Individuals within the Bush Administration revealed the
identity of CIA operative, Valerie Plame in contravention of US statutes.
If Patrick Fitzgerald is somehow illegally removed as Special Counsel in
the Treasongate proceedings, the grand jury(s) he has impaneled will serve
at the mercy of Fitzgerald's replacement, an individual who will have been
brought in to shield the Bush administration from criminal prosecution for
its many treasons. If that grand jury is aware of their true
Constitutional power, it's possible they might stand up, fight, and win a
legal battle that is long overdue.
****************************
If Patrick Fitzgerald is somehow illegally
removed as Special Counsel in the Treasongate proceedings, the grand
jury(s) he has impaneled will serve at the mercy of Fitzgerald's
replacement, an individual who will have been brought in to shield the
Bush administration from criminal prosecution for its many treasons. If
that grand jury is aware of their true Constitutional power, it's possible
they might stand up, fight, and win a legal battle that is long overdue.
Furthermore, all of us may one day serve as grand jurors in federal court,
and I hope this article will educate the reader to his/her true power as
granted by the Constitution. For that power, despite having been hidden
for many years behind the veil of a legislative fraud, still exists in all
of its glory in the 5th Amendment to the Constitution. The US Supreme
Court has confirmed and reinforced that power.
So please, copy this report and paste it far and wide. It is not spin. It
is not false. It is not for sale, it is not copyrighted by me, so paste
and quote it freely. This report is the truth and we need truth, now, more
than ever.
The Constitutional power of "we the people" sitting as grand jurors has
been subverted by a deceptive play on words since 1946 when the Federal
Rules of Criminal Procedure were enacted. Regardless, the power I am going
to explain to you still exists in the Constitution, and has been upheld by
the United States Supreme Court despite the intention of the legislature
and other legal scholars to make our power disappear with a cheap magic
trick.
Repeat a lie with force and repetition and the lie becomes known as truth.
In the case of the 5th Amendment to the Constitution, the power of the
grand jury, to return "presentments" on its own proactive initiation,
without reliance upon a US Attorney to concur in such criminal charges,
has been usurped by an insidious play on words.
Most of this article is going to quote other scholars, judges and
legislators as I piece together a brief but thorough history of the
federal grand jury for your review. But the punch line is my personal
contribution to the cause:
UNITED STATES CITIZENS SITTING AS FEDERAL GRAND JURORS ARE THE FOURTH
BRANCH OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.
My input into this vital fight is no more than the analysis of a few
carefully used words. It only took a small sleight of pen back in 1946 to
hide our power, and it won't take more than a few words to take that power
back. But a proper overview is necessary for most of you who are
unfamiliar with the issue at hand. So let me provide you with some history
and then we'll see what went wrong and how to correct it.
HISTORY OF FEDERAL GRAND JURY POWER
I want to draw your attention to a law review article, CREIGHTON LAW
REVIEW, Vol. 33, No. 4 1999-2000, 821,
IF IT'S NOT A RUNAWAY, IT'S NOT A REAL GRAND JURY
by Roger Roots, J.D.
"In addition to its traditional role of screening criminal cases for
prosecution, common law grand juries had the power to exclude prosecutors
from their presence at any time and to investigate public officials
without governmental influence. These fundamental powers allowed grand
juries to serve a vital function of oversight upon the government. The
function of a grand jury to ferret out government corruption was the
primary purpose of the grand jury system in ages past."
The 5th Amendment:
"No
person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime,
unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury."
An article appearing in
American Juror,
the newsletter of the American Jury Institute and the Fully Informed Jury
Association, citing the famed American jurist, Joseph Story, explained :
"An indictment is a written accusation of
an offence preferred to, and presented, upon oath, as true, by a grand
jury, at the suit of the government. An indictment is framed by the
officers of the government, and laid before the grand jury. Presentments,
on the other hand, are the result of a jury's independent action:
'A presentment, properly speaking, is an
accusation, made by a grand jury of its own mere motion, of an offence
upon its own observation and knowledge, or upon evidence before it, and
without any bill of indictment laid before it at the suit of the
government. Upon a presentment, the proper officer of the court must frame
an indictment, before the party accused can be put to answer it.' "
Back to the Creighton Law Review:
"A 'runaway' grand jury, loosely defined as
a grand jury which resists the accusatory choices of a government
prosecutor, has been virtually eliminated by modern criminal procedure.
