders' missile theory. I figured if agents of the government were willing to arrest someone like Elizabeth Sanders for conspiracy, they might, in fact, have had something to hide.

Hoping to probe a little deeper, I asked the Sanderses if they could meet me the next morning for breakfast, and they agreed.

Later that day I went online to research TWA Flight 800 – and quickly sobered up. The debate had apparently been settled. Three years earlier, in November 1997, the FBI essentially closed its criminal investigation into the disaster.

At a press conference, the FBI declared emphatically, "No evidence has been found that would indicate that a criminal act was the cause of the tragedy of Flight 800."

For its part, the NTSB wrapped up its investigation in August 2000. At the final hearing, the NTSB's Bernard Loeb said confidently, "The physical evidence indicated indisputably that a missile did not strike the airplane."

Neither the FBI nor the NTSB was sure exactly what electrical source sparked an explosion in the plane's center fuel tank, but each agency vigorously rejected the idea that a bomb or missile might have been responsible.

Knowing how hard the media rode "conspiracy theorists," I had no interest in becoming one. My idea was to do a video documentary, but before embarking on the project I needed to be convinced.

By this time, two mainstream books had been written on TWA Flight 800. Both toed the government line. I read these books before going to Florida to see James' evidence. They almost made me rethink my trip.

At the time, I had little up-close insight into the way the national media worked. I had to assume that two reporters with great contacts working for top-flight media outlets had a pretty good grasp on the facts.

Sanders, by contrast, was an off-brand reporter and convicted felon living in a low-end Florida apartment complex by a smelly canal from which alligators occasionally emerged to eat neighborhood dogs. I owed him a visit, but I expected little.

I underestimated the couple. During our few days together, James impressed me with his relentless, good-spirited energy. In his mid-50s when we met, he saw the world as it was and did not flinch from its occasional injustice.

Three intense days with James and Elizabeth in March 2001 left me convinced they had a much better handle on the facts of the case than did the major media.

Two things persuaded me. One was the willingness of James to confront the evidence and follow where it led. He hid nothing. He fudged nothing. He offered no improbable rationales.

The Sanderses' integrity was just the half of it. For all their good intentions, I would not have embarked on this excellent adventure had they not shown me one particular swath of evidence: the eyewitness testimony. I could scarcely believe there was so much of it, and that it was so consistent and so credible.

In the summer of 2001, James and I co-produced a documentary called "Silenced." A year later, we collaborated on the book "First Strike." In 2016, with James's guidance, I wrote the book "TWA 800."

James never gave up. To the end, he continued to hound the FBI for information on the suppressed seat-back residue when he wasn't working on his magnus opus about Soviet infiltration of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations.

James was right about TWA 800. He was right about Truman and FDR. His heroic quest for the truth made him what he was – one of a kind. He will be missed.

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This is eighth time Alabama has made the cut since the four-team playoff structure was implemented in 2014. No school has made as many appearances or won as many national championships during this period.

Similarly, during this past week, Harvard University has established itself once again as the dominant powerhouse in the field of college plagiarism.

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Indeed, no other school dare compete against a university whose very president has gone down to the field and taken a snap or two for the sake of Crimson glory.

I refer here, of course, to Claudine Gay. After her disastrous performance before a congressional committee investigating antisemitism, scholars began wondering how Gay ever got to be Harvard president.

The Manhattan Institute's Christopher Rufo and Karlstack's Chris Brunet took the lead. In their report published on Dec. 10, they show example after example of outright pilfering from other scholars.

"In light of this troubling evidence," they conclude, "we call on Harvard's Board of Overseers to conduct a full investigation into Claudine Gay's academic integrity."

Knowing the recent history of Harvard plagiarism, I would be shocked if the Harvard Corporation took action of any kind against a black, female president who is so willfully unattractive the brass probably assume she is as gay as her name. (She's apparently not).

I have been writing about plagiarism for some time. So allow me to deprive leftist trolls of the joy of discovery – all that follows I have written, in one form or another, elsewhere. Citations available upon request.

Among Harvard's star plagiarists is Harvard Ph.D. historian and fading TV star Doris Kearns Goodwin. In 2002, while serving on the university's governing board, Goodwin got caught stealing at least 50 passages for her book on the Kennedys from Lynne McTaggart, author of a biography of Kathleen Kennedy.

So powerful was her Harvard connection and so valuable was she to Team Democrat, Goodwin got the equivalent of a one-game suspension for what should have been a career-ending infraction.

In the early part of this century the Harvard legal duo of Charles Ogletree and Laurence Tribe teamed up in a pas de doofus that would have embarrassed an online diploma mill.

In September 2004, Harvard Law professor Ogletree conceded that his book "All Deliberate Speed" contained an almost verbatim six-paragraph passage from "What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said," a book by Yale Law School professor Jack Balkin.

In his faux apology, Ogletree blamed two assistants for "inadvertently" deleting the attribution to Balkin. As the black progressive mentor of Barack Obama, the Dems' rising star, Ogletree had the equivalent of a no-cut contract. Lifting another's work and then lying about it did not even get him benched.

Professor Laurence Tribe was tight with Obama as well, but as a woke superstar, he had no need for outside help. In 2002, when the student editors at the Harvard Crimson attacked Goodwin, Tribe attacked the editors.

That was Tribe's style. He was as immune from criticism by student reporters in Cambridge as Alabama Coach Nick Saban is in Tuscaloosa.

Tribe came to Ogletree's defense as aggressively as he did to Goodwin's. So offensive was his defense, however, that a tipster alerted the conservative media to the fact that Tribe had problems of his own.

Apparently, Tribe had lifted numerous passages from Henry J. Abraham's 1974 book, "Justices and Presidents," and inserted them in his 1985 book, "God Save This Honorable Court."

