Analysis of GOP strategies and accountability from Benghazi to current political challenges.

Earlier this month, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the arrest of Zubayr Al-Bakoush, one of the alleged leaders of the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack on the US Mission in Benghazi, Libya.

Fourteen years after the deaths of Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods, and serious injuries to mission security personnel David Ubben and Mark Geist, this is accountability far too long in coming, though nonetheless greatly welcome.

In 2014, I was part of a group that pressed for answers to the Benghazi disaster. We dubbed it the “Benghazi Accountability Coalition,” and through a “select” House committee that was established to investigate the attack and in many months following, we pursued that “accountability,” but mainly to little effect against an arrogant Obama administration and a wholly — and typically — unconcerned mainstream press.

This month’s apprehension is a perfect microcosm of the maddening and incessant frustration — not just of conservative activists such as myself — but of the American people. And it’s that elite arrogance and dismissiveness (as has been frequently noted in these intervening years) that led to the 2016 political primal scream that elected Donald Trump.

The egregious leadership failure on the part of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama led directly to the Benghazi debacle. They have yet to answer for it. Or Hillary’s email scandal. Or the IRS targeting of conservative groups. Or the DOJ “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal. Or the Russia Hoax. Or take your pick of a good half-dozen or more euphemized scandals.

So, forgive me if Pam Bondi and D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro making shop-worn declarations to hunt down the violators rings hollow. Where is the indictment of John Brennan? James Clapper? Peter Strzok? (In the interim, Strzok has even secured a settlement from the government for invading his privacy!) His co-FBI conspirator/adulterous snuggle-bunny Lisa Page? The promised re-indictment of James Comey? Again, the list is seemingly never-ending.

Republicans in Washington are in the typical mid-term panic of a majority party. They’re pinning their hopes on a rebounding economy carrying them in November. A couple little inconvenient reminders – bad economies didn’t torpedo Barack Obama in 2012 or produce the highly-touted anti-Biden mid-term “red wave” in 2022.

People are tired of seeing the “big shots” get away with it. Some commentators noted that it was perhaps not a coincidence that this arrest was announced the same day as Hillary and Bill Clinton made a deal to testify on their Epstein dealings before Congress. Maybe – maybe not. But as we’ve seen in his two terms now, Donald Trump is the embodiment of the little guy’s middle finger to the establishment. If Republicans know what’s good for them, they’d better hold Bill and Hill’s feet to the fire on Epstein, and that testimony had better be broadcast far and wide. And Trump, via Bondi, must get the political hacks in the dock and roll out the subpoenas and indictments, and in sufficient time to see some results – ideally, verdicts. You might call it Republican Lawfare.

A recovering – and ideally – booming economy is the standard political cure-all. But we’re not living in standard times – THAT is certainly an “80 percent poll question,” as is the popular reference today. Trump as middle-finger is no longer available as a choice this November, so for Republicans to become his proxy, voters must see some evidence.

As the president frequently inveighed during his first run, it’s HIGH time for him and the Republicans to “lock them (the Democrats) up!”

That is the REAL Republican turnout machine.

By Tommy Sears  | 7:00 AM on February 14, 2026

Source: From Benghazi to Bondi – the New GOP Turnout Machine – RedState

Greenpeace challenges a US court verdict via EU laws, raising issues of judicial sovereignty and transatlantic legal trust.

In a troubling departure from longstanding legal norms, the environmental activist group Greenpeace has turned to the European Union in an effort to undo an unfavorable verdict rendered against it in the United States. If successful, the implications would extend well beyond the nullification of a judgment unanimously decided by a jury of our peers.

At the center of the dispute is the landmark Energy Transfer v. Greenpeace decision handed down in March 2025 by a North Dakota district court. A jury found Greenpeace International and several of its affiliates liable on several counts related to their involvement in the destructive Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2016. Energy Transfer, the pipeline’s owner, was initially awarded $667 million in damages. Although the trial judge later reduced to $334 million, Greenpeace’s response was not confined to the ordinary appellate process.

Instead, during the trial, Greenpeace International filed a separate lawsuit in the District Court of Amsterdam, where the organization is headquartered. Invoking the EU’s newly enacted Anti-SLAPP Directive – a legal directive intended to deter lawsuits designed to suppress lawful public speech – Greenpeace accused Energy Transfer of pursuing an “unfounded and abusive” lawsuit, despite offering no new evidence beyond what had already been presented in the North Dakota proceedings.