Today's "runaway" grand jury is in fact the common law grand jury of the
past. Prior to the emergence of governmental prosecution as the standard
model of American criminal justice, all grand juries were in fact
"runaways," according to the definition of modern times; they operated as
completely independent, self-directing bodies of inquisitors, with power
to pursue unlawful conduct to its very source, including the government
itself."
So, it's clear that the Constitution intended to give the grand jury power
to instigate criminal charges, and this was especially true when it came
to government oversight. But something strange happened on the way to the
present. That power was eroded by a lie enacted by the legislative branch.
The 5th Amendment to the Constitution still contains the same words quoted
above, but if you sit on a grand jury and return a "presentment" today,
the prosecutor must sign it or it probably won't be allowed to stand by
the judge and the criminal charges you have brought to the court's
attention will be swept away. And the reason for this can be found in a
legislative lie of epic proportions.
Mr. Roots weighs in again:
"In 1946, the Federal Rules of Criminal
Procedure were adopted, codifying what had previously been a vastly
divergent set of common law procedural rules and regional customs.[86] In
general, an effort was made to conform the rules to the contemporary state
of federal criminal practice.[87] In the area of federal grand jury
practice, however, a remarkable exception was allowed. The drafters of
Rules 6 and 7, which loosely govern federal grand juries, denied future
generations of what had been the well-recognized powers of common law
grand juries: powers of unrestrained investigation and of independent
declaration of findings. The committee that drafted the Federal Rules of
Criminal Procedure provided no outlet for any document other than a
prosecutor-signed indictment. In so doing, the drafters at least tacitly,
if not affirmatively, opted to ignore explicit constitutional language."[88]"
Rule 7 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure (FRCP):
"An offense which may be punished by death
shall be prosecuted by indictment. An offense which may be punished by
imprisonment for a term exceeding one year or at hard labor shall be
prosecuted by indictment..."
No mention of "presentments" can be found in Rule 7. But they are
mentioned in Note 4 of the
Advisory Committee Notes on the
Rules:
"4. Presentment is not included as an
additional type of formal accusation, since presentments as a method of
instituting prosecutions are obsolete, at least as concerns the Federal
courts."
The American Juror published the following
commentary
with regards to Note 4:
"[W]hile the writers of the federal rules
made provisions for indictments, they made none for presentments. This was
no oversight. According to Professor Lester B. Orfield, a member of the
Advisory Committee on Rules of Criminal Procedure, the drafters of Federal
Rules of Criminal Procedure Rule 6 decided the term presentment should not
be used, even though it appears in the Constitution. Orfield states [22
F.R.D. 343, 346]:
'There was an annotation by the Reporter on
the term presentment as used in the Fifth Amendment. It was his conclusion
that the term should not be used in the new rules of criminal procedure.
Retention might encourage the use of the run-away grand jury as the grand
jury could act from their own knowledge or observation and not only from
charges made by the United States attorney. It has become the practice for
the United States Attorney to attend grand jury hearings, hence the use of
presentments have been abandoned.' "
That's a fascinating statement: "Retention might encourage...the grand
jury [to] act from their own knowledge or observation." God forbid, right
America? The nerve of these people. They have the nerve to put on the
record that they intended to usurp our Constitutional power, power that
was intended by the founding fathers, in their incredible wisdom, to
provide us with oversight over tyrannical government.
And so they needed a spin term to cast aspersions on that power. The term
they chose was, "runaway grand jury", which is nothing more than a
Constitutionally mandated grand jury, aware of their power, and legally
exercising that power to hold the federal beast in check, as in "checks
and balances".
The lie couldn't be inserted into the Constitution, so they put it in a
statute and then repeated it. And scholars went on to repeat it, and
today, as it stands, the grand jury has effectively been lied into the
role of submissive puppet of the US Attorney.