Weeks after Ogletree's apology, Tribe had to go public with his own apology. Said Tribe, "I have immediately written an apology to Professor Abraham, whom I – like so many others – hold in the highest regard."

Forced to review the two cases, Harvard Law School Dean Elana Kagan and Harvard President Larry Summers waffled for months before finally declaring the offenses of their star players "inadvertent."

At this level, "inadvertent" was no worthier an excuse for Tribe and Ogletree than it was for Jim Harbaugh's signal stealing at the University of Michigan.

Although lacking the star power of a Tribe or a Goodwin, Harvard Ph.D. Fareed Zakaria has made up for it in sheer hustle. In 2009, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg caught Zakaria swiping unattributed quotes from Goldberg's interview with Benjamin Netanyahu.

In 2012, Time and CNN suspended Zakaria for lifting material from a New Yorker column. In 2014, two bloggers dissected in detail Zakaria's lifelong pattern of pilfering passages from others and getting away with it.

"Yet Zakaria's high-flying career has barely wobbled," wrote Andrew Beujon approvingly in a 2016 Washingtonian piece. "He still hosts a show on CNN, still writes a column for the Washington Post, and last year published yet another conversation-starting book."

Seven years later, Zakaria is still on the playing field. The Harvard part didn't hurt. The leftist politics helped immensely, but his prominent role on Team Muslim is what saved – can I say this? – Zakaria's bacon.

Speaking of leftist politics and Islamic leanings, no Harvard grad has been as immune to the consequences of literary mischief as current woke GOAT, Barack Obama.

Even the conservative media fear to review the evidence that the Harvard Law grad plagiarized Kuki Gallman's 1994 memoir, "African Nights," to complete the Kenya section of his1995 memoir, "Dreams from My Father."

Or perhaps a certain neighborhood "assistant" did the heavy lifting for Obama, "inadvertently" of course.

Jack Cashill's new book "Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America's Cities" makes the perfect stocking stuffer.

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As Henein reports, the man who stabbed Chauvin 22 times on "Black Friday" in an Arizona prison is a 52-year-old con named John Turscak. Don't let the name fool you.

The half-Croatian Turscak is serving a 30-year sentence for crimes committed while leading a Los Angeles faction of the Mexican Mafia in the 1990s.

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As even the major media acknowledge, Turscak was an FBI informant. The intel he provided federal investigators led to the indictments of 40 or so of his former colleagues.

As Henein reports, the FBI recruited Turscak upon his release from California's Pelican Bay State Prison in 1999. "The FBI will pay TURSCAK as part of his cooperation up to a total of $2,000 a month," reads the FBI contract.

According to court documents, "The Defendant had informed his 'FBI handlers' of the crimes he 'had to commit' before he committed them, but that, although the FBI knew in advance that Defendant was going to commit these crimes, the government never did anything to stop him."

Although he was expecting to receive a relatively light sentence for his cooperation, the feds charged Turscak to the max, sentencing him to 30 years.

In its scant coverage of the stabbing, the New York Times is quick to remind its readers, "Mr. Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer who is white, murdered Mr. Floyd, who is Black, during an arrest on a South Minneapolis street corner in May 2020."

Although race had nothing to do with Floyd's death, nor for that matter did Chauvin's restraint of Floyd, the Times puts race front and center in its coverage, capitalizing the "B" in Black and lowercasing the "w" in white.

Not surprisingly, the Times has not seen fit to cover the potentially game-changing new documentary on the Chauvin case, "The Fall of Minneapolis." According to Liz Collin, producer of the film, not even the local Minnesota media will review the film or discuss its findings.

To the degree that establishment organs have paid attention to the film it is to scold those who praise it. As a case in point, the Poynter Institute's Politifact attacked Megyn Kelly for describing the police bodycam footage as "new."

As Politifact points out, the Minnesota State Attorney's office released the footage two-and-a-half months after Floyd's death in May 2020. What Politifact did not say was that this unconscionable delay allowed the prosecution and the media to set their own false narrative about the event in stone.

Nor did the major media, if they showed it at all, attempt to put the bodycam footage in any kind of honest context. That was left to Collin and before her Henein in her 2023 film, "The Real Timeline."

The most powerful revelation in the Collin film involved not the bodycam footage but the technique Chauvin and his fellow officers used to restrain Floyd.

As the "Fall of Minneapolis" showed, this very maneuver was graphically featured in the MPD's official training handbook. On camera, several officers confirmed that they had been trained on that very technique.

The film also showed then-Police Chief Medaria Arradondo lying about its use during Chauvin's trial. Chauvin attorney Gregory Erickson addressed this issue with Henein in a recent call.

"According to the information coming out of the civil suits surrounding the Hennepin attorney's office, it appears that there has been perjury testimony of the former police chief Medaria Arradondo who retired in December 2021," Erickson told Henein.

"In fact, multiple officers are coming out and saying that when they said they weren't trained in this Maximum Restraining Technique, that was an outright lie."

On the up side, Chauvin has been released from the hospital. On the down side, he has been returned to prison. Thanks to the race-baiting reporting of the Times and the other media, the target on his back has only grown larger.

With only three years left to go before his release, the question remains as to who or what prompted Turscak to attack Chauvin.

According to the document Turscak signed with the FBI, the agreement between the Bureau and him "shall continue as long as the FBI deems that TURSCAK's services are required."

Given the rush of narrative-eroding information released in the month before the stabbing, one has to wonder whether someone in power thought it a useful time to require "TURSCAK's services."

Jack Cashill's new book, "Untenable: The True Story of White Flight from America's Cities," is now available in all formats. Plenty of time to order before Christmas.

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