Setting aside the shaky merits of the EU case, Greenpeace’s pursuit of parallel litigation represents an affront to judicial sovereignty. Our legal system provides established mechanisms for contesting adverse judgments, including post-trial motions and appellate review. Allowing any litigant to pursue a more favorable forum once a lawful judgment has been rendered undermines confidence in the judiciary by weakening its ability to provide finality. A nation’s courts must retain the authority to adjudicate disputes under their own laws without foreign second-guessing.

The doctrine of res judicata exists precisely for this reason. As a doctrine of finality, res judicata exists to bar parties from relitigating claims that have already been decided by a competent court. While limited exceptions do exist – most commonly where new evidence emerges or where enforcing a judgment would result in a clear and grave injustice – Greenpeace satisfies neither. The absence of new evidence is plain, and any claim of injustice is hindered by the court’s careful post-trial review and partial reduction of damages, which largely reaffirmed the jury’s findings.

As concerning are the ripple effects Greenpeace’s actions would have on transatlantic trust and commercial relations. According to Texas-based attorney Charles Meyer, transatlantic judicial respect has served as a bedrock principle of international law for centuries. When legal principles are weaponized for political retribution, that trust erodes, along with the willingness to honor mutually beneficial agreements like the $750 billion EU-US energy pact.

Faced with the prospect that lawful U.S. judgments can be undone abroad, it is no surprise that American energy companies would think twice before aiding our closest allies.

Our courts have a duty not only to deliver justice to those who appear before them, but to safeguard the authority of the judicial system itself. Judicial sovereignty is not a discretionary principle; it is a constitutional necessity. Allowing foreign courts to second-guess duly rendered American verdicts would weaken the rule of law at home, erode confidence abroad, and reward those who seek to evade accountability rather than respect it.

George Landrith | Feb 14, 2026

Source: Greenpeace, Europe, and the Challenge to American Courts

Sen. Kennedy humorously criticizes Schumer over Democrats’ DHS bill demands and ICE restrictions amid funding battles.

Democrats and Republicans are still battling over the funding for the Department of Homeland Security bill as Democrats demand restrictions on ICE.

They didn’t give a darn about ICE under Barack Obama or Joe Biden, but suddenly they care because they want to attack President Donald Trump.

Friday is the deadline when we will go into a partial shutdown, according to DHS, unless they pass a further stopgap/extension.

The funny thing is that because of the One Big Beautiful Bill passed last year, ICE was already given a lot of money to pursue its mission, so this might not truly affect them. What it would affect is the other agencies in the DHS, like FEMA, TSA, and the Secret Service. But for Democrats, what do those facts matter? It’s all about posturing to their base that they’re being tough on ICE.

But Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) had a very direct message to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) about the Democrats’ demands about ICE, which include things like not wearing masks, as well as no immigration enforcement at places like schools, courts, and polling places. The Democrats really tell on themselves when they say they don’t want ICE around polling places. Why would illegal aliens be around polling places – unless they were trying to vote?

https://twitter.com/i/status/2021723072269549711

“The Karen wing of the Democratic Party wants to defund ICE, just like they wanted to defund the police,” Kennedy explained.

“And we know how that vampire movie turned out. The Karen wing of the Democratic Party is in control of the Democratic Party. Even if we agreed to every one of Sen. Schumer’s conditions – and I wouldn’t vote for ’em – he couldn’t deliver the Democratic votes. Because the Karen wing will punish any Democrat who votes to keep the DHS open.”

Kennedy said that’s why Schumer was kind of “wandering around” like a “roomba, looking like a man who has just lost his luggage.” That’s a pretty perfect description of Schumer, who always seems to be in a perpetual state of confusion when it comes to decisions about his own party. He can’t deliver the votes, even if we agree, Kennedy said. “And we wouldn’t agree anyway.”

The DHS did agree to body cams, but the minute they did so, the Democrats flipped on a dime and then started terming it “mass surveillance” and started demanding that their use face certain restrictions to protect “privacy.”

Translation? The Democrats realized that body cams weren’t going to help their narratives, and it was likely to nail leftists doing bad things.

So if Democrats want to play this game of demonizing ICE here, they’re going to hurt the other agencies far more than ICE. That’s going to come back on them, and their base should realize they’re being played.

By Nick Arama  | 12:10 PM on February 12, 2026

Source: Sen. Kennedy Delivers a Humorous and Direct Message to Schumer About Those DHS Bill Demands – RedState

Immigration is reshaping political parties in Britain, Europe, and the US, challenging longstanding party stability.