The
American Juror publication
included a very relevant commentary:
"Of course, no statute or rule can alter
the provisions of the Constitution, since it is the supreme law of the
land. But that didn't prevent the federal courts from publishing a body of
case law affirming the fallacy that presentments were abolished. A
particularly egregious example:
'A rule that would permit anyone to
communicate with a grand jury without the supervision or screening of the
prosecutor or the court would compromise, if not utterly subvert, both of
the historic functions of the grand jury, for it would facilitate the
pursuit of vendettas and the gratification of private malice. A rule that
would open the grand jury to the public without judicial or prosecutorial
intervention is an invitation to anyone interested in trying to persuade a
majority of the grand jury, by hook or by crook, to conduct investigations
that a prosecutor has determined to be inappropriate or unavailing.'
[7]
What is the result? Investigating seditious
acts of government officials can be deemed inappropriate or unavailing by
the prosecutor, or the judge can dismiss the grand jurors pursuing such
investigations. Consequently, corrupt government officials have few
natural enemies and go about their seditious business unimpeded.
By the way, they made a rule to take care
of runaways too, in 1946: Rule 6(g):
'At any time for cause shown the court may
excuse a juror either temporarily or
permanently, and in the latter event the
court may impanel another person in place of the juror excused.' Now
judges can throw anyone off a grand jury, or even disimpanel a grand jury
entirely, merely for exercising its discretion."
Now let me add my two cents to this argument:
Most of the discussion about Note 4 to Rule 7 of the FRCP
takes for granted that the common law use of "presentments" (as codified
in the 5th Amendment) was made "illegal" in 1946 by this act. Nothing
could be more false. Note 4 does not contain language that makes the use
of presentments "illegal", although it had chosen its words carefully to
make it appear as if that is what the legislative branch intended. But
let's look at Note 4 again:
"4. Presentment is not included as an additional type of formal
accusation, since presentments as a method of instituting prosecutions are
obsolete, at least as concerns the Federal courts."
The key word is, "obsolete". Obsolete means "outmoded", or "not in use
anymore", but it does not mean "abolished" or "illegal". And therein lies
the big lie. The legislature knew it could not directly overrule the
Constitution, especially with something so clearly worded as the 5th
Amendment, which grants a power to the people which has a long and noble
purpose in criminal jurisprudence. But the federal beast legislative
branch sought more power to protect themselves from the oversight of "we
the people", and in its vampire like thirst for more governmental control,
it inserted this insidious Note 4 in the hope that scholars and judges
would play along with their ruse, or in the alternative, their ruse would
appear to be legally viable.
Let's look at some authoritative legal resources which discuss Note 4:
Susan Brenner,
THE VOICE OF THE COMMUNITY: A CASE FOR GRAND
JURY INDEPENDENCE:
"Finally, federal grand juries' subservience to prosecutors was
exacerbated when the federal system eliminated the use of presentments,
which allowed a grand jury to bring charges on its own initiative. (N35)
Now, federal grand jurors cannot return charges in the form of an
indictment without a prosecutor's consent. (N36) Elimination of the
presentment demonstrates the historical trend towards elimination of
proactive features in the grand jury system."
Did Brenner fall for the lie or did she cleverly further it when she said,
"[T]he federal system eliminated the use of presentments"? The federal
system did no such thing. Note 4 said the use of presentments was
"obsolete". First of all, Note 4 is not a law in itself. It is a Note to a
law, and the law as written, does not have anything to say about
presentments. You see the leap Brenner has made? The Constitution provides
for "presentments", then the FRCP are enacted and the Rules therein do not
mention presentments, nor due they ban presentments, and if they did, such
a ban would be unconstitutional, since an administrative enactment
regarding procedure can not overrule the Constitution.
Regardless, it's irrelevant, since the FRCP does not mention
"presentments". Note 4 simply states that "presentments" allowed for in
the 5th Amendment of the Constitution have become "obsolete", or outmoded,
which is not to say that they were "eliminated". Shame on you Susan
Brenner. You know damn well that the Constitution can only be changed by
an official Amendment to it. Nothing can be "eliminated" from the
Constitution by an administrative note.
The use of presentments had become obsolete because the grand jurors were
not aware of their power. So the use of "presentments" became more and
more rare, and then in 1946 the legislative branch seized upon the moment
to make this power disappear by waving its magic wand over the
Constitution.
Mr. Root got it wrong in the
Creighton Law Review
as well:
"Before the Federal Rules of Criminal
Procedure - which made independently-acting grand juries illegal for all
practical purposes - grand juries were understood to have broad powers to
operate at direct odds with both judges and prosecutors..."
The FRCP did not make it "illegal for all practical purposes". That's
patently false. I don't know if Mr. Root, and/or Susan Brenner, were
acting as the magician's assistant, but I can't imagine how these educated
scholars could be so incredibly ignorant of basic Constitutional law. Give
me a damn break.
But if enough people repeat the lie, the lie appears to be the truth.
But we have it on good authority, the Supreme Court, that the lie has no
legal effect.
Justice Powell, in United States v. Calandra, 414 U.S. 338, 343 (1974),
stated:
"The institution of the grand jury is
deeply rooted in Anglo-American history. [n3] In England, the grand jury
[p343] served for centuries both as a body of accusers sworn to discover
and present for trial persons suspected of criminal wrongdoing and as a
protector of citizens against arbitrary and oppressive governmental
action. In this country, the Founders thought the grand jury so essential
to basic liberties that they provided in the Fifth Amendment that federal
prosecution for serious crimes can only be instituted by "a presentment or
indictment of a Grand Jury." Cf. Costello v. United States, 350 U.S. 359,
361-362 (1956). The grand jury's historic functions survive to this day.
Its responsibilities continue to include both the determination whether
there is probable cause to believe a crime has been committed and the
protection of citizens against unfounded criminal prosecutions. Branzburg
v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665, 686-687 (1972)."
The Note 4 lie is smashed on the SCOTUS altar, "The grand
jury's historic functions survive to this day." Take that Note 4!
The wonderful irony of the situation concerns the ultimate neocon Justice,
one known as Antonin Scalia, who effectively codified the unique
independent power of the Fourth Branch into the hands of all citizens
sitting as federal grand jurors. In discussing that power and unique
independence granted to the grand jury, the United States Supreme Court,
in
United States v. Williams, 504 U.S. 36 at 48 (1992),
Justice Scalia, delivering the opinion of the court, laid down the law of
the land:
"'[R]ooted in long centuries of Anglo-American history," Hannah v. Larche,
363 U.S. 420, 490 (1960) (Frankfurter, J., concurring in result), the
grand jury is mentioned in the Bill of Rights, but not in the body of the
Constitution. It has not been textually assigned, therefore, to any of the
branches described in the first three Articles. It "`is a constitutional
fixture in its own right.'" United States v. Chanen, 549 F.2d 1306, 1312
(CA9 1977) (quoting Nixon v. Sirica, 159 U.S. App. D.C. 58, 70, n. 54, 487
F.2d 700, 712, n. 54 (1973)), cert. denied, 434 U.S. 825 (1977). ' "
I submit to you that this passage sets the stage for a revolutionary knew
context
necessary and Constitutionally mandated to "we the people", THE FOURTH
BRANCH of the Government of the United States. Besides, the Legislative,
Executive, and Judicial branches, I submit that there is a fourth branch,
THE GRAND JURY, and "we the people" when sitting as grand jurors, are, as
Scalia quoted in US v. Williams, " a constitutional fixture in its own
right". Yes, damn it. That is exactly what the grand jury is, and what it
was always intended to be.
Scalia also stated, that "the grand jury is an institution separate from
the courts, over whose functioning the courts do not preside..." Id.