As British Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces calls to resign for his appointment of Epstein-tied Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States, one is struck by the sudden instability of British governments. In the 28 years between 1979 and 2007, Britain had only three prime ministers, while in the 19 years since 2007, it has had seven, and may soon have eight. Only one of those, David Cameron, carried his party to a reelection victory, and he resigned a year after being beaten in the Brexit referendum.

Similarly, elsewhere in Europe, France’s historic socialist, communist and Gaullist parties have more or less disappeared, and the National Rally, dismissed as unthinkable, to the point that the judicial establishment disqualified it from the ballot, still leads the polls under its 30-year-old successor.

Germany’s Social Democrats, founded in the 1880s, were swept in and promptly swept out of office, while the Christian Democrats, the descendants of the anti-Nazi Catholic Center party, have barely been holding their own against the oft-denounced AfD.

Italy’s dominant asymmetric duo, for two generations after World War II, the Christian Democrats and the Communists, fell on bad times in the 1990s, with the fading of belief in their founding faiths, Catholicism and communism. Dominant since then have been media millionaire Silvio Berlusconi, the Five Star Movement party, founded by a comedian, and the current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, whose party’s roots were once dismissed as neo-fascist.

The two American political parties, the oldest and third-oldest in the world, have shown more stability. In the first half of the 20th century, Democrats survived the landslide rejection of Woodrow Wilson in 1920, and Republicans survived the landslide rejection of Herbert Hoover in 1932.

The two parties’ resilience prevented Americans from succumbing, as many feared they would, to the totalitarian temptations that swept much of continental Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.

In the volatile years after what was then called the Great War, communists took over Russia in 1917 through 1920, fascists took over Italy in 1922 through 1924, and Nazis took over Germany in 1933 through 1934. No one could be sure that a similar upheaval would not succeed in France, Britain or America.

Before that war, American presidents opposed restrictions on immigration, confident that assimilation efforts, such as big-city public schools and Henry Ford’s English-language classes, would Americanize the Ellis Island generation of 1892-1914. Fears of revolution and the wartime capacity to control people’s movements led to bipartisan majorities for the 1924 law that cut off immigration from eastern and southern Europe.

Now, a century later, immigration is the problem that, more than anything else, is threatening the hold of longstanding political parties. Old parties’ leaders in Britain and Europe, nervous that below-replacement birth rates would halt economic growth and endanger their welfare states, encouraged massive immigration of Muslims from North Africa, the Middle East and Pakistan. Prime example: former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s unilateral decision, without consultation internally or with European Union partners, in 2015 to admit 1 million mostly male Muslims to Germany.

Authorities seemed to regard any qualms about immigrants with unfamiliar customs as equivalent to the bigotry that fed the Holocaust and ignored the obvious moral difference between excluding people from your country and murdering your fellow citizens.

Whether Starmer survives politically is unclear, but it is clear that the Labour Party, like the Conservatives before it, is in perhaps terminal trouble. Conservatives won 44 percent of the popular vote in 2019, and 365 seats (out of 650) in the House of Commons in December 2019; Labour, with only 33 percent of the popular vote, won 411 seats in July 2024.

Despite some campaign rhetoric, neither party staunched the flow of immigrants, and neither has visibly changed government bureaucracies’ bias against those who protest it. Unsurprisingly, both are now polling below 20 percent, well behind Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, founded in 2018.

The situation in America, and concerning its parties, is less drastic. The nation has a much stronger tradition of assimilation of immigrants, although many American liberals regard that as something like persecution. And our great immigration surge between 1982 and 2007 came primarily from Latin America and Asia. The Christian and European cultures of Latins, and the test-driven literacy and numeracy of Asians, have made them more assimilable than the Muslims thronging Britain and Europe.

Trump has demonstrated that under current legislation, border enforcement, which most Americans support, can work, and his second-term use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has shown that hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants can be deported, and that even more may be incentivized to self-deport. But the harsh footage and the two protesters’ deaths in Minnesota suggest that the immigration problem could become a liability for Trump and his party.

Democrats have also changed in response to Trump. Former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama proclaimed that they were enforcing immigration laws. Former President Joe Biden scarcely bothered, even as his appointees put in place an open-borders policy. Today, most Democratic officeholders are intent on obstructing and, in the tradition of Democrats John C. Calhoun and George C. Wallace, nullifying federal law enforcement. Few Democratic voters seem to mind, but that could become a political liability too.

On both sides of the Atlantic, we are seeing in the 2020s something like reenactments of the 1920s — the overthrowing of political establishments in Britain and Europe, and the sometimes awkward and painful reshaping, but not overthrowing, of the political parties of the U.S.

Source: Immigration Is Shaking Up Political Parties in Britain, Europe and the US