And finally, to seal the deal, Scalia hammered the point home:
"In fact, the whole theory of its function is that it belongs to no branch
of the institutional Government, serving as a kind of buffer or referee
between the Government and the people. See Stirone v. United States, 361
U.S. 212, 218 (1960); Hale v. Henkel, 201 U.S. 43, 61 (1906); G. Edwards,
The Grand Jury 28-32 (1906). Although the grand jury normally operates, of
course, in the courthouse and under judicial auspices, its institutional
relationship with the Judicial Branch has traditionally been, so to speak,
at arm's length. Judges' direct involvement in the functioning of the
grand jury has generally been confined to the constitutive one of calling
the grand jurors together and administering their oaths of office. See
United States v. Calandra, 414 U.S. 338, 343 (1974); Fed.Rule Crim.Proc.
6(a). [504 U.S. 36, 48] "
This miraculous quote says it all, "...the whole theory of its function is
that it belongs to no branch of the institutional Government, serving as a
kind of buffer or referee between the Government and the people." The
Constitution of the United States, as interpreted by the Supreme Court,
gives rise to a FOURTH BRANCH of Government, THE GRAND JURY. We the people
have been charged with oversight of the government in our roles as grand
jurors.
And at this critical time in American history, we must, for the protection
of our constitutional republic, take back our power and start acting as
powerful as the other branches of government.
The law is on our side. So please spread this knowledge as far and wide as
you can. We the people have the right and power under the 5th Amendment of
the Constitution to charge this government with crimes by returning
presentments regardless of whether the US Attorneys or the federal judges
agree with us. As the Supreme Court has so brilliantly stated, we are the
"buffer between the Government and the people."
Take the reins America. Pass it on. The Fourth Branch is alive and kickin'.
by Citizen Spook
citizenspook@hotmail.com
http://citizenspook.blogspot.com/2005/08/treasongate-federal-grand-jury-fourth.html
The Controlling Law - Big Trouble
For The White House Staff
The Controlling Law, Part 2: THE DEATH PENALTY, 18 USC 794
and the shift from GWOT to GSAVE
Total Media BLACK OUT of 18 USC 794, Federal Espionage Statute
How The White House, Wilson, Novak,
Corn & Plame Conspired
The Federal Grand Jury, FOURTH BRANCH
of the US Government
The US Attorney General's Office AND President Bush
Have NO
LEGAL AUTHORITY To Remove Patrick Fitzgerald As Special Counsel
The Challenge of 18 USC 794...
Prior High Profile Convictions Under 18 USC 794
US Court of Appeals: Special Counsel's Showing Decides
The Case
Iraq War fraud could lead to State court prosecutions for murder of
American soldiers
NIGER DOCUMENT FRAUD --Wilson and Plame May Be on
Fitzgerald's Radar for Treason Related to the Niger Document Conspiracy
Wilson Is In Cahoots With Bush Crime Family
Project Perfect Storm:
Citizen Activism against Felony Murder Resulting
from Fraud that Led to the Iraq War
July 18th Chicago Subway/Dirksen Federal Courthouse
Bomb plot
involving British MI6 assets -Part 1:Chicago Police Implicated in Cover
up?
July 18 Chicago Subway/Dirksen Federal Courthouse
Plot
Involving British MI6-Part 2: CTA Officials Deny Chicago Police Accounts
The world gets crazier and crazier everyday, doesn't it? The world that many
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taught that we can control government by voting. The founder of the Rothschild
dynasty, Mayer Amschel Bauer, told the secret of controlling the government
of a nation over 200 years ago. He said, "Permit
me to issue and control the money of a nation and I care not who makes its
laws." Get
the picture? Your freedom hinges first on the nation's banks and money system.
It's all about 'commerce'. Freedom is connected with Debt Elimination for
each individual. Not only does this end
personal debt, it places the people first in line
as creditors to the National Debt ahead of the banks. They don't wish for
you to know this. It has to do with recognizing WHO you really are in A
New Beginning: A Practical Course in Miracles, an informational study. Is
your credit rating bad for reasons that seem out of your control? There are
ways of credit repair,
so you can men those broken fences too. Do you want to keep your children protected
from outside forces, there are ways of protecting
your children. Do you want
to keep your sons and daughters free from 'the draft'? Check this out.